Mourning the death ... of liberal education

 (The following essay has been rejected by two publications.  So ... time to self-publish!)
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Through the past pandemic year, I, like many, have had several Zoom meetings—with students, colleagues, relatives, and my physician too.  However, I wish I hadn’t had a recent Zoom meeting in which the college dean informed me that I was being laid off from my job as Professor of Geography at Western Oregon University (WOU.)

The two-page layoff letter that arrived via email during the Zoom firing included this line: “Please note that your layoff is not disciplinary in nature and does not reflect on your performance.”  But that provides no consolation.

Geography is not the only program that is being phased out.  Philosophy and anthropology will also not be available as majors or minors from fall 2021.  Students will no longer have an option to minor in physics either.  Many other programs are also being right sized, as the university president’s plan puts it.  As a result, a few tenured faculty, including me, have been issued layoff notices, some tenure-track lines will not be filled, contracts for quite a few adjunct faculty will not be renewed, and academic programs are being curtailed.

The American higher education landscape had been rapidly changing even in those halcyon days before we became familiar with the word “coronavirus.”  During the pandemic year, the rate of change reached unprecedented levels, with the result that tenured full professors are being laid off and academic programs are being shut down at WOU.  

The fashion over the years across higher education, and at WOU too, has been to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and to gut anything that resembles traditional liberal education.  The logic has been that STEM graduates are more employable than are those who spent their college years studying subjects like geography, philosophy, and anthropology.  

This false impression persists despite the growing mountain of evidence that points to the value of liberal education for employment and also for our collective well-being.  The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is one of the many groups that routinely make this point very clear.  In a recent research report that is based on surveys of employers, the AACU points out that a “liberal education provides the knowledge and skills employers view as important  for career success.”

In the vast world of employment in which specialized professional credentials are not required, employability is about skills, and not about whether a student can solve a linear algebra problem.  The preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself, and the skills are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major.  A few years ago, WOU developed undergraduate learning outcomes that make clear what the core of an undergraduate education is about: Quantitative literacy; Written Communication; Inquiry and Analysis; Integrative Learning; Diversity and Global Learning.  These are the essential outcomes that employers repeatedly cite as being important.

Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes have only made it worse for liberal education.  For instance, in 2014, President Obama mocked art history as an undergraduate major.  Senator Marco Rubio, during his failed run in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, claimed that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.  Obama and Rubio were not the only leaders trash-talking liberal education and calling for vocational versions of higher education.  Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful.  The harsh sound bites quickly reverberated among the public and through the political world that determines funding for public universities like WOU.  Three years later, Rubio acknowledged the value of philosophy and philosophers.  Meanwhile, Obama sent a handwritten apology to a University of Texas art history professor regretting his glib remarks.   Their apologies were mere whispers that few heard.

All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called “liberal education,” but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  In India, we kids who were good in school were compelled to think only about two options—engineering or medicine.  Rare was an academically talented kid who fought against the system in order to study literature or history.  That’s how I ended up earning an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, even though my heart was never in it.

My intellectual world opened up when I came to the US for graduate schooling.  In 1987, I joined the urban planning program at the University of Southern California (USC) and, for the first time in my life, I had a formal and structured opportunity to study philosophy, political science, geography, and more.  It was liberal education on steroids!  I was in heaven.  I immediately fell in love with liberal education and latched on to it pretty strongly. 

When I accepted the employment offer from WOU, I told friends in California that the charming campus and the curriculum presented the university as a public version of a private liberal arts college.  In fact, for a while, WOU’s marketing materials included this tag line: "Steadily emerging as a leading public liberal arts institution.”  A few years later, that was replaced with "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education."  When I served as the Director of the university’s Honors Program, I was all too thrilled with providing college freshman what I wished I had in India—liberal education.

Over the recent years, WOU ceased to be a public version of a liberal arts college.  Programs that had the appearance of being professional and employable were increasingly favored over traditional disciplines.  The writing on the wall became clearer with each academic term that it was a liability for me to be associated with Geography.  I am, therefore, not at all surprised that I am being laid off.

The layoffs and program curtailment as a result of right sizing the university are evidence of the death of liberal education at WOU.    I mourn that death.