Planning and Partnering for Innovation Must Include the Liberal Arts
By Jesse Schatz — The Liberal Arts College (LAC) is, “Antiquated, belated, arrested, [and] starved…the college will disappear, in fact, if not in name. The best will become universities, the others will return to their place as academies.”1 When inaugural Stanford University President, David Starr Jordan, made this prediction nearly two centuries ago, he carved his place in a long line of cultural critics who believed that the Liberal Arts College was on the verge of collapse.
Yet, despite his doomsday predictions, the Swarthmores and Pomonas of the world still exist. In fact directly counter to Jordan’s assumptions, Susan Frost writes, “Residential Liberal Arts colleges may well be among the most resilient institutions in our culture…with considerable fortitude and adaptability, they have continued through times of financial recession and depression, wars and conflicts of all sizes, the rise and decline of the agrarian culture and then of industrialization, several technological revolutions, and massive shifts in cultural norms and practices that have occurred throughout U.S history.”2
While Frost limits her analysis to United States- based institutions, examples of the application of the Liberal Arts to the developing world show that this model is universal. An examination of the resiliency of the Liberal Arts College can lead to important insights for how Research Universities can both form effective partnerships, as well as best position them to be drivers of regional and economic innovation.
While promoting a ‘knowledge economy,’ necessitates a hyper-focus on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) fields, lessons learned from the Liberal Arts College will show that to be truly innovative, university planners should instead be looking towards providing a STEAM education, whereby the ‘A’ grants the Liberal Arts curriculum the equal attention that it deserves.
Liberal Arts & Innovation
The value of a Liberal Arts degree is typically discussed in terms of its humanistic qualities, the ability to foster compassion for others and create well-rounded global citizens. While these intangible values are indeed true, as Stanford University Professor of French Dan Edelstein writes, “the contributions of the humanities to our consumerist society…are rarely addressed.”3
While the ability to quantify the effects of a degree in French Studies or History remains to be seen, the true value of these kinds of degrees lies not necessarily in the topic under examination, but rather in the methods used to teach them.
Innovation requires originality, and yet as Edelstein goes to show, the STEM fields do not teach students to be original until much later in their academic careers, “When one considers the curricular requirements of most scientific majors, it becomes equally apparent that the majority of the courses focus on reproducing knowledge in the students.” Edelstein sets up a useful example, “If you provide the same answers as fifty other students on a calculus exam, you may very well get an A, but if you hand in a final essay for your American History course, in which you develop the same thesis as fifty other students, you would most likely not get an A, since original thinking is one of the criteria used to evaluate a student’s understanding and assimilation of material.”4 Edelstein’s analogy is not meant to diminish the importance of the STEM fields (Edelstein makes it clear that he acknowledges and appreciates the originality of his STEM colleagues), but instead to point out that the inquisitiveness innovation requires begins during the first days of a humanities student’s undergraduate career.
The originality imparted by an education that infuses the Liberal Arts will be a near-requirement for jobs that arise from our developing ‘knowledge-economy.’ We have all heard the statistics that a large percentage of jobs that graduates will work in do not exist yet, meaning that in the words of Veronica DiConti, “To cope with this kind of rapid change, students and educators alike need a working familiarity with a vast and growing body of knowledge that may have far more lasting value than specialized techniques and training offered in pre-professional programs.”5.
And yet, despite the need for graduates with sharp and original critical thinking skills, DiConti reveals that for most graduates, “Perceived or future success depends on professional preparation in areas such as law, medicine, or business. The fact that the liberal arts are at the roots of such disciplines is often lost on today’s career-minded youth.”6 As such, perhaps due to a hyper-focus on STEM or conditioning by constantly being asked, ‘What are you going to do with that degree,’ graduates incorrectly believe that the best education is one that is best suited to prepare them for an existing job, something they assume a Philosophy degree will be unable to provide.
Despite this misconception, a quick search will reveal that ‘humanities jobs’ are in high demand, even in a place most associated with American technological innovation: Silicon Valley. In a Forbes cover story titled “That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket” published in 2015, Slack Technologies CEO Stewart Butterfelt says of the impact his Philosophy degree had on the success of his $2.8 billion dollar company, “studying philosophy taught me two things … I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings. And when I studied the history of science, I learned about the ways that everyone believes something is true … until they realized it wasn’t true.” Butterfelt’s sense is pervasive throughout Silicon Valley where at disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to non-technical jobs, particularly sales and marketing.
In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in sales and marketing will grow by 2.1 million by the year 2022, whereas in the same year there will only by 279,500 software engineering jobs.
This statistic reinforces McKinsey analyst Michael Chui’s assertion, “Narrowly defined tech jobs, by themselves, aren’t going to be the answer for long-term employment growth.” For every software engineering job, there is a slew of marketers, educators and businesspersons who will use Liberal Arts derived critical thinking skills to navigate an ever -changing economy and society. In conditioning our youth to believe that an Africana Studies or Classics degree are altogether useless we are limiting the potential impact these graduates could have on building successful technology sectors.
Liberal Arts Partnerships: Untapped Potential
Partnerships between Liberal Arts colleges and large Research universities remain few and far between. Of this untapped potential, program director at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Hamilton College Eugene M. Tobin writes, “Rarely do colleges and universities build on the work of their peers, and seldom do they engage in comparative study…there is even less formal interaction between Liberal Arts colleges and research universities, and this deeply ingrained mutual disregard, bordering on denial, speaks volumes about the organizational limitations of our highly compartmentalized higher education system.”8 He continues, “This is unfortunate…Research universities have the resources and infrastructure that would enable Liberal Arts Colleges to expand their curricular offerings and provide their faculties with interesting scholarly opportunities, and liberal arts colleges have much to share with their university colleagues about getting undergraduates involved in research.”9
Luckily, Tobin’s call for cooperation between LAC’s and Research universities has not been entirely ignored. In her essay, “The College without Walls: Partnerships at Home and Abroad,” Smith College President Carol T. Christ demonstrates how the ‘5 College Consortium’ consisting of 4 Lac’s (Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst and Hampshire) and one publicly funded research University (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) use collaboration to maximize the strengths of each institution.
This consortium, which began as a library partnership in 1979, now includes cross-registration for classes allowing students to register for classes at any of the five colleges. This model has allowed for the creation of ‘5-college’ majors, departments and certificate programs, leading to degrees and experiences that each college alone would be unable to provide. Notably this model has been most impactful in foreign language study, as less commonly taught languages, such as Persian and Uzbek, can be taught through the advanced level by sharing teaching and funding across colleges. The benefits of the consortium extend beyond academia, including the administrative task of, “payroll, accounting, grants management, human resources, and information technology support.”10
Liberal Arts: International Implications
Swarthmore College President Rebecca Chopp writes, “The ‘distinctively American’ tradition of residential liberal arts rests on the foundation of an early social charter between American higher education and democratic society.”11 While she is certainly correct in her acknowledgment of the LAC being a large part of the American collegiate culture, it would be limiting to assume that a Liberal Arts education and its benefits are being experienced only within the United States or other countries that identify as ‘Democracies.’ In more recent years the Liberal Arts model has demonstrated its flexibility in being retrofitted to fit different cultural, governmental and economic contexts. Take for example the developing regions of Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.
Within the former soviet states of Central Asia, authors Norma Jo Baker and Chad D. Thompson argue that the post soviet educational system has not caught up with changes in society that have occurred since the collapse of the soviet union and they position a transition to a Liberal Arts model of education as a remedy. Their assertion, that, “[Central Asian] university education is presumed to be nothing more than presenting the scientifically demonstrated ‘truth’ to students; student work is no more than a reputation of such ordained expertise,”12 is evocative of Edelstein’s argument of how a focus on STEM fails to teach ‘innovation.’
While the tightly controlled educational planning of the Soviet era has largely melted away, Baker and Thompson write, “The university systems within Central Asian states did not step far beyond the circumstances in which they found themselves upon having independence foisted upon them in 1991.”13
As it relates to the preparation of Central Asian students to be primed to become the innovators that a knowledge economy requires, the authors write, “This is a structure based wholly upon the reproduction and transmission of knowledge; the actual production of knowledge, or its discovery is a separate task.” Within the region, Baker and Thompson point towards American University — Central Asia, the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research and the University of Central Asia, each of which, “has sought to establish a new hybrid educational structure, one that would adapt the liberal arts to the needs of the region.”14 Based on Baker and Thompson’s argument, in order for Central Asia to transition to an innovative knowledge economy, universities will have to transition from a teaching model that prioritizes replication to one that emphasizes originality, a job that a Liberal Arts curriculum seems perfectly suitable.
Liberal arts colleges in the Middle East, particularly the Arab Gulf, are a testament to the ability of a liberal arts education to successfully traverse differing models of government and society. Of bringing the Liberal Arts to the Middle East, Vice-Chancellor of NYU: Abu Dhabi, Alfred Bloom writes:
“I think actually liberal-arts education lends itself to be transported to other environments. Because what makes a liberal-arts education so successful is that it prepares people to engage in a complexity of issues and develop their own sense of what’s right and their own sense of the balance between conflicting factors, whether they be pragmatic or political or ethical. And by being in different locations in different cultures, it introduces the idea that there are a lot of ways of looking at the world, a lot of value systems, and prepares people to see those value systems, to stretch across differences in value systems, and find solutions that will work for a global world rather than only for a single country.”15
The success of NYU Abu Dhabi speaks for itself, (the university has produced eight Rhodes Scholars in only three graduating classes) and shows that the Liberal Arts are not limited to democratic governments, but can exist within societies that include monarchies, elected officials or a mix of the two.
In Conclusion
While extreme projects that require large-scale international collaboration such as the Human Genome Project, or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, will necessarily rely on the financial and scientific resources of large, publicly funded Research Universities, if the researchers behind these projects want to train the next generation of students to possess the critical thinking skills to come up with original and innovative solutions and technologies, it is essential that these students have a background in the Liberal Arts. The actual content learned in an Art History class may only have career applicability for a select few; however, the research, methods and frameworks that these classes utilize and teach can have profound impacts on how we approach scientific questions and projects. Additionally, partnerships between LAC’s and Research Universities can be mutually beneficial for institutions and students, in that mixed consortia can compensate for the weaknesses of a single school. Finally, while research on the Liberal Arts is typically done within a North American context, emerging models of education in the Middle East and Central Asia, among others, shows that an education that infuses the liberal arts can help societies that are either in transition, or looking to diversify into fully-fledged knowledge economies.
Therefore we must say, ‘full STEAM ahead.’
Jesse Schatz serves as the Research Associate for the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils. As Research Associate he researches anything and everything related to the upcoming University Research & Leadership Forum to be held in Malaysia this November. More specifically, he has been researching ‘Extreme Projects’ related to the GFCC task-force of the same name.
Outside of the GFCC, Jesse is beginning his final year at Vassar College where he is studying Africana Studies with a concentration in Arabic Language & Culture. Concurrently, Jesse serves as a Research Intern at Gulf State Analytics, a geopolitical consulting firm that specializes in the Arab Gulf Region. Upon graduation, he hopes to travel to the Gulf Region to better prepare himself for a career strengthening the relationship between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council member states. He can be contacted via LinkedIn.
Endnotes
1 Eugene M. Tobin, “The Future of Liberal Arts Begins with Collaboration,” in Remaking college: Innovation and the Liberal Arts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 125.
2 Ibid
3 Daniel Edelstein, “On the Humanities and the Knowledge Economy” Liberal Education, vol. 96. №1, winter 2010, 14.
4 Edelstein, 17.
5 Veronica Diconti, “Experiential Education in a Knowledge-Based Economy: Is it Time to Reexamine the Liberal Arts?” The Journal of General Education, vol 53, no. 3–4, 2004, 170.
6 Diconti, 169 9 George Anders, “That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket,” Forbes Magazine, July 29, 2015, 2.
8 Tobin, 129
9 Tobin, 130.
10 Ibid 15 Carol T Christ, “The College Without Walls: The College at Home and Abroad,” in Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 141.
11 Rebecca Chopp, “Remaking, Renewing, Reimagining: The Liberal Arts College Takes Advantage of Change,” in Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 11. 17 Norma Jo Baker and Chad Thompson, “Ideologies of Civic Participation in Central Asia: Liberal Arts in the post-Soviet democratic ethos,” Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, vol. 5 no. 1, 2010, 59 18
12 Baker and Thompson, 62.
13 Baker and Thompson, 64.
14 Baker and Thompson, 68.
15 Karin Fischer, “How the Liberal Arts can Bridge International Divides: Alfred Bloom, Vice Chancellor, New York U, Abu Dhabi,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 January 2017.
Works Cited
Anders, George. “That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket,” Forbes Magazine, 20 July 2015, 2.
Baker, Norma Jo and Chad Thompson, “Ideologies of Civic Participation in Central Asia: Liberal Arts in the Post-Soviet Democratic Ethos,” Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice, 5 (2010): 59–68
Chopp, Rebecca, Susan Frost and Daniel Weiss, eds. Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
DiConti, Veronica. “Experiential Education in a Knowledge-Based Economy: Is it Time to Reexamine the Liberal Arts?” The Journal of General Education. 53(2004) 169–170.
Edelstein, Daniel. “On the Humanities and the Knowledge Economy,” Liberal Education, vol. 96 no. 1 (2010): 14.
Fischer, Karin. “How the Liberal Arts can Bridge International Divides: Alfred Bloom, Vice Chancellor, New York U, Abu Dha-
