Intellectual parochialism wins

In May 2018, which is nearly 3 years ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a rare joint statement on "increasingly threatened" disciplines and approaches.

They noted in that statement:

we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education--are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience.

Indeed!

Through my years in higher ed, and over the past almost 20 years at WOU, I have been fighting nothing but losing battles defending liberal education.  The war has now ended.

I worry that instead of broadening the reach of liberal education, universities like WOU are rapidly moving in the other direction of further limiting the horizons of less-privileged students. We seem to be well on our way to re-creating the huge divide that has always existed between the privileged few and the overwhelming rest--a divide that public higher education was designed to address.  

Students have always been shocked when I tell them, for instance, that Harvard does not even offer an undergraduate major in "criminal justice," which is one of our high enrollment programs.  They seemed genuinely puzzled about students majoring in English or philosophy at these expensive schools like Harvard.

Over the years, we have hyped up these high enrolling majors, and actively invested them, as if we know something that the privileged few do not.  Universities like WOU systematically, intentionally, and strategically create and market academic programs, often by vocationalizing it, even when the links to gainful employment are dubious, as this 2013 report shows, and there's nothing to convince me that things have changed. 

The academic environment at WOU is a contrast to how the privileged students are treated at the elite schools.  And even after they declare their majors, Stanford notes that "to avoid intellectual parochialism, a major program should not require a student to take more than about one-third of his or her courses from within a single department."  We, on the other hand, actively promote intellectual parochialism.

The joint statement concludes with this:

Higher education’s contributions to the common good and to the functioning of our democracy are severely compromised when universities eliminate and diminish the liberal arts.

The liberal arts will live on at the elite institutions.  But, democracy is not by the elite, for the elite.  The death of liberal education at the institutions that educate the masses does not bode well for the health of democracy :(