The Crisis of Liberal Education

Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. However, this shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Before Frey’s arrival, Jacob Howland described how the new university’s board of trustees were business people first, educators second. The lesson learnt here is that who is in charge is as important as who is in the classroom.

Before I discuss university governance and the possibility of reviving liberal education, it would be helpful first to survey the landscape of American higher education. Besides its number (nearly 4,000 universities and colleges) and diversity (private, public, regional, etc.), what makes the American system of higher education unique is the different purposes and values that its array of institutions offers. Some are comprehensive; others are narrow; some are religious; others are civic-minded. This assortment of university missions―and not just generous federal funding―made American higher education “the envy of the world.” What created that envy was a diverse educational marketplace able to cater to the various needs of a continental nation.

What is troubling is the trend that this diversity in university missions is being homogenized into a singular purpose: pre-professional training. The latest manifestation is the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and pre-professional studies (e.g., business, nursing). At the same time, humanities majors have declined by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, with no bottom in sight. Social science majors also have dropped. How did we get here? What are the consequences? And what are the possible remedies?

Authority, Data, and Equality

The factors often cited for the rise of pre-professional training in American higher education are the declines in government funding and high-school student demographics, the increased costs of college tuition and student debt, and the politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Fewer resources and greater costs have led both universities and students to seek a more career-aligned education at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. But there are three additional factors that have played a role that are often neglected. They are authority, data, and equality.

The first is authority: who has the power to recognize the legitimacy of an institution of higher education? To answer this, we must look briefly at the history of accreditation. Starting in the late nineteenth century, accreditation was established to ensure the academic quality of colleges and ease student transfer between schools. Over time, specialized accreditation bodies (e.g., law, medicine) and regional organizations (e.g., the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities) emerged and conferred the authority to recognize legitimate colleges and universities.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the federal government became involved with accreditation with the passage of the G.I. Bill for Korean War veterans. The bill was limited to students enrolled at accredited institutions and designated a peer review process as the basis for evaluating institutional quality. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) were authorized to recognize reputable accrediting bodies. That is, neither the federal government nor CHEA accredits individual institutions, but published a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Without the imprimatur of that list, federal student loans were not eligible to colleges and universities. While there are some exceptions, American universities and colleges need access to those student loans in order to stay financially afloat.

The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

This traditional division of supervising higher education―the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, accreditors examine educational quality, and states focus on consumer protection―was changed in the 1960s and 1970s with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors. With access and consumer protection incorporated into their mission, accreditation bodies now monitor schools so that all students and groups have equal access to education and that universities demonstrate students are learning (assessment).

These two responsibilities are amenable to metrics of quantification. For example, access is determined by such metrics as how many students receive financial support, graduate, and become employed afterwards. Assessment likewise has been transformed from qualitative peer reviews and self-studies to numerical data that correlates with student learning objectives. Universities are accountable to these metrics, with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.

Accreditors, therefore, not only have appropriated more power but have channeled that power into the currency of quantifiable data. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with relying upon data to make evaluations about academic quality. However, the data accumulated for these evaluations are divorced from educational achievement, e.g., looking at post-graduate salaries rather than foreign language passage rates. Academic quality, consequently, is defined by these metrics and misses not only educational learning but also evaluations of students’ character and the interiority of their lives. Such currency flattens educational distinctions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks not only of the humanities and social sciences but more broadly of liberal education. By contrast, STEM and pre-professional studies align well with quantifiable metrics because of the nature of how they structure and disseminate knowledge.

This support of the datafication of the university is, in turn, a manifestation of the American value of democratic equality. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent. It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amenable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself. In democratic societies, everyone relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.” But because everyone is equal, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by easily quantified data.

Data, consequently, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can challenge it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. When universities apply data appropriately―such as student retention and graduation―schools can learn where they fall short and remedy it. The problem today is that universities only use data to measure against standards that seem objective, like post-graduate salaries. This, in turn, replaces the diverse and competitive market of American higher educational missions with the monopoly of pre-professional training. The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

Beyond the Mandarin Class

Given this landscape of American higher education, those who seek leadership roles must follow this path of numerical counting―a path antithetical to liberal education. Values like wonder, discovery, and purpose are resistant to meaningful quantification. The result is an administrative class and leadership that think, speak, and decide on data alone.

When higher education is publicly discussed, it is often characterized in terms of ideological, cultural, and curriculum battles between left and right. What is missing in this conversation is the need to address how administrators and board members understand higher education and how it is manifested in the missions of their schools. The concerns of finances, as expressed in data, are critical for the health of the university, but even more so is the question of values and purpose. The datafication of the university can’t answer these questions. Only humans can.

The first step that schools can take to promote a diverse and competitive market of higher education is to provide instruction to board members about the history of education and the institution that they are leading. One of the oddities of American higher education is that board members often lack an understanding of the history and purpose of education, even that of the institution they lead. As a result, these members approach the university from their own perspectives, which are usually from a business mindset since many are asked to serve in part because of their financial contributions and their professional networks. To introduce these members to the history and purpose of education would expose them to a different set of values that can’t be captured by data.

Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting.

The second step is for faculty to reassert their roles as administrators. While there are circumstances when it makes sense to bring in an administrative leader from outside the institution, it is frequently better for the university that faculty be promoted as administrators within―and then only for a limited period before they rotate back into faculty. One of the results of this faculty responsibility is that university culture benefits in terms of institutional memory and a sense of continuity and community. Administrators have a stake in the long-term health of their institution and are perceived by faculty as part of the university rather than apart from it. Again, another oddity of American higher education is that more than 80 percent of college presidents are external hires compared to 30 percent of CEOs of major corporations. The consequence is that a president upsets the university applecart in pursuit of new metrics of success, only to depart soon after for the next gig, leaving faculty and staff resigned to the next experiment of another incoming leader.

The third step is for the school as a whole to determine its mission: what are its values and educational purpose? This is not just faculty and administrators but includes students, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. Then the school must ask itself how they―from board member to president to student to staff―hold themselves accountable and evaluate success? For now, quantifiable metrics will be required, especially for accreditation reports, but these are not the only ways to determine accountability and success. For instance, qualitative methods exist to evaluate leadership accountability and student success. And even more meaningful are the relationships that are sustained between alumni and the university, faculty and students, staff and administrators. While these relationships cannot be measured, they can be articulated and provide purpose for people and the institution they serve.

The fourth step would be to provide alternative methodologies for how accreditation bodies and governments evaluate schools. As stated previously, there is a value in data to evaluate universities, but it should be one among many tools. Higher education leadership and public pressure can nudge governments and accreditation bodies to be more open to non-numerical assessment. But more importantly, scholars and educators need to devise different methodologies and practices to evaluate academic quality and standards for their institutions. These could include entrance and exit examinations, qualitative assessment, and student portfolios.

The fifth and final step is to articulate and demonstrate the value of the type of education one’s institution offers. This particularly applies to those colleges whose mission is liberal education. Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting. They must find ways to blend the old and the new―the perennial principles of liberal education with the current circumstances of today―to promote liberal education’s promise that in studying it one becomes authentically human.

The challenges that American higher educational institutions confront are myriad, from a loss of public trust to government funding cuts to declining student enrollment. But what is neglected in this conversation is the loss of mission diversity―of values and purposes―that traditionally has characterized the marketplace of American higher education. It is this diversity that has served this vast continental country well.

The repurposing of the University of Tulsa’s Honor Program is representative of a troubling homogenization trend in American universities. Liberal education colleges and programs are its most recent casualties, but if this trend continues unabated, the variety in American higher education will disappear. To prevent this from transpiring, American higher education leaders need to think and rethink their institutions’ values and purpose and discover new ways to make the old seemingly new.