FEATURED ARTICLE: THE PLACE FOR RESEARCH IN A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION
By Joel Schwartz, Charles Center Director and Professor, Department of Government, College of William and Mary; 2012
Institute Participant
I recall that when I was still a school-boy I worked hard to know the names of things that my eyes fell
upon or that came into my use, frankly concluding that a man cannot know the natures of things if he is
still ignorant of their names.... Often I proposed cases and, when the opposing contentions were lined
up against one another, I diligently distinguished what would be the business of the rhetorician, what of
the orator, what of the sophist. I laid out pebbles for numbers, and I marked the pavement with black
coals and, by a model placed right before my eyes, I plainly showed what difference there is between an
obtuse-angled, a right-angled, and an acute-angled triangle. Whether or not an equilateral
parallelogram would yield the same area as a square when two of its sides were multiplied together, I
learned by walking both figures and measuring them with my feet. Often I kept watch outdoors
through the winter nights like one of the fixed stars by which we measure time. Often I used to bring
out my strings, stretched to their number on the wooden frame, both that I might note with my ear the
difference among the tones and that I might at the same time delight my soul with the sweetness of the
sound.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, written in 1161 (1978, 136-137)
To what extent is the liberal arts mission of a college or university compatible with its research mission? Is it
possible that, undertaken properly, undergraduate research can even refresh and re-energize a very
traditional liberal arts agenda? This essay is a preliminary consideration of these questions that draws heavily
on the experience we have had over the past several years at The College of William and Mary, made possible
in part by a series of generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After a brief consideration of
some of the most prominent features of the liberal arts tradition, and a historical and theoretical inquiry into
the role of research in this tradition, I conclude that undergraduate research and the liberal arts can play a
mutually supportive role in colleges today.
The Liberal Arts Tradition
Hugh’s Didascalion is a prominent example of a complex tradition of reflection on education in the liberal arts.
This reflection became formalized in pedagogical writings associated with medieval Scholasticism, a literature
that began with Augustine and included Boethius, Cassiodorus, Bede, and others. It also self-consciously
reached back to the didactic works of Cicero, Quintillian, Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras. It became
conventional in the medieval world to associate the liberal arts with the seven artes, or domains of
knowledge: the artes triviales, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the artes quadriviales, arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music. However, views on the actual number of artes that should be taught in a
comprehensive education varied considerably. For example, “music” often referred broadly to all of the
subjects over which the Nine Muses presided, including, for instance, history and music in the narrow sense.
Hugh divided knowledge into four primary branches - the theoretical (truth), the practical (morals), the
mechanical (“occupations of life”), and the logical; these, in turn, he subdivided into 21 artes.
Hugh’s text exemplifies three overarching themes that rested at the heart of this liberal arts tradition. The
first is a conviction that knowledge as a whole is unified, something that is assured for him by the axial role
that the Creator plays in the Creation. It followed that, if knowledge is unified, education can be
comprehensive, embracing the unified whole of which each fragment of knowledge is a part. Second, just as a
liberal education conveys the whole of knowledge, so does it seek to educate the whole person, including the
cultivation of the student’s intellect, soul, and civic and social capacities. To use a modern vernacular, liberal
education has always been student-centric. The artes liberales did, of course, exclude education in the art of
money-making (the artes illiberales), but it is important to observe that this referred to the intent of the
instructor and student more than the subjects that he or she taught or studied. For example, the study of
architecture or agriculture, undertaken for the sake of knowledge alone, not for the purpose of making money,
had a legitimate place in Hugh’s system of knowledge.
There was, finally, an emphasis on the activeness of the learning process itself. The “freedom” at the heart of
the term “liberal” was not just a reference to the social class for whom liberal education was intended, i.e.,
well-to-do citizens, as opposed to slaves, who were legally un-free, or the lower classes, who lived a
necessitarian life that makes free thought impossible.
Freedom was not just a negative absence of
impediments; it was also a positive and active attainment of the individual intellect striving to be reunited with
God. The passionate commitment to student engagement can be seen in the quote that heads this essay:
while students should be introduced to a broadly integrated body of knowledge, they should also be
encouraged to engage vigorously with the subjects they are studying – analyzing, judging, criticizing, creating,
and so on – because mere spectators to life cannot, in the end, be free human beings.
Hugh was writing on behalf of the liberal arts in a time that was experiencing many challenges that sound very
familiar to us today. The small rural monasteries that had carried the liberal arts torch were being replaced by
large cathedral schools in the emerging urban areas. As Jerome Taylor has pointed out, Hugh’s text was a
defense of the unity of knowledge and the importance of a comprehensive education in the liberal arts against
the encroaching growth he saw in specialized and pre-professional education, including schools of law and
medicine, and narrow schools of theology that forbade the study of secular subjects (Hugh of Saint Victor
1978, 4).
The Liberal Arts Tradition and Research
Research, it is often assumed today, is the thing that faculty do when they are not engaged in enabling this
liberal arts education. Where the liberal arts seek to uncover the interconnectedness of all knowledge,
research seems to be successful precisely because scholars can isolate narrow questions from the great tangle
of data and human speculation. A biologist might spend her career asking increasingly precise questions
about a single virus; a Shakespeare scholar might dedicate an article to comparing the Bard’s use of the
gerund phrase in the history plays. Moreover, the specialized knowledge and skills associated with answering
these narrow questions are characteristically tied to specific professions for which research experiences are
designed to prepare students. Perhaps, then, it is better if faculty maintain a sturdy partition between their
duties as researchers and as liberal arts teachers. Liberal education, it would seem, would be threatened if
research were allowed to play a significant role in the undergraduate curriculum.
“Research,” an Old French word, does not appear in Hugh’s text. However, it is profitable to consider how it
might have been understood in the context of the classical/medieval liberal arts tradition out of which this
text emerged. Put differently, how did Hugh experience what he was doing when he judged the soundness of
arguments, worked out geometry problems in the dirt, or kept records of his observations of the stars? If we
call this “research,” itself a medieval term, what could this have meant?
There are three perspectives on medieval “research” that make it a complex but ideal word for describing
Hugh’s investigations, and they all flow from a consideration of the meaning of the ambiguous prefix “re-.”
First, “re-,“ in Latin, can denote intensity (not repetition or going back), as it does, for example, in
“resplendent.” So research could simply be an intensive, careful “searching” for or after knowledge, a meaning
that fits the meticulous attention to detail that Hugh brought to his investigations. (Hugh did not just
“distinguish,” he “diligently distinguished.”)
But there are also two senses in which the implication of repetition or going back (consider not just repeat but
also regenerate, refurbish, retrace, revert) or “searching again,” may also be a good fit with liberal arts
sensibilities. First, as Hugh makes clear, much of the task of the scholar is to recover the wisdom of the
ancients, a theme that permeates the Didascalicon. From this point of view, all scholarship, including medical
or biological scholarship, is a historical act of recovery, renaissance – “research.” It is well known that liberal
arts schools placed a surprising emphasis on the cultivation of their students’ memories, which primarily
meant detailed memorization of the documents that they had inherited from antiquity. As we have seen,
Hugh does not just evaluate the validity of arguments on their own merits, he judges their validity by
categorizing them into the venerable categories of rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry.
There is also, finally, a view of knowledge in Hugh’s writings that we often associate with Plato’s Meno:
knowledge of universal truths is present in the soul from birth and learning is really an act of re-membering.
For instance, Hugh’s text begins with a reference to the Appolonian injunction to “Know Thyself” and with the
claim that all wisdom comes from self-knowledge, or “self-searching” (Hugh of Saint Victor 1978, 46). To
Hugh, this meant that education and re-search were at base a recovery and restoration of the knowledge of
God’s creation that man had before the Fall and that remained latent in the soul; a more secular formulation,
also advanced by Hugh, proposes that humans, including Meno’s uneducated slave boy, are born with the
rational capacity to learn and understand. Education, from this perspective, is a “drawing out,” not a “putting
in,” a perspective that fits well with the overall student-centered orientation of the liberal arts tradition.
Liberal education and medieval “research,” then, were fundamentally compatible. The intense and
meticulous attention to detail that research demanded was naturally affiliated with the active and dedicated
learning demanded of all liberal arts students. Moreover, research cultivated both a historical and an
ontological memory that was closely aligned with the learning/recovery of the artes: it required a research
into the interconnected whole of knowledge that went backwards in time, to the ancients and the historical
Garden, and that developed the student’s native spiritual and intellectual capacity to grasp knowledge.
The Liberal Arts Today
The liberal arts tradition is complex and interpenetrated with the remnants of dispositions and assumptions
that do not today always appear to be fully compatible or shared. Take a single question: should the liberal
arts seek to cultivate intellectual independence or interdependence in students? This question rests at the
root of many of the debates between advocates of libertarian/minimalist approaches to requirements and
advocates for an extensive core curriculum. The “free” mind, to Hugh, exercises independent, critical
judgment, yet the pursuit of knowledge is a collaborative process and knowledge itself is an interconnected
whole to which all students are introduced. On one level, the goal is fierce critical independence; on another,
the liberal education of a future doctor is the same as the liberal education of a future musician. Small
wonder that faculty charged with the responsibility to identify learning objectives and assess outcomes for
accreditation authorities find it difficult to operationalize “critical thinking” and other components of a liberal
education. This frustration is a common refrain in the writings of social scientists who have tried to empirically
study the efficacy of liberal arts curricular practices (Glyer and Weeks 1998, x; McClelland, D.G, D.C.1981, 1314; Bird, C 1975, 109).
Yet there are good reasons to believe that “liberal arts” is not just a slogan that we should discard because it
cannot easily be factored into specific, operationalized propositions. Many of the studies of the efficacy of a
liberal arts education have found that practices commonly associated with liberal arts institutions (close
faculty-student contact, a residential student body, etc.) have positive outcomes for students. Moreover,
other studies have gone further to demonstrate that these practices have a more pronounced and enduring
impact when they are employed together in a “seamless learning environment” (Seifert 2008, 110.) Liberal
arts experiences for students, then, should not be seen as the outcome of specific institutional “best
practices” that could, for instance, be transferred individually with success to a university that lacks the larger
matrix of practices of which each is a part. The convictions and practices that have come down to us as
components of a liberal arts education do not just share a common intellectual pedigree; evidence shows that
they also work together to achieve positive and measurable student outcomes (Astin 1993, 1995, 2000;
Pascarella, and Terenzini 1998; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005; Nussbaum, 1997)
There have been many attempts to enumerate and study the “experiences” and “outcomes” that are intrinsic
to the liberal arts. We should not be surprised to see that for the most part these schemes can be grouped
into the three basic categories emphasized in Hugh’s text. There may be a diminished temptation today to
assume an underlying unity of knowledge, but it remains core to liberal arts institutions to introduce students
to a breadth of subjects and to provide them with opportunities to appreciate the contributions that a range
of disciplines can make to our understanding of the world. While only a small number of institutions still
identify the pilgrim’s progress to salvation as a discrete learning objective, liberal arts schools continue to
assert a mission to cultivate the whole person, including their students’ civic capacities and appreciation for
diversity, in addition to their specific training in their majors. The persistence of a commitment to engaged
learning explains why liberal arts institutions place a high value on maintaining a favorable teacher-student
ratio so that essay assignments, classroom dialogue (and, I will soon add, research opportunities) are a regular
experience for students.
The liberal arts tradition remains a useful concept because it gives us a vernacular for capturing the
embeddedness or interconnectedness of the full range of liberal arts goals and practices. For example, while
it is possible to separate the teaching of writing (for example, in freshman composition courses) from the
teaching of the content of disciplines, a liberal arts sensibility tells us that writing, learning, and thinking will
each profit if all three are infused throughout the curriculum. From the point of view of our students, there
should be a playful interaction between the subjects they are studying in their courses, the debates they are
having in their residence halls, the articles they are writing for the student newspaper, and the films they are
seeing on Saturday night. A liberal arts sensibility is skeptical of distance learning because it is predicated on
the view that writing or history can adequately be taught if they are individually extricated from this
embedded context and conveyed over the internet to discrete markets of consumers who want to be able to
write a better job resume or learn the causes of the Civil War. Advocates for distance learning see increased
efficiency in product and market differentiation and segmentation; the efficiency of liberal arts schools,
difficult to demonstrate, is that they simultaneously accomplish a comprehensive set of learning and personal
growth objectives in a compact campus setting.
The Liberal Arts and Research Today
Undergraduate research became a specific and intentional institutional focus on college campuses in the early
1980's. For instance, the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) was initiated in 1978 and formally
incorporated in 1981. Today, undergraduate research has become a distinct consideration in the U.S. News
and World Report rankings, and it is not easy to find a college web site that does not shine a prominent light
on its superior undergraduate research opportunities. The growth in research programs has been
accompanied by a growing body of literature on the impact of undergraduate research experiences for
students (Boyd and Wesemann; 2009; Hensel 2012). This literature has, for instance, documented the positive
effect that research experiences can have on grades, retention, and graduation rates, and on the attainment
of discipline-specific learning objectives and the promotion of post-baccalaureate education (Osborn and
Karukstis 2009).
However, commentators have not addressed in an explicit and systematic way the relationship between the
goals of providing students with research experiences and of providing them with a liberal education. At The
College of William & Mary we have learned that an ambitious undergraduate research program can be a
significant ally of very traditional liberal arts objectives, but we have also learned that there is nothing
inevitable about this relationship – that to achieve this goal it is critical to build research into the curriculum
and the co-curriculum in a careful way. To accomplish this we have orchestrated several transitions over the
past 30 years that collectively have improved the alignment of the research and teaching missions of the
College.
Undergraduate research at William & Mary, as at most schools, began as an activity that was made available
to a small number of exceptionally strong upper-level students in the laboratory sciences. No doubt the initial
impetus was the desire of faculty in experimental science fields to use superior undergraduates to fill positions
in their labs that would characteristically be filled at research universities by graduate or post-doctoral
students. It is not surprising, for this reason, that the faculty who came together to found CUR in the late
1970s were science faculty teaching in small, liberal arts schools that lacked graduate programs. Since fulltime undergraduates were not able to work a large number of hours in faculty labs during the school year, the
bulk of their research took place in the summer. Colleges like William and Mary had some discretionary
funding to pay students but there was a heavy reliance on hard lines in faculty grants and new federal
initiatives, such as NSF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates, to cover costs.
The earliest use of “research,” according to the OED, was primarily as a verb. It was this emphasis on the
activity of intensive searching and re-searching, and the claim that it is worthy in itself (i.e., independent of
results), that made it particularly compatible with the liberal arts attachment to the impact of engaged
learning on the knowledge and overall experience of the student. We, of course, can still “research” a topic
today, but we also see research as a set of products or results that, for instance, can be listed in a resume. As
long as a primary goal of inviting undergraduates into faculty laboratories was to assist in the production of
articles, it was not necessary to give much attention to the quality of their experience. At its extreme, a
student could be trained to do a specific procedure that he or she could perform efficiently without even
understanding the overall hypothesis that was being tested in the lab. To align undergraduate research with
liberal arts objectives, it was necessary to give students not only a contribution to a result, but a challenging
experience that brought them into the intellectual heart of the project.
Over time, faculty in laboratory sciences adopted practices that better attend to the overall educational
experience of undergraduates, including providing students with written learning objectives, organizing
journal discussion events, and scheduling regular lab meetings at which all aspects of the research are
discussed. But if undergraduate research was to have a broader and deeper impact on our students, it was
necessary to encourage four further transitions: moving research experiences into the credit-bearing
curriculum; across the full range of disciplines; across the four years of the students’ undergraduate careers;
and across degree programs as a whole.
There are several advantages to moving research into the curriculum. Above all, if research is built into
courses, there is no ambiguity that the primary measure of success will be the quality of the student’s
educational experience. William & Mary received a grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2007 that funded 90
course development projects over three years, all of which were designed to implement a strategy of
“teaching with research” into our curriculum. William & Mary, of course, had a strong commitment to liberal
arts teaching practices that preceded this effort, including an emphasis across the curriculum on projects that
require students to work with primary materials. For this reason, this Mellon initiative brought about
curricular change that, while significant, also built organically on teaching methods that were already well
established at the College. In contrast to the fragmented experience of many out-of-class research assistants,
moreover, the integration of research opportunities into classes has assured that they will be contextualized
for students within their courses’ overall syllabi and learning objectives.
A few examples of projects that were funded under this grant to add new research experiences to courses:
Research on Campus and Abroad in Classical Studies
This initiative launched a research abroad program in Latin and Greek Studies. Working under close
faculty supervision, students begin research projects in courses during the academic year and then
conduct critical primary research on their topics during a summer class research trip to classical Greek
and Roman sites. Students then are enrolled in a 1-credit course in the fall after they return during
which they present their research and complete papers for submission to conferences and journals.
Class Projects in Physics 351 Using Integrated Field Programmable Gate Array Chips (FPGAs)
Research projects that draw on the capacity of FPGAs to support complex, high speed circuits were
integrated into Physics 351, “Digital Electronics.” These chips support circuits with thousands of circuit
elements. Working in teams during the last month of the course, students are required to develop
imaginative solutions to challenging research problems that they submit to an international
competition.
The Development of a Digest Extractor for Use in Inquiry-Based Learning
Projects in Computer Science 420/520
Computer Science 420/520, “Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence,” is
often taught with simple “toy” problems that do not give students a deep
understanding of the pros and cons of different techniques. This project replaces
these toys with a digest extractor that allows students to do Machine Learning (article
digesting) projects, some elementary and some that still challenge scholars.
Policy Research in Government on Global Environmental Governance
The project creates an ongoing year-around research program. Working with primary
materials, students complete research projects during the academic year on the
behavior and effectiveness of international organizations that are active in
environmental governance. In the summer, students add data from these projects to
a growing GIS-based database, which, in turn, creates the starting place for the
research of students in the course in the following school year.
Survey Research in an Experimental Philosophy Course
Experimental philosophers conduct empirical studies of the psychological processes
underlying people’s intuitions about moral responsibility, free will, and other topics,
often concluding that people think about these topics differently than philosophers
have assumed. Grant funding was used to conduct survey experiments in Philosophy
415, Advanced Metaphysics and Epistemology. Students in this class will themselves
do substantial research projects, as well as supervising group research projects
drawing on this data in Philosophy 201, Introduction to Philosophy.
While undergraduate research opportunities in the 1980s did not begin until the upperdivision level, many of the projects funded under this grant were at other levels of the
curriculum. For this reason, faculty and departments started thinking about how these
experiences might best be sequenced over the four-year careers of students. All William &
Mary students are required to take a freshman seminar and so this was a good place to start
to introduce research skills to all of our students. Some departments quickly discovered that
they had to move statistics and research methods courses that had been taught in the junior
year to the sophomore year so that students would be prepared earlier to undertake
sophisticated projects. An increased number of opportunities have become available for
students to pursue their research interests – for example, on health policy or the
determinants of political participation – across several courses, perhaps culminating with a
senior honors thesis. Finally, we have added a wide range of department-based and Collegewide presentation symposia, most of which are at the upper-division level, to provide
appropriate closure for student research efforts.
Of course, different research experiences are appropriate for students at different points
along the pipeline from matriculation to graduation. Projects for freshmen will be less
ambitious and more specifically orchestrated by faculty; as students become more advanced,
students will have more say in selecting projects, and be expected to be able to work more
independently (together or in teams) and use more sophisticated methods. Research
projects introduced in lower-level courses are less likely to be closely associated with the
instructor’s own research, while at the upper level many students have the opportunity to be
full collaborators with faculty, including in some cases co-authoring conference and journal
articles. Many faculty have collected student research over several terms in databases that
-8-
then become valuable resources for future students. For example, for several years the
students of a Hispanic Studies faculty member have been building a database of resources
associated with the recovery and documentation of the historical memory of victims of the
Spanish Civil War and of Francisco Franco’s regime of political repression.
Much of “study abroad” has become “research abroad” at William and Mary thanks to the
impact of grant support from the Mellon Foundation. Like the Classical Studies and Hispanic
Studies research abroad programs summarized above, most research abroad programs begin
with a rigorous course on campus that allows students to initiate projects and that prepares
them in paleography and other research techniques that will be critical for these projects.
This approach is also followed by a faculty member in Art History who provides students with
the opportunity to study seventeenth-century architecture, painting, sculpture, and
metalwork in Quito, Ecuador, and then publish their findings in a peer-reviewed student
research journal. One final example: The Russian Movie Theater Project, a digital archive of
film exhibition, movie-going, and film reception throughout the twentieth century, has been
built over the past several years by students doing summer archival research in Moscow and
St. Petersburg.
Our initial efforts focused on increasing the number of research experiences that are available
to our students in specific courses – at the cellular level, as it were. However, once we began
thinking about how research experiences should be sequenced over time, it was important to
begin to support and coordinate research experiences at the organismal level – across degree
programs as a whole.
Since we were experiencing considerable growth in our
interdisciplinary Global Studies programs (Africana Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies,
European Studies, Latin American Studies, and Russian/Post-Soviet Studies) we sought, and
received, funding from Mellon in 2010 to place new faculty positions in these fields with the
explicit goal of institutionalizing a set of research experiences as the defining backbone of
each of these majors. One advantage of selecting Global Studies for this effort was that, as
interdisciplinary programs, they sit at the curricular crossroads between some of our larger
departments, including History, Government, and Modern Languages and Literatures. For
this reason, the new Global Studies curricula will contribute to the experience of their own
majors and also majors in these larger departments.
Another example of a degree program that has research at its core is our Community Studies
minor. Just as “study abroad” has become “research abroad” at William and Mary, so has
“service learning” become “community-based research.” Before 2000, most of the William
and Mary students working in the local community were doing so on a volunteer basis –
tutoring in schools, assisting with Red Cross blood drives, and so on. In that year we initiated
-9-
the Sharpe Community Partnerships Program, which is a freshman-only initiative that gives
students the opportunity to live together and take freshman seminars that include
community projects that are tied to the subjects of their seminars. Building on the
community-based research expectations that had always been part of Sharpe, we initiated a
Community Studies minor in 2009 that requires students to take course work closely related
to a community partnership that they sustain over their undergraduate years, and to
complete a culminating senior research project that ties all of this work together.
William and Mary has also made significant progress toward developing the infrastructure
and policies to support a wide diffusion of research experiences. For example, we built a
Center for Geospatial Analysis (also with grant funding from Mellon) that supports research
efforts across a wide range of humanities, social science, and science fields. We have been
fortunate to secure significant new individual and grant funding for undergraduate research,
including four consecutive multi-year grants from The Howard Hughes Medical Institutes.
William and Mary has also made a significant investment in summer student research by
providing summer housing for research students free of charge – for up to 400 students in the
upcoming summer. Finally, we have developed the Charles Center on our campus as a central
home for much of the funding that is dedicated to curricular and co-curricular research
(especially student summer grants); for several scholars programs that include significant
funded research experiences for our most academically distinguished students; for start-up
and grant-matching ventures related to undergraduate research; for an undergraduate
“teaching fellows” program that funds advanced undergraduates to help faculty supervise
group research projects in lower level courses; for faculty development initiatives that include
workshops that explore new techniques of incorporating research into courses; and for
several campus-wide research presentation programs that take place each year.
We have also learned that, as important as centralized funding, recognition, and coordination
can be, it is also important to fully embed research within the department structure:
initiatives on college campuses are rarely fully institutionalized if departments do not take
ownership of them and see them as part of their core identity and mission. It is also
important to attend closely to faculty incentives. For example, we have dedicated
considerable resources to funding faculty-student research collaborations, including creating
several faculty chairs that include support for student collaborators. However, not all of our
departments have fully adjusted merit review policies and other faculty incentives in ways
that would fully support undergraduate research.
-10-
The liberal arts tradition, we have seen, has always emphasized the importance of providing
students with active learning experiences, and the level of active learning in the
undergraduate program at William & Mary has seen a radical increase over the past 20 years
thanks largely to the increased emphasis on undergraduate research. The typical steps in the
research process are perfectly suited to the liberal arts goals of teaching students how to
learn, how to work productively on their own or in small groups, and how to solve problems.
These include mastering a literature, forming hypotheses, working with primary materials,
adjusting with ingenuity when the data isn’t telling the story you thought it would, arriving at
informed conclusions, and communicating those conclusions persuasively, both orally and in
writing. The research process, moreover, is an ideal setting for developing ethical judgment
in students, another critical liberal arts goal. It does this in part because of the high premium
it places on intellectual integrity and because of the rigorous attention that is paid to the
ethical treatment of animals and human research subjects. The emphasis on engaged
learning at liberal arts institutions seeks in part to prepare students to be lifelong learners,
both to enrich their personal lives and to give them the resources to adjust with dexterity to a
changing world. In contrast, students who spend four years passively absorbing lectures, no
matter how brilliant, will lack both the skills and the motivation to live up to this expectation.
Hugh of St. Victor argued that liberal arts students should be taught to integrate the
perspectives that come to us from a broad range of artes. Many have expressed the concern
that a heavy emphasis on research at the undergraduate level would lead to more
specialization and to diminished opportunities for students to integrate knowledge from a
range of fields. But at William & Mary we have found that the opposite is more often the
case – that it is quite common that a research-based curriculum leads faculty and students to
cross department boundaries and integrate knowledge in ways that has not typically been the
norm in more traditional curricula. The fact is that departments are often extremely
conservative in the way they preserve their curricula, differentiate their way of seeing the
world from the world-view of other departments, and communicate their disciplinary
assumptions to students. Studies of course catalogs over time reveal remarkable – even
comical, in some cases -- inertia. Research, in contrast, is much more dynamic, churning up
new topics, methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations with a rapidity that far
outpaces the speed of change in the curriculum. The fact is, faculty research is often far more
fluid and interdisciplinary than the courses they teach, so we should not be surprised that
courses become more dynamic and integrative when faculty bring research into them.
When William James published The Variety of Religious Experiences in 1902, he taught in a
Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Harvard. Philosophy and psychology, of course,
-11-
were to soon go their separate ways, the former to become more conceptual and analytic and
the latter to become (especially in the academy) more empirical and positivistic. In recent
years some philosophers have developed a renewed interest in the validity of empirical
research to study the questions they are asking, and a round of curriculum development
grants at William & Mary provided the vehicle for philosophers working in this area to team
up with members of our psychology department. Of course, the intellectual unity that
seemed natural to William James seems like a wildly interdisciplinary and avant-garde
marriage today. It has been developments in faculty research that have opened the door for
this change. After the first year of this collaboration the faculty organized a research
symposium that featured the work of undergraduates in cognitive psychology, philosophy,
and linguistics who had been using similar methodologies to study topics that until recently
they had studied only from the siloed perspectives of their home disciplines. If one
traditional goal of the liberal arts is to encourage students to imagine new connections
between domains of knowledge, it is important to bring the intellectually disruptive force of
research into contact with the curriculum.
A research-based freshman seminar at William & Mary forges a similar link between quite
traditional debates in democratic theory and literature in cognitive psychology and behavioral
economics. There are a variety of implicit empirical claims in the debate between
participatory democrats, who wish to promote unrepresented, face-to-face democracy, and
advocates of liberal democracy, who favor representative government and limited citizen
participation. Students in this course organize deliberations on hot-button issues, both on
campus and in the broader community, that are set up specifically to test claims made by
both sides in this debate about the causes of polarization and consensus. The underlying
research interest of the instructor – to understand the actual dynamics at work in deliberative
institutions – has led him to build the course around a syllabus that draws on works from
several disciplines. If this course was not redesigned to include a significant research
experience, it no doubt would still be a very traditional “history of philosophy” course on
democratic theory. This, then, is another example of the role that research can play in
disrupting disciplinary boundaries and instigating a novel reintegration of knowledge in the
curriculum.
Finally, it has been our experience that research in the sciences also has this interdisciplinary,
integrative impact. An example can be found in a recent research effort examining mercury
pollution in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Undergraduate biology majors with either
molecular or organismal biology backgrounds carried out four summers of intensive
fieldwork, catching thousands of birds and their insect prey for mercury samples, and
-12-
recording the birds' breeding success in contaminated and uncontaminated habitats.
Students mastered measurement of mercury levels in their samples throughout the academic
year, using sophisticated chemistry techniques to measure concentrations in the parts-perbillion range. Some students performed analysis of data on singing behavior using state-ofthe art programs that allow the measurement of visual displays of sound, while others
performed sophisticated multivariate analyses of spatial data using Geographical Information
Systems. Blood and DNA samples were used to allow students to identify prey items and
determine how mercury moves through the food chain from river pollution to insects to
birds. The most exciting element of the project has been the outreach and dissemination
component, because the study site is the topic of current public debate and threatened
lawsuits over what to do next. Students participated in quarterly stakeholders meetings at
which they presented their data to scientists and risk managers, alongside professors and
paid consultants. Students have already coauthored 15 papers from this study in
internationally peer-reviewed journals on toxicology, ornithology, and environmental
pollution, and dozens have given talks or posters at professional conferences. Research, we
see again, is not a threat to the liberal arts curriculum; indeed, it is research that is bringing
liberal arts experiences into the curriculum.
While the emphasis on undergraduate research has had brought many changes at The College
of William & Mary, I do not want to exaggerate its impact. Of course, many of the faculty at
William and Mary conduct their research without student collaborators, and many of our
courses, especially at the survey level, have not been dramatically touched by our emphasis
on research – and probably, in many cases, for good reasons. Moreover, much of our
undergraduate research still goes on outside of the credit-bearing curriculum. For example,
we fund over 300 students each summer to conduct research and only a minority of them are
receiving credits.
Yet our undergraduate research program has demonstrably benefitted our students in many
ways, including leading them to dedicate more time and passion to their courses, and
preparing them to be successful in graduate schools, careers, and competitions for prestigious
post-graduate scholarships, such as Rhodes and Fulbright. But the focus of this essay has
been specifically on describing the powerful role that research experiences have played in
updating and re-energizing the quality of the liberal arts experience that our students receive.
As suggested in the first sections of this essay, there is no natural tension between research
and the liberal arts tradition. Confirming this point of view, our efforts to support
undergraduate research at William and Mary have contributed to the whole range of
traditional liberal arts goals: they have dramatically transformed the level of intellectual
-13-
engagement that our students experience throughout the co-curriculum and curriculum;
supported student personal and academic growth; increased the ability of students to solve
problems and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines; and developed both the
motivation and the capacity in students to be lifelong learners.
References
Astin, A. 1993. What Matters in College? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Astin, A. W. and M. J. Chang 1995. “Colleges that Emphasize Research and Teaching.”
Change (September/October).
Astin, A W, 2000. “How the Liberal Arts College Affects Students.” in S. Koblik and S.R.
Graubard (Eds.) Distinctly American. The Residential Liberal Arts College. Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers.
Bird, C. 1975. The Case Against College. New York: McKay.
Boyd, M and Wesemann (Eds.) 2009, Broadening Participating in Undergraduate Research:
Fostering Excellence and Enhancing the Impact, 2009. Council on Undergraduate
Research, Washington, D.C.
Glyer, D., and Weeks, D.L. 1998. “Liberal Education: Initiating the Conversation,” in D. Glyer
and D.L. Weeks (Eds.), The Liberal Arts in Higher Education. New York: University
Press of America.
Hensel, N. 2012. Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Washington, D.C.:
Council on Undergraduate Research.
Hugh of St. Victor 1968. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts .
Jerome Taylor (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
D.G. and D.C. McClelland 1981. A New Case for the Liberal Arts. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Nussbaum, M.C. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
-14-
Osborn, J. and Karukstis, K 2009. “The Benefits of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and
Creative Activity,” in M. Boyd and J. Wesemann (Eds.)., Broadening Participation in
Undergraduate Research Fostering Excellence and Enhancing the Impact. Council on
Undergraduate Research, Washington, D.C.
Pascarella, E.T. and Terenzini, P.T. 1998. “Studying College Students in the 21 st Century:
Meeting the New Challenges.” The Review of Higher Education 21.
Pascarella, E.T.and Terenzini, P. 2005. How College Affects Students: Vol 2. A Third Decade of
Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Seifert, T.A., Goodman, K.M., Lindsay, N., Jorgenson, J.D., Wolniak, G.C., Pascarella, E.T. 2008.
“The Effects of Liberal Arts Experiences on Liberal Arts Outcomes.” Research in Higher
Education 49: 107-125.
-15-