What's Liberal? And Why Arts?

By Robert A. Weisbuch

As I write these words, I am sitting outside my cabin on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee. It's a portrait of ideal nature -- with moving parts, for this is a family camp. I've been told by a reporter for The New York Times who somehow got through to me -- cellphones are allowed only inside cabins -- that all of the university presidents seem to be on vacation this week. They, like me, must need a respite, an extended moment for the cognitive equivalent of slow cooking.

But I am unfit to be here, on what I term the Island Without Toilets. I typically prefer nature in the context of iambic pentameter. In fact, a friend once asked me whether, as a child, I had suffered a traumatic event in a park or on a farm. In a career aptitude test as an undergraduate, I scored an all-time low for "forest ranger."

Yet this is my fifth summer on this island in New Hampshire, and I somehow find it a perfect setting for large, hopeful thoughts that feel like deep and blessed breathing. Twice before and again now, this island has made me think in different ways about the liberal-arts education in which I busily, sometimes thoughtlessly, participate for the rest of the year.

During my first summer here, the 50 or so adults were assigned a book to read, Bill McKibben's 1992 tome, The Age of Missing Information (Random House). In it, McKibben contrasts a day spent hiking up a modest mountain with the weeks and months he spent watching a single day's broadcast of everything on all channels of a massive cable system.

The book was a bit predictable -- guess which day afforded greater understanding -- and ecosnobby, but it had its effect. As I finished reading a chapter on the cabin porch, my wife and youngest son rushed up from the dock to say they had brought the canoe in just ahead of a storm. "A storm?" I asked, for it had been a sunny day when I last looked up from the book. "Dad," shouted Gabe, who was then 7, "you missed the information."

There are many ways to miss the information besides watching too much television, and the real contrast in McKibben's book is not between the natural world and the electronic similitudes but between deep knowledge and sound bites. He illustrates deep knowledge by citing how much an Adirondack farmer knows, and how much there is to know, about each and every species of apple.

In fact, there is so much to know about everything -- about musical composition, baseball, gemology, wine, lyric poetry, and, yes, even television.

A sense and a sampling of that plenitude struck me that first summer as one definition of a liberal-arts education. The liberal arts do not occur in nature or in culture. They are the academic organization of knowledge and learning, but they are the free spirit of inquiry more than they are a set of topics or fields. Our job, as educators, is to thrill our charges with a sense of that plenitude and with some experiencing of specific worlds of it. That is what I learned my first summer on the Island Without Toilets.

For the second summer, we had a shorter community reading assignment, an article titled "Listening to the Other," written by an Arab-American scholar (the author of which escapes me). If McKibben's book had been all too goody-two-shoes, the article proved very contentious.

While it urged readers to see things from a pro-Arab point of view as a corrective to prejudice, it seemed to some of us to lodge its own prejudice and to verge on anti-Semitism. The "some of us" to whom that seemed the case were all, like me, Jews, including many who were hardly pro-Israeli in all things.

To a person, the non-Jewish readers found the article unbiased, and that bothered all of us eventually. Perhaps, we groused, there is no true way to listen to the Other.

No, I found myself saying, this very conversation is helpful and opens me up. It reminds me that we have the cure in our education system, that we could not even be having this conversation if most of us had not experienced that kind of education.

I recalled the comment by Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, that "the more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel or think in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking, and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion." To reach a conclusion, she must first see things from every perspective, including those foreign and even, and especially, opposed to her own gut reactions.

That summer, the island taught me that the liberal arts are the opposition to talk radio, to fanaticism of all kinds, including our own, that another characterization of the liberal arts consists not in wonder worlds alone but in a cherishing and empathic practice of difference. The notion of reaching beyond the self is the liberal arts.

My liberal-arts epiphany the following summer came not from reading but from staring out at the lake on a cloudy day and thinking about the previous sentences from the previous summer. It occurred to me that thought isn't enough -- that if the kind of education we practice is meant to connect us to others, it should include something more active, more worldly. I've always had an aversion to concepts like service learning and character education, feeling -- perhaps influenced by Stanley Fish, the literary and legal scholar -- that they reduce intellectual activities to a cookie bake.

And so I meditated on the notion not of general volunteerism, lovely as it is, but of using learning to meet social urgencies and of bringing experiential learning reciprocally back into the classroom. Those are easy sayings, but difficult to make happen without reductive acts. Two years later, I am still working with my colleagues at Drew to redefine the university by just that messy but potentially muscular idea.

The Island Without Toilets became the Island Without Ideas for summer four. It was my religious summer, in a sense: After a year of the presidency at Drew, I just looked out stupidly upon the waves, murmuring "Holy ... ." Loyal readers of The Chronicle know I wasn't having a bad time, I was just having, like all new presidents, a time.

But this summer, more acclimated, I am more active, if, presidentially, more trivial in my thought.

What I have been contemplating on the cabin porch today is the extremely unattractive quality of the words "liberal arts." How would progressives out there like to have it called "conservative arts" or, to reverse the habit of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, "a conservative education"?

What's liberal? And why arts?, which is why some people talk about the liberal arts as opposed to the sciences. Nor does the solution to that, "arts and sciences," fare better, as it vaguely implies painting and physics and leaves out more than half of the whatchamacallit that we do.

Then we revert to the language of corporate life at its most unattractive -- "general education" -- which is also distantly military to no good purpose. Lost in that landmine lexicon like a battalion from Iowa in rural Iraq, we stumble upon other phrases bound to alienate: "distribution," sounding like a furniture-warehouse truck firm, or the Rotarian phrase "civic engagement," which is still superior to "service learning" (see above), though that is comparing abstract apples and abstract oranges, equally tasteless.

This matters. If we had a name for the liberal arts that engaged students and grant makers rather than baffled or vaguely repelled them, it would be of benefit. Of course, you can always make up a sloganeering name, and a cursory visit to university Web sites reveals a number of ad-agency-like phrases, all high on the ick scale.

Looking out upon the lake, I think of the vocabulary I invented with the child of a friend, where we would speak to each other in a nonsense lexicon. "Clabirty sclow freg?," I would ask Matthew. "Glombol plock!" he would respond emphatically. Perhaps we could rename the liberal arts the floragarbs krakow. It has a ring.

On this dreamy lake, though, as the wind picks up to carry away such frivolous thoughts, the answer comes to me. Instead of adding on something, imagining anew, we simply do what the liberal arts are all too good at doing, and exile what does not belong. This liberal-arts education thing? From now on, how about we just call it college? And anything else isn't.

That's all. Let it sink in.

But taking together my five summers of desultory thought, I have a final one. Let us make certain, when we say college as we once said liberal arts, that we don't describe an island. The mainland calls. We are equipped.