A liberal arts education was once considered the rule at the university. A student entering college could be expected to know something beyond their major—they had to be exposed to history, literature, mathematics, and science. They had to have a basic understanding of rhetoric and be able to communicate what they’ve learned through a variety of methods. Now, as universities have become focused on student's career needs, the model of a liberal arts education has begun to dwindle in the face of undergraduate business schools, specialized trade schools, and the growth of specialized cultural studies departments that supplement the notion of a “life-long scholar.”

Keynote speaker Raimond Gaita, a philosopher at King's College London, kicked off the conference with an anecdote about a gathering of leading philosophers at Leeds early in the Thatcher years, when universities felt under siege from the market-oriented conservative government. If a university eliminated its philosophy department, they told a junior government minister they had invited, it couldn't be called a university. "That's OK," the minister replied. "We'll call it something else."

But for Gaita, it's not just budget-cutting conservatives who must be defended against. He reserves a special scorn for academic leaders who have "debased" the academy by pretending that fields like Hospitality and Gaming Studies have a place at a university. A true liberal education, he says one in which learning is pursued for its own sake, and is based on the idea that broad literacy prepares students to act as educated, enlightened citizens requires a "community of scholars" who are not worried about job-placement rates, or the relevance of their work to government officials, and who view a life of scholarship "as a vocation," not simply a career. "We couldn't well imagine Socrates taking early retirement," Gaita said.[…]

A university's job, said [technologist Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the Media Lab at MIT], is to "promote creativity." Traditional academics delude themselves when they say that they must be cut off from practical fields like engineering and the business world to do the best work. Corporations come to places like MIT's Media Lab to encourage "high risk" work, and that's where universities have the potential to make real breakthroughs. Negroponte argued that all universities should abolish traditional departments, group scholars together, and require industry collaboration.

But not all scientists at the meeting were as blithely unconcerned. Vernon Rosario, who teaches psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he worries that the next generation in his field is far too narrow, interested only in neuroscience and not the many other factors that go into psychiatry. He now assumes, he said, that his new residents in psychiatry have never read Freud.

Indeed, while an undergraduate degree in business can get you a job in middle management, it is almost impossible to enter into a M.B.A. program with a Bachelor of Business degree: most of the respected M.B.A. programs consider you “ruined.”

(Written by: christopher)

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Labels: Culture, Philosophy