“If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,” the editors wrote, “then it is nothing.”
The Times was giving voice to the ideal of liberal education, in which college is a vehicle for intellectual development, for cultivating a flexible mind, and, no matter the focus of study, for fostering a broad set of knowledge and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent.
Reagan was staking out a competing vision. Learning for learning’s sake might be nice, but the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for it. A higher education should prepare students for jobs.
Those two theories had long existed in uneasy equilibrium. On that day in 1967, the balance started to tip toward utility in ways not even Reagan may have anticipated.
Sometimes, sea changes in attitude start small, gradually establishing assumptions until no one remembers thinking differently. This is how that happened to liberal education. It’s a story of events on campus and beyond: the oil embargo, the canon wars, federal fiscal policies, the fall of the Soviet Union. On that day in 1967, Reagan crystalized what has since become conventional wisdom about college. In the early 1970s, nearly three-quarters of freshmen said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. About a third felt the same about being very well off financially. Now those fractions have flipped.
The notion that a liberal education is of dubious value has become entrenched in the popular imagination, even as its defenders argue the opposite. The Association of American Colleges and Universities, liberal education’s chief advocate, celebrates its 100th anniversary this month. Its choices have shaped the story of liberal education, too. The group appears to be in fine shape, with a $10-million budget, more than 1,300 member colleges, and high-profile projects on educational quality, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and civic learning, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. But such projects and respect on many campuses haven’t stopped the public from largely dismissing the idea of liberal education.
College is defined so narrowly and instrumentally now, AAC&U’s president, Carol Geary Schneider, has said, that it’s “ultimately dangerous both to democracy and to economic creativity.”
Once prized as a worthy pursuit for all, liberal education that day in 1967 became pointless, an indulgence, a joke.