The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

Samford University Library
(Photo by Charles Kinnaird)

Last week on NPR's The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor read a poem by Faith Shearin, “Directions to Your College Dorm.” It is a wonderful poem that transported me back to those days of breaking away form home, meeting new friends, and learning of a wider, grander world. It also reminded me of how much I value having gone to a small liberal arts college where I could safely explore the wonders, joys, anxieties, and anticipations of a life moving out into the world. (You can read Shearin’s poem here.)

Thinking back on those days prompted me to repost an essay that I wrote a couple of years ago looking back on my liberal arts education which was published at AMERICAblog in May of 2015:

The Liberal Arts Pathway

It has been over 30 years since I received my first undergraduate degree at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. I have no regrets about the liberal arts foundation of my higher education. While the question “How can I get the best job?” has encouraged much of higher education to become glorified technical schools, to limit one’s education to employability for employability’s sake is to miss out on what education is supposed to be. What’s more, even in the context of employment, it limits ones opportunities down the road.

In my professional life, I have been involved in teaching, social services and healthcare. At each stage of my career path, my liberal arts education helped not only in opening some doors, but also in dealing with life once I walked through them. In today’s environment, with the speed of both technological and social change, one can expect to have to change jobs or to get some retraining for the workforce. A liberal arts education teaches you how to learn, allowing you to adapt to new challenges, requirements and settings.

I double majored in English and Religion & Philosophy, leading to all of the predictable jokes about my supposedly nonexistent job prospects. At the time, I wasn’t worried because I expected to either teach or enter the ministry. While those fields were good for me at first, I began to see that there were other professions that would suit me better. I eventually went back to get further training for my subsequent jobs, but my background in liberal arts was with me every step of the way.

Learning liberally

A view of Samford's Reid Chapel
(Photo by Charles Kinnaird)

I grew up in a small town, which led to my being a bit naïve when I entered college. I was surprised to find that my college professors were intent upon not only teaching me “things,” but also making me struggle with what those “things” meant. Whether it was history, science, literature, music, art or philosophy, everything was grounded in larger questions concerning what it means to be alive in the world. I was introduced to Shakespeare, who wrote more on the human condition than anyone else in the English language, and who more importantly dramatized the conflicts and struggles common to us all. I saw Huck Finn wrestle with the notions of race and slavery; I saw Atticus Finch strive for justice in the segregated South. I came to understand the intricate beauties of poetry, which I began to see as our own “open canon of scripture,” to which we continue to add with each passing year.

There was no condemnation for stepping out of the boundaries. There was just the exhilarating process of examining life, love, joy, sorrow, struggle and friendship. And when what you’re studying is life itself, your education naturally extends beyond the classroom. Some of my best memories from college are the debates and conversations with friends over lunch, about what Professor So-and-so said in class or a project that one of my friends was working on.

It was a wonderful and challenging milieu that fostered an appreciation for others and, in turn, a more progressive consideration of life itself — an outlook that was at once more hopeful than the provincial views I had grown up with and more aware of our past and present social inequities.

Living my education

That being the case, it still took most of my college career to get to the point of being able to think through the concepts I was being exposed to. Many are not developmentally ready to fully profit from their education in their late teens and early twenties. Education is a life-long struggle. For example, I had a conversation with a high school classmate whom I happened to meet years after graduation and who had become a successful banker. He mentioned our high school English teacher and noted that, “We really need what we learned in English class even more when we are in our thirties and forties — much more than we could realize at the time.”

A foundation in the liberal arts forces the student to grapple with the realities and vagaries of life, both before and after they receive their degree. This is especially important in the real world, which doesn’t curve your grades. In the ups and downs I have faced since graduating, I have always had something essential to fall back on; lessons that extended beyond employment and paychecks that could be re-applied to life as it happens.

So by all means, get all the training you can, but make sure you’re learning more than just what’s on the test. Life is more than your first job; educate yourself liberally, and you’ll be prepared to live accordingly.

Samford University Campus (courtesy of Wikipedia)

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

Samford University's Harwell G. Davis Library
(Photo by Charles Kinnaird)

I have spent some time recently reflecting upon the value of my own liberal arts education.  Not long ago I wrote as essay in response to an invitation from the editor of my alma mater's Seasons magazine to share some thoughts about the value of liberal arts study at Samford University. Some portions of the essay were quoted in "On the Value of Liberal Arts Education ‘Understanding How Our World Is Put Together’," by William Nunnelley in the Spring 2015 edition of Seasons.

I presented a version of that same essay on AMERICAblog last week, “Looking back on the benefits of a liberal arts education.” I was pleased with the responses I got from people who echoed the values I place on the liberal arts. My college experience was in an incredibly dynamic learning environment. In the essay I talked about the fact that I came from a small town and was a bit naïve when I entered college. I held to the provincial views I had grown up with, but was challenged toward a more progressive view of the world by the give and take of the discussions that took place about what we were reading. The remarkable thing was that these discussions did not end in the classroom. The conversation continued in hallways and dorm rooms. Some of my best memories are from discussions that took place around a certain table in the school cafeteria where I sat with some of my college friends. I heard things from professors whose courses I was not even taking, because friends were raising points that this professor of that professor had been taking about. I shared my own views, but also had some views challenged by listening to my peers present their views.

Reid Chapel
Samford University (CK) 

We were at a special time in our lives in which we could examine new ideas and concepts, and we were learning from each other as well as from our professors. It was a wonderful and challenging milieu that helped to turn me toward a more progressive view of life and a different outlook upon the world. As I mentioned in the AMERICAblog post, it was “an outlook that was at once more hopeful than the provincial views I had grown up with and more aware of our past and present social inequities.”

Gleaning the Benefits of "University"

Through the years, in the academic world, liberal arts studies have been in and out of fashion. Schools will focus on technical training, then some study or survey will show that employers really want employees with a liberal arts background because of their versatility, their ability to think on their feet, and their communication skills. School recruiters will then focus on liberal arts again until another career track comes along to lure more students. 

One aspect of "university" is that it is a multidisciplinary community of scholars. A liberal arts curriculum is an excellent way to gain the benefits of that multidisciplinary aspect if education. Last year, in an opinion piece in Forbes Magazine, "Why Getting a Liberal Arts College Education Is Not a Mistake," Jessica Kleiman takes issue with what Lazlo Block, the head of hiring for Google, had to say about the kind of training one should have in preparation for the job market. She states that her liberal arts curriculum, 

"fueled my curiosity, strengthened my critical thinking and writing skills and made me knowledgeable on a variety of subjects. And my internships at a magazine, a PR firm and a record company gave me the practical experience to pursue a career in writing and communications. I didn’t feel I made a “mistake” in choosing that path. In fact, I am now an executive vice president of communications at a media company–so I guess that degree came in handy."

Ms. Kleiman ends her column with some good advice: 

"Do what you love, study what interests you, get good internships, connect with as many people as possible who might help you land a job, be willing to work hard and be resourceful – and you’ll be fine, whether or not you know how to build an app or program a computer."

Questions continue to be raised, however, about the value of the liberal arts curriculum. Just last week America the National Catholic Review (a Jesuit Catholic weekly journal) presented an editorial by Brian Daley in response to the University of Notre Dame considering curriculum revisions that would drop philosophy and theology from its core requirement. Daley makes the argument that theology requirements are foundational to Catholic education and therefore should not be dropped.   

I had already read about the proposed changes in a feature in The Washington Post, “Why Notre Dame’s curriculum review raises far-reaching Catholic identity questions.” The Post article opens with the statement, “As the University of Notre Dame conducts its 10-year review of curriculum standards, a proposal to reconsider requiring students to take theology and philosophy courses is raising concerns that such a change could endanger the institution’s Catholic identity.”

I agree with the premise of Daley's editorial and with the concerns raised in The Washington Post piece, yet to me, it is not just about Catholic identity or Christian mission, it is about the concept of "university." As a liberal arts grad myself, I think it is important for every educated person to be schooled in the intellectual disciplines across the board. If an institution is a university, but its students only specialize in limited disciplines, has the "university" aspect of education in fact become undone? I want doctors, lawyers, businessmen and scientist to at least be exposed to literature, philosophy and theology from reliable academic sources rather than from cable TV and popular media.

The Universtiy of Notre Dame
(America Magazine photo)

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A Humorous Post-script

The thing about liberal arts students, especially English majors, perhaps, is that they can wind up working in any number of fields. I happened to gravitate to social services and healthcare. A humorous post-script: One night, not long after I began working night shift as a registered nurse on a heart surgery floor, I was able to aid a patient family member by drawing upon my knowledge as an English major. At around 2:30 in the morning when all was quiet, a young man came up to the nurses’ station with an unusual question: “What was the name of that play where the old king was trying to decide how to divide his inheritance between his daughters?” Who knows what conversations in the patient’s room prompted him to seek out a citation reference?

“That was King Lear, by William Shakespeare” I responded.

“Yes, that’s it! Thanks.” And the young man returned to the patient room where he was visiting.  My young nursing colleagues all turned to me in silence with raised eyebrows.

“What?” I said to them, “You didn’t get that in nursing school?”

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A Liberal Arts Education

I have been invited to write for AMERICAblog, "a journal of news and opinion about US politics, both domestic and foreign, from a progressive point of view." Yesterday was my first entry, with my essay, "Looking back on the benefits of a liberal arts education." 

It’s been over 30 years since I received my first graduate degree, and I have no regrets about the liberal arts foundation of my higher education. While the question “How can I get the best job?” has encouraged much of higher education to become glorified technical schools, to limit one’s education to employability for employability’s sake is to miss out on what education is supposed to be. What’s more, even in the context of employment, it limits one's opportunities down the road...  

You can read the rest of the essay at  http://americablog.com/2015/05/looking-back-on-the-benefits-of-a-liberal-arts-education.html

I'll have a bit more about the liberal arts next week.

The iconic bell tower clock atop Samford University's
Harwell G. Davis Library (photo by Charles Kinnaird)

Are We Becoming a Nation of Day Laborers?

From college profs to the loading docks, we're seeing changes in the workplace

It happened this past Sunday. I was reminded once again by three different news articles of how our political and economic climate favors industry at the expense of the worker. There was a time when unions could see that a worker was justly compensated and given a pension to ensure that he was not just tossed aside when his productive years were over.  There was also a time when laws created safe work environments and protected workers against exploitation. Though those laws have some lingering benefit, there is a rising sentiment on the part of some that regulation is an infraction upon our liberty. Furthermore, industry is always figuring out loopholes and other ways to work around having to treat its workers with the dignity and worth that they deserve.

The first reminder was in the “In Depth” section of the Sunday edition of The Birmingham News. On page 19A there was an article by Alena Semuels that first appeared in The Los Angeles Times describing how workers are sacrificing more as employers push for “more efficiency.” The article gives an example of a worker whose full time job unloading trucks went to a temporary one, in which he does not know from week to week how many hours he will work. The company, I am sure saves money by not having to pay benefits that would go to a full time employee. The article further describes the growing workplace harshness that is being brought about as employers make sure that not a minute of time is wasted on the job. “Businesses are asking employees to work harder without providing the kinds of rewards, financial and psychological, that were once routine.”

After reading that article, I turned to the “Business” section. There on page 1C, above the fold, was the headline, “Belle Foods to reduce full-time workforce.” The local supermarket chain will be hiring 300 part-time workers “in effort to get ‘in line’ with industry standards.”  This trend has been happening for years in every sector as the drive has been to increase profits with each quarterly report. It should have been obvious throughout the first decade of this century as Wall Street profits steadily soared while personal wages remained stagnant.  In fact, many had to work two jobs just to maintain a living wage. All of that was before the economic crisis of 2008 in which thousands of jobs left and will probably not come back. Yet even in the economic downturn, Wall Street investments have continued to show profits.

Even in the non-profit sector, cost cutting measures are being taken that affect the frontline worker more than the executives.  Hospitals are using more part-time employees and schools are using more part-time faculty – which brings me to the third article that was posted by a friend on Facebook.  “The Ever-Shrinking Role of Tenured College Professors” is an article from The Atlantic  which outlines how universities have been decreasing the number of tenured faculty while hiring more adjunct professors. There again, the school can pay someone to teach a class without having to undergo the expense of providing benefits. The author of the article, Jordan Weissmann, closes with these words:

Why should you care? For one, it's damn tough making a living as a freelance professor (full disclosure: my mother was one for many years). The AAUP reports that the median pay for teaching a single course was $3,200 at a public research university, and just $2,250 at a community college. But more broadly, it's a reminder that rising college costs aren't necessarily paying for a better quality (or better compensated) faculty. Moreover, unless the burgeoning ed-tech industry finds ways to remake at least parts of college teaching, this chart shows us how schools will attempt to do more with less resources over time. It's not a particularly pretty picture. 

We live in an era in which too many workers feel that they should just shut up and be thankful for what they have.  Corporate leadership has us under their thumb. “We are the job creators,” they tell us, “and if you vote for anything that raises our taxes or cuts into our nice profits, we just might have to eliminate your job.”  All too often we are even too timid to speak of the common good, a great American democratic ideal which nowadays is spurned by many as sounding too much like “socialism.”  Yet we are seeing an ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else. It is time we called upon that ideal of the common good.

Last fall I posted an essay which looked back to a surprising progressive advocate for the worker back in the 1950s. That progressive voice was coming from Bishop Fulton Sheen over the airwaves of the still new medium of television.  That essay was titled, “Economics as if People Mattered.” You can see that post here.  I am not sure what the way out of our current quagmire is, but I think that holding on to the common good, and doing business as if people mattered will need to be part of the equation.

A view of Wall Street

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"Somebody was wrong, and it wasn’t Jesus"

Wayne Flynt
Samford University Photo

I went back to my alma mater last Saturday to hear Wayne Flynt give a talk at the Samford University Library as part of the Homecoming events. He talked about what life was like when he graduated with the class of 1961. He then read an excerpt from his new memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. The reading he chose related his experience of being challenged and seeing broader possibilities as he went from a provincial homogenous community to experience higher education and as he met people on his college campus from other parts of the world and other walks of life. I was especially taken by one quote in particular:

“It was not my parents, peers, school, or church that began to unshackle me from the chains of racism. It was the Bible. I was only a teenager in high school when the first tensions appeared between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of John Patterson and George Wallace. Somebody was wrong. And it wasn’t Jesus.”

The reason I like that quote is that it resonates very much with my own experience. When I went to Samford University in the mid 1970s, I decided on a double major in English and Religion. One of my friends said at the time, “Not only will you have religion, you will be able to talk about it.” There may have been some truth to that. There has also been a lot of truth in Garrison Keillor’s remarks about English majors on his radio program, A Prairie Home Companion – which is why I ended up making a living as a registered nurse so I could continue to enjoy the fields of English and Religion.

My experience in the two departments became very enlightening and even liberating. The professors in the Religion Department were not the fundamentalist strand of the Baptist faith. "They all," as Wayne Flynt recalls, “held to the neo-orthodox theology as espoused by Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr; they were all theistic evolutionists; none believed in the plenary inspiration of scripture [i.e. inerrant and infallible texts directly dictated by God]. Those Baptists in 1958 were more liberal than half the country is today.” I indeed found that my professors were all caring people who wanted each student to really evaluate the concepts of life and faith in order to understand how it all works in the real world.  So many of us young Baptists had come to college having been steeped in folk religion, and this was our first opportunity to explore the faith more fully.

One particular professor, Karen Joines, was constantly being vilified by certain conservative students as a liberal bent on destroying faith. I found Karen Joines to be quite poetic as well as thought provoking. It occurred to me, since I was studying in both departments, that if Dr. Joines said the same things in the English Department that he was saying in the Religion Department, he would be hailed as a defender of the faith!  My love of literature helped me to see my studies in theology from a different perspective, and I suppose allowed me to be more open to new ideas than some of my conservative colleagues.

For me, it took most of my college career to really get to the point of being able to think through the concepts I was being exposed to (which is why I also believe in life-long learning – so many of us aren’t really at the stage to gain the most from our education while we are in our late teens and early twenties). By the time I finished college, I decided to go on to seminary. It was while I was at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, that I saw a need to truly change my way of thinking.  Like Wayne Flynt during his high school and college days, I was reading the Bible, which I was conditioned to believe as the truth, and seeing a radical contradiction between the words of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets vs. the ethic of my Southern Christian culture.

The ironic thing was that Golden Gate Seminary, even though it was located in California, was more conservative than Samford University back in Alabama. The more I read, however, and the more I saw of society, the more I leaned toward a more liberal take on things. It is certainly possible to be just as fanatical and polemic as a liberal as are certain conservative fundamentalists. The important thing, rather, is to be open to learning. Openness to learning, openness to hearing another point of view, may lead to a conclusion seen as conservative by some. It may lead to a more liberal view. It is possible to be liberal in some things while being conservative in others.  Authenticity is the key.

My personal motto has become, “Honor Wisdom wherever you find it, welcome Beauty whenever it arrives, follow Truth wherever it leads.” I can thank caring instructors who had unswerving integrity for setting me on that path. I can also thank Wayne Flynt for reminding me of my great blessing in his talk last Saturday.

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