PRACTICALLY SPEAKING:
Don't send liberal arts to the back of the class. By Bill Kirtz
President Freeland is garnering well-deserved praise for insisting that Northeastern have a clear institutional goal, a salable and honorable way of defining itself. His aim to tie the university's signature co-op program more closely to relevant academic departments would bring more accountability to both. Professorial detachment from students' co-op jobs or indifference to employment after graduation is deplorable in an institution that prides itself on hands-on learning. Closer scrutiny of how instructors, co-op advisers, and placement personnel staffers cooperate to assure our grads' marketplace success is overdue.
But as they focus on Freeland's "practice-centered" educational ideal, as they carry out his call to create dual majors between the humanities and "practical" disciplines, deans and professors should not send liberal arts to the back of the class. Freeland's ideal curriculum will integrate co-op, professional education, and liberal learning.
That's as it should be. Northeastern will maintain its reputation for "education that works" only if such programs as music, history, and art are valued as vital parts of every college experience, and not as mere service spokes on the great utility wheel. We should make sure that the cornerstones of a liberal arts education aren't made subservient to "applied" programs. A university should produce new ideas and transmit lasting values. Because the humanities furnish and expand the mind, because they help people think critically about every aspect of our lives, they're as relevant as any course in the curriculum.
Let's not deem some fields less valuable just because classified ad pages aren't crammed with openings for, say, film curators, sculptors, or moral philosophers. The best practitioners in every profession are the best educated. On the job, they apply research skills, academic rigor, and high ethical standards learned in liberal arts courses. Narrowly educated graduates with only technical training lack the intellectual background to grow in analytical ability. While they may fit the requirements for a first job, they're as underprepared for a career as people with only theoretical knowledge.
For example, a recent survey finds a direct correlation between liberal arts experience and international business success, which rewards broadly educated executives sensitive to other cultures. Leaders in World Wide Web content development prefer designers with liberal arts backgrounds because their creative talents are more important than technical skills. America's newest media mogul, financial news provider Michael Bloomberg, is a former engineer who tells colleagues that technology matters less than a liberal arts background-that context matters more than expertise. The 4,000 companies founded by graduates and faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-a practical university with world-class humanities programs-tend to be knowledge-based, including many software and consulting firms, where a broad educational background is a necessity, not a frill.
To John Cipolla, who heads Northeastern's mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineering department, that's not surprising. He calls the liberal arts essential for his students. "They're basically part of how you educate people well. Engineers are not automatons who never interact with other people," he says. "All students have a life outside" their profession, a life he thinks should include a background in art, music, and literature. Cipolla's own horizons expanded a generation ago at Brown University, where he did graduate work surrounded by humanities students. He says broad exposure to other fields is now more important than ever to engineering majors because they have to communicate better with outsiders. "No longer is the design engineer in one room, sales in another, and maintenance staff in a third," he says. "Engineers interact a lot with people in other fields-we're in close contact with clients, customers, and the community."
Matthews distinguished professor of physics Stephen Reucroft calls knowledge for knowledge's sake vital to progress. "The fundamentals useless to the man on the street 100 years later are the basis of what you're doing today. That's always been the way in science. You have to do basic research without immediate use. How do you know what's useful and what isn't? In England in the last century, Michael Faraday was playing with bits of wire and electrical magnetic fields. It seemed esoteric, and had no intrinsic use," but the eventual result was electricity. The ten-year Northeastern veteran, a particle physicist, finds that "the best scientists I've known know music, literature, art. Intelligent, bright, educated people are the ones who contribute."
Further undercutting the notion of narrowly focused practical training is the fact that many of our students change majors, and most will change careers. This is increasingly true as companies reinvent themselves and jettison people who don't do the same. In journalism, for example, which presumably would gain most-favored-department status under a "practical" plan, some of our best graduates end up in law, teaching, or politics. Sixty percent of Columbia Journalism School's class of 1962, which was chosen as much for professional dedication as for promise, aren't working newspeople today.
A good education helps people decide how to live their lives as well as how to make a living. It sparks intellectual curiosity and breadth. Our graduates daily face issues too important to be left to experts. Now that scientists can replicate sheep and monkeys, the possibility of dittoed humans makes discussion of the ethics of assisted reproduction vital not just to laboratory workers and philosophers but also to parents who might be able to order their children's attributes like pizza toppings. Religion writer Peter Steinfels notes that ethical thinking about human reproduction has lagged behind scientists' accomplishments. Liver transplants, the definition of death, carcinogen regulations-all have a powerful ethical component. What moral lines has President Clinton crossed in using the White House for fundraising? Useful citizens cull their education to draw their conclusions.
Freeland wisely cautions against programs becoming too "market-driven." If we focus more on placement than philosophy, departments could be unjustly condemned for not adhering to workplace realities. The reality is that the workplace often demands all facets of a well-rounded education. A recent example, one of many, of a clash between moral and business imperatives is detailed in internal documents from the Liggett tobacco company. Even while noting the need for safer cigarettes, industry researchers worked to woo smokers with increased nicotine levels. On the journalistic front, Esquire magazine removed a short story scheduled for last month's issue because its advertising department objected to the story's graphic descriptions of gay sex. Should the literary editor resign in protest? In making this dumb marketplace but perhaps smart ethical decision, he might have found philosophy courses more useful than proofreading.
Freeland opens a promising topic of discussion with his call for "practical" research that speaks to people in the field and not just a handful of experts, and for giving service to students and teaching equal status with scholarship. These comments are welcome to departments where practitioners have lost the tenure race for activities more useful to professionals than academics, and they should be pursued to their logical conclusion. Without vitiating traditional standards, our hiring system should be revamped to accommodate practitioners in fields where such qualifications are a teaching plus. Northeastern should adapt a professional track, letting these experts be judged, perhaps on a renewable contract basis, on teaching and professional performance. This would inject new blood and relevant experience and prepare our and other institutions for the inevitable time when professors will be given terms, not lifetime job security.
As we reshape programs, though, we must respect traditional disciplines. Some scholars here may not be involved in practical and service activities vital to other fields. Their work should be valued. If we cut everything that doesn't have a financial payoff, we're not in education but in the education business. The university chorus doesn't pay its way. Neither do the many fine scholarly publications housed here. So what?
In his February speech to Northeastern's faculty and staff, the president urged us to "project even more strongly as an academic institution," noting that as co-op earnings cover an increasingly small part of tuition expenses, "we must compete on the basis of quality, not price." Of course, quality means excellence in every area. It means not sacrificing knowledge to vocation or vocation to knowledge. In every field, the best professionals are the best-educated professionals. The liberal arts give them the tools to keep on learning, to use research skills, academic rigor, and high standards throughout their career. The ability to follow various intellectual streams marks one of the differences between education and training. It informs every student's personal and professional vision. In a world growing ever more complicated, it's a necessity, not a luxury. In this real world, the narrowly trained graduate, not her liberally schooled counterpart, is the one living in an ivory tower of specialization without reflection. Battles between "practical" and "theoretical" education are simplistic evasions of complex problems. Joining these forces is the educated solution.
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."
