Reflections and Transitions
Liberal Arts Lunch Talk
September 12, 2013
Marilyn R. Schuster
Provost & Dean of the Faculty
At a recent dinner for faculty members with President McCartney, Bill Oram quoted a now retired
colleague who said: “my true education has been at Smith.” The sentiment rang true with me. I
have learned from students and colleagues, from faculty development workshops and seminars and
even in committees. I’ve learned about new and emerging fields, I changed my own research
trajectory. Crossing the threshold into College Hall has also taught me a great deal about higher
education and about Smith. What I have valued in my Smith education has been the opportunity to
experiment, to connect with other minds and fields beyond my original specialization. I hope that
these opportunities for a Smith education continue for other faculty members in the years to come,
that our “continuing education” will be not only in our individual research and our professional
organizations, but in our interactions with each other and with our students.
I want to thank CAP for giving me the opportunity today to think out loud, to share reflections about
liberal arts colleges and about Smith and about my life in College Hall and to think also about
transitions in American colleges and universities and, of course, at Smith. The most obvious transition
at Smith is the arrival of Kathy McCartney and the energy and vision she brings to her presidency.
Other transitions are happening as well, as the discussion at yesterday’s faculty meeting brought into
sharp relief. There will be more changes in the near future as our colleagues on the faculty and in the
administration move on to new positions or to retirement.
I will organize my thoughts around three paradoxes: why we need to think about these
apparent contradictions and what worries me about the trends and unintended
consequences associated with each.
Paradox #1: American liberal arts colleges are under siege at home even as they are
emulated elsewhere in the world.
Why emulated abroad? Value of broad based education with experience in more than one
discipline, an education not geared to a specific career, but grounded in the development of skills
and perspectives that promote creativity and adaptability coupled with depth in one field of study.
Even within US, surveys of employers show preference for candidates with liberal arts background
and universities – like our neighbor across the river – are creating Honors Colleges that try to create
a liberal arts experience within a big public university.
Why under siege at home?
Earlier this year, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences published a report called The Heart of the
Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive and secure nation. They also frame the
issue as a paradox:
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Early in the twenty-first century, we are living with a paradox. It is broadly acknowledged that
more and more Americans will need quality higher education to live up to their full potential:
the opportunities and rewards open to those who lack this training have declined steadily as the
knowledge economy has taken hold. But at the same time, questions about higher education
and its worth are mounting. There has been rising public concern about the cost of college, the
debt burden students can incur, and whether colleges actually provide the skills students need to
thrive. These concerns have caused some to question the liberal arts tradition itself, on the
grounds that its elements do not all contribute visibly and directly to near-term employment.
But this concern misses the ways in which the liberal arts train people to adapt and change over
a lifetime.
To support the case that liberal arts education is valued, the AAAS report cites a survey of
employers they commissioned in April of this year:
Employers were given this definition of liberal education: “This approach to a college education
provides both broad knowledge in a variety of areas of study and knowledge in a specific major
or field of interest. It also helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as
intellectual and practical skills that span all areas of study, such as communication, analytical,
and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in realworld settings.”
Fully 96% of employers in this survey say that a liberal education is fairly to very important.
74% of them would recommend a liberal education to their own child or a young person they
know. (The AAAS doesn’t comment on this disparity)
Importantly, the AAAS report says:
We are not arguing for a return to the “general education” model of some idealized past.
Arguing over what things students should know and what mental skills they need to develop are
worthy projects for great educators, and the curriculum that emerges from this debate will allow
plenty of room for creativity, both in its design and in its delivery. The key is defining a vision
of education that meets students’ needs as broadly capable people equipped for the lives that
await them, not one that simply mirrors the map of current faculty specializations.
Legislators, parents and potential students want to know why it is worth investing over $50,000/year
and taking on considerable debt to enable their children to go to colleges like Smith.
What we know is that the real cost of providing a Smith education is higher than the comprehensive
fee that we charge. All students at Smith are subsidized; the real cost per student this year is $67,900
while the comprehensive fee is $57,524); at Smith we also try to keep the expected level of debt in
check, currently no more than $19,000 at graduation.
The rising costs and loan debt lead parents and students to ask how their education prepares them
for work and leads the government to demand more accountability which translates into assessment,
metrics, ranking and rating systems (U.S. News based on “raw material” quality of students who are
accepted, the rejection rate (aka selectivity) and how much money is spent per student vs. Obama’s
proposal based on outcomes – how well does the college serve poor students? how many students
graduate within 6 years, how many are employed right after college and how much do they earn.)
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Where does this leave us and why am I worried?
Demands for accountability generate calls for assessment and the development of metrics that have
unintended consequences.
Obama’s plan appears to favor colleges like Smith. It looks at how well colleges serve poor students,
among other things, and how well we do by our students while they are in college and when they
enter the work force. This is better than grading high for rejection rates like U.S. News. More than
our peers, Smith has for years enrolled and supported students from poor backgrounds as measured
by the number of students who qualify for Pell grants.
But the metrics proposed to measure colleges favor short-term success – employability right after
college and level of income. The lifelong value of a liberal arts degree has nowhere to weigh in.
The call for accountability also leads regional accrediting bodies like NEASC to require assessment
for all departments and programs offering majors. My worry is that outcomes in some fields are
easier to quantify than in others.
Empirical, data-based fields in the sciences, some social science fields and foreign language
acquisition lend themselves to measurement. When we look at what is actually being measured, it is
a fraction of what we want our students to be learning, but it is possible to generate metrics that
provide a basis for comparison and improvement.
But what about discursive, interpretive, expressive and creative fields in the arts and humanities and
in some social sciences? A recent report called The Teaching of the Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping
the Future, provides this definition of the arts and humanities:
The Arts and Humanities teach us how to describe, evaluate, and change the world.
The terms of art and philosophy are irreplaceable for our articulate description
of the world, without which we fall painfully mute. The capacity precisely to describe
experience of the world also provokes evaluation of the world, through the act of
deliberative criticism. Our rigorous, receptive responsiveness to art and philosophy
provokes an answering responsibility to the world. As we answer, we also seek to
harness art’s capacity to help us imagine transformation of the world. Every work of art
is an act of recreative making. Art thereby models the liberating way in which the
world itself might be remade.
The report was prompted by concern about the decline in majors in the arts and humanities but it
also brings to light the quandary caused by assessment: how can we devise a metric that adequately
measures how well students “describe, evaluate and change the world”?
The stark reality – as Barbara Wolvoord reminded Chairs and Directors last January – is that we
have to develop ways to define and assess learning outcomes for all fields. Fortunately, NEASC is
genuinely interested in working with faculties to develop plans that work for us. We define the
learning outcomes we hope to achieve and the means to measure the outcomes. But it is still a tall
order and will take creativity and patience between now and the next accreditation in 2017.
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Paradox #2: Selective private liberal arts colleges are all alike and yet each is unique.
Gene Tobin of the Mellon Foundation is fond of saying that liberal arts colleges are all alike. I agree
with him to a certain extent, but I also think that each college is unique.
How are selective liberal arts colleges alike? we share basic values and face similar challenges. We are
also looked to for educational leadership. Liberal Arts colleges occupy a very small sliver of higher
ed in US (6% of students is a generous estimate) but they enjoy influence beyond their numbers.
How can it be said that each college is unique? Each has its own history and culture, its own mission
and geography and each develops particular ways to respond to the challenges we all face. A
colleague said to me that she had just completed a “college tour” with her high school-age child and
on every campus “global education” was cited as central to what they offered.
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We are all responding to the need to provide an education that includes international
perspectives and experiences, we are all responding to the demand for “global education”
expressed by potential students. But each college’s response is shaped by its particular
history, priorities and geography.
Other challenges we share with other liberal arts colleges include:
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How does liberal arts education relate to applied knowledge and the world of work?
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Growth and support for STEM fields. It would be hard to find a respectable liberal arts
college that hasn’t built a new science center – or have plans in the works.
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Online learning.
I’ll turn now to the third paradox I mentioned to consider these challenges in the context of Smith.
We ignore changes in education and we ignore our history and mission at our peril:
Paradox #3: To maintain our core values we must embrace change.
If we want to continue to offer an excellent education, to hire and support an excellent faculty, to
attract women of promise and enable them to excel, we need to change the way we do things. We
have already done this in creative ways, but the real work has just begun and will never be
completed.
 How does liberal arts education relate to applied knowledge and the world of work?
At Smith – through the Concentrations, a faculty initiative. Are all faculty members wildly
enthusiastic about Concentrations? Of course not, that wouldn’t be the Smith way. And like all
important parts of the curriculum each Concentration will be reviewed and assessed regularly to be
certain it remains a good idea to which people and resources are committed.
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 Growth and support for STEM fields.
At Smith, expressed in last decade by considerable investment in facilities and faculty but also by
programs like AEMES, designed to enable first generation and under-represented students with an
interest in the sciences to succeed. AEMES is based on the novel idea that our job as faculty is to
help our students realize their dreams rather than dash their hopes. It makes good on our promise of
access.
An unintended consequence of the growth of STEM fields is addressed by the Harvard study
Mapping the Future that notes the diminishment of the arts and humanities as students are drawn
increasingly to STEM fields and certain social sciences. At Smith we have witnessed a shift in
enrollments and majors that is less dramatic than at other institutions, including Harvard, but we
need to pay attention, to “re-articulate the extraordinary promise of the Humanities,” as the Harvard
report suggests. Concentrations have had the unintended consequence of providing a new place for
students to discover the humanities and the arts – eight of the 12 approved Concentrations are
grounded in the humanities, an additional 3 are grounded in the social sciences and humanities.
 Online learning
Online learning and the rising cost of college are the two topics that dominate the academic press;
too often they are linked in simplistic ways. Good treatment of both: Higher Education in the Digital
Age by William G. Bowen (Princeton, 2013). Bowen, former president of Princeton and longtime
president of the Mellon Foundation is both lucid about the potentially transformative effect of
online learning on higher education and about the enduring value of residential liberal arts
education. About the changes that are likely he warns that though we can’t see yet they will be, we
need to pay attention.
Some people and some institutions will undoubtedly resist such changes – some wisely, some
unwisely. [an NYU prof] compares what is going on with what happened in the recording
industry when large numbers of people started to listen to MP3s. He described this pattern as “a
new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know. . .
First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume
it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world
has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time that they had to adapt.” 67
Quick summary of paradoxes and of worries –
Paradox #1: American liberal arts colleges are under siege at home even as they are emulated
elsewhere in the world.
Paradox #2: Selective private liberal arts colleges are all alike and yet each is unique.
Paradox #3: To maintain our core values we must embrace change.
Worries:
 Rising cost of a college education
 National decline in humanities and arts
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



.
Uncertainty about future of online learning but certainty that it will change higher education
significantly
The cultural “default” position of new technologies reinstates old pedagogies and ideologies
– mainly white men are the authorities lecturing to passive viewers. Recent study shows very
few women make MOOCs and the study didn’t even bother to look at race.
Our structures – the way we organize the faculty – are not agile enough to respond to
changes in knowledge and pedagogy
And more. . .
But –
To conclude, I want to return to Bill Bowen, who after warning about changes that technology will
certainly create also points to “central aspects of life on our campuses that must be retained [and]
even strengthened,” such as the great value of “minds rubbing against minds” – not only the power
of the presence of great teachers but also “the learning that goes on continually on our campuses, as
often outside the classroom as in.” 67-68
I share his faith in the transformative effect of life on campuses like ours, not only for our students
but for us, for our “Smith education.”
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