Defending liberal education is merely more tilting at academic windmills?

As a new academic year begins, in addition to preparing for classes, I will also have to prepare to defend liberal education. 

Over the past few years, there have been increasingly loud chants in favor of professional-sounding academic programs at the higher educational level and, of course, STEM, which expands to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. They seem to rooted in a belief that liberal education is an old-fashioned idea whose time has come and gone.  That simply is not the case.

In defending the idea of liberal education, I typically rely on the resources at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU,) which describes liberal education as “an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth study in a specific area of interest.”  

STEM and professional  programs that students pursue need not be in conflict with liberal education.  Yet, even within the academic environments, there is a greater push than ever before in favor of preparation that seems far removed from the traditional interpretation of liberal education.   

Instead of viewing education as a broad understanding of the world with its complexity and change, we simplistically reduce higher education to nothing more than a passport to jobs and paychecks.  It is within this skewed interpretation of higher education that we push for STEM as a panacea.

My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, though, by now, I have forgotten everything about partial differential equations.  The geographic move from India to the US was also a move away from a narrowly-focused STEM program in India, which did not provide us with curricular opportunities to explore and understand “complexity, diversity, and change.”

As an undergraduate, I was a student member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE.)  Though that membership ended with the graduation, old habits die hard.  I was glancing through the September 2013 issue of IEEE’s magazine, Spectrum, and was drawn to a lengthy essay because of its title--”The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.”  I wonder how the STEM proponents will respond to the IEEE publication featuring an essay with a tagline of “Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.”

The essay notes this--“What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”

Society needs scientists and engineers, and also plumbers and teachers and ditch-diggers and whole array of personnel.  The extreme fascination that we have with STEM is rapidly leading to a systematic gutting of the very idea of liberal education, and a misallocation of scarce budgetary resources.   

As if all these were not enough, a high school friend, who is now on the faculty at one of India’s premier universities, emailed me a news item a couple of months ago about a proposal to introduce four-year undergraduate programs in India, modeled after what we have in the US.  Well, modeled after what we used to have here in the US.  What an irony that while India wants to expand its higher education content, we in the US are actively exploring options that would narrow a typical undergraduate’s curricular exposure to the wider world--via possible three-year degree programs or professional studies.

It is not more college-level STEM that we need in the US.  Instead, we need basic scientific literacy among my fellow-citizens.  It is simply bizarre that the richest and most powerful country that the world has ever known also has huge numbers of people who have very little understanding of natural selection and evolution, or global climate change, or even the four seasons.   

Finally, as we look around at the world, the concerns and worries that we have are not always problems for science and technology to solve.  We need a much broader understanding to keep up with, for instance, why there are protests in Egypt, or how it is possible for Robert Mugabe to continue to mess up what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa, or why tens of millions gather at Kumbh Melas in India.   

While it might be a losing effort to continue to defend liberal education, as I often joke, Don Quixote is my hero when it comes to such foolish acts of tilting at windmills.  But then, Don Quixote is perhaps rarely ever a required reading anymore in liberal education!