Liberal education under (economic) attack ...

My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, but since then my academic life has been tilting far away from "applied science" with immense practical utility to the fascinating liberal arts, whose utility is not immediately calculable.

So, I can truly appreciate the news that liberal education might go through a serious transformation as a result of this Great Recession.   Newsweek has gone one step more (or maybe a few steps?) and titled the article ..."The Death of Liberal Arts" ... Well, the usage of "death" is probably hasty, and reminds me of Mark Twain's quip on reports of his death having been exaggerated.

But, yes, there will be immense consequences for the liberal arts.  For a while now I have blogged about the crisis in the humanities , higher education, and the falling value of the college degree.  If any of my colleagues were willing to listen to me (editor: there are colleagues who talk to you? hmmm!) I have bugged them about how we need to be on the leading edge to reform liberal education from within.  But, as I often joke around, even my dog never listened to me, so why should people, eh! :)
 
Over at the Chronicle, debates and discussions have picked up quite some pace over the state of the Humanities--including in the recent issue.  And, yes, I have blogged about many of them, too, including the essays by Thomas Benton ... This essay by Benton set off quite a raging debate ...  Martha Nussbaum jumped in with her own take on how liberal education is not elitist.

Yes, we are at those metaphorical crossroads.  I am glad that the Newsweek essay ends on a constructive note:

regardless of where students chose to go to school, they still need to get good grades, network, and complete goal-specific internships. "If you don't know that in advance and you major in philosophy, you're in major trouble," says Ceniza-Levine. "You can be Harvard philosophy major, but you'd better have worked at a bank during the summer."
While the tradition of the liberal-arts education may be on the wane nationwide, the most elite schools, such as Harvard, Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Williams, remain committed to its ideal. These top schools are not tweaking their curriculums to add any pre-professional undergraduate programs. Thanks to their hefty endowments, they don't have to. As the economy rebounds, their students, ironically, may be in the best spot. While studying the humanities has become unfashionable and seemingly impractical, the liberal arts also teaches students to think big thoughts—big enough to see beyond specific college majors and adapt to the broader job market.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.