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Article Excerpt
Because liberal arts colleges are "in certain respects more diverse than any other type of higher education institution," (1) and because their nature, history, generally shared characteristics, even their very number, are so often a matter of contention, I have learned over the years the wisdom, when attempting to say something about them, of beginning with a preliminary exercise in intellectual throat-clearing. Hence I offer these rather basic introductory stipulations.
The first concerns the nature of such colleges and the history of the category of institutions to which they belong. Some of our liberal arts colleges began their careers as secondary schools of one sort or another (Williams College is one such example), and it is not only for Europeans that the term "college" has tended willy-nilly to evoke the image of an institution of secondary education. "The college will disappear, in fact, if not in name," David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, confidently predicted a century ago. "The best," he added, "will become universities, the others will return to their place as academies"--return, that is, to being advanced-level secondary schools. (2)
But even when they did in fact originate as schools, once they became colleges such institutions did not trace their lineage back to any sort of academy for secondary education. Their institutional forebears, instead, were the constituent colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and, more precisely, beyond them the single-college universities that had appeared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Spain, Scotland, and Ireland. Those institutions, unlike the Oxbridge (or, for that matter, the medieval Parisian) colleges, though still colleges were also something different in that they were granted the crucial and distinctive prerogative attached to university status: namely, that of granting degrees. Siguenza in Spain, accorded that prerogative in 1489, was a classic example. So, too, later on, was Trinity College, Dublin-or Dublin University, as it was sometimes called, or, better, and with greater legal and institutional precision, the University of Trinity College, Dublin. (3)
The sharp distinction between "college" and "university" that people like President Jordan instinctively advanced, and that we today all too often assume, was something, in fact, of a late-nineteenth-century American innovation. It was spawned by the enormous contemporary admiration for the German research university and by the concomitant attempt at places like Johns Hopkins, Clark, the Catholic University of America, Cornell, Chicago, and Stanford to replicate its particular characteristics on American soil. That distinction has not always been a helpful one. It has tended to promote the idea that the free-standing, residential liberal arts college is something less than the modern American university rather than something other than that. And it has encouraged the colleges themselves to permit others to define them in terms of what they lack (great research libraries and laboratories, graduate and professional schools, for example) rather than in terms of what they proudly possess: a firm, unwavering, and undistracted commitment to bringing to the education of undergraduates the full resources proper to a small university. For that, in effect, is what they are: small college-universities devoted exclusively (or almost exclusively) to the teaching of undergraduates. And that fact is directly pertinent to the nature of the contribution they make to the well-being of the humanities in American higher education.
The second stipulation concerns the matter of institutional diversity, even within the traditional category of liberal arts colleges. For that factor shapes, conditions, and qualifies the nature of the collegiate contribution to the overall health of humanistic studies. The definition of the American college given above, while it emphasizes undergraduate teaching, says nothing about what, precisely, is being taught. In particular, it says nothing about the liberal arts (arts and sciences) let alone the humanities--and for very good reason. It turns out that many of the colleges traditionally labeled or self-styled as liberal arts colleges award less than half of their degrees in liberal arts/arts and sciences (as opposed to vocational or preprofessional subjects). These are the institutions now categorized in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (2000 edition) as Bac-calaureate Colleges--General. (That category overlaps with or bears a reasonably close relation to the category designated in earlier editions either as Liberal Arts II or as Baccalaureate Colleges II. (4)) And given the fact that the bulk of their students are not majoring in liberal arts subjects, the Baccalaureate Colleges--General designation more accurately describes the type of education in which these colleges are predominantly engaged than does any sort of collegiate label invoking the liberal arts.
Nor does that particular manifestation of diversity within the group of institutions lumped together traditionally as liberal arts colleges exhaust their variety. Diversity among them, in fact, extends further and well beyond the normal distinctions between private and publicly controlled, single-sex and coeducational, non-sectarian and religiously affiliated, historically black institutions and the rest. It reflects also differences in the degree of racial and ethnic diversity in their student bodies, differences in curricular structure and favored pedagogic mode, differences in the degree to which their faculties are committed to and actually engaged in scholarly research and writing, and differences in the level of academic preparation characteristic of the students they admit. This last differential is linked further with markedly varying levels of selectivity in the admissions process, as well as with other differences flowing from the highly un-even distribution of financial resources across the entire universe of colleges.
Of the several hundred institutions traditionally viewed as constituting the universe of liberal arts colleges, fewer than fifty fall into the favored group of so-called "medallion institutions," which regularly attract a surplus of well-qualified applicants and have no difficulty at all in peopling their freshman classes with students who are academically well-prepared. By far the larger group of colleges, however, finds itself hard-pressed to fill classes with students who are not only adequately qualified but also capable of paying the standard tuition rates. Such institutions operate, in effect, an open (or quasi-open) admissions system and are condemned, even then, to an annual exercise of juggling anxiously the bleak equations of tuition pricing and tuition discounting. (5) Even within the highly favored medallion group, the colleges truly able to operate in unqualified fashion on the basis of both need-blind admission and need-based financial aid amount to no more than a handful. Taking the collegiate sector as a whole, it is a dramatic testimony to the unevenness in the financial resources at their disposal that the most affluent of the colleges are able to spend no less than five times as much per student as can their less well-endowed collegiate brethren. (6)
The third stipulation, if we are to speak intelligibly about our liberal arts colleges and the place the humanities enjoy within them, is that we have to be clear at the outset, not only about matters pertaining to their nature, history, and diversity, but also, and more fundamentally, about their very number. In this respect, the story across the past half century has been one of unquestionable decline. As recently as the mid-1950s the institutions traditionally classified (or self-styled) as liberal arts colleges constituted about 40 percent of the total number of institutions of higher education. By the early 1970s, however, they had come to account for no more than a quarter of all institutions. Over the subsequent years the shrinkage has continued, if at a slower pace, and the decline involved has not simply been proportionate to the size overall of the higher educational institutional universe. Between 1967 and 1990, in fact, some 167 private four-year colleges ceased to exist, whether by merger with other institutions or by outright closure. (7) Moreover, the predominance at many of those remaining of vocational and preprofessional curricular offerings suggested the propriety (indeed, the necessity) of whittling down still further the number of those that could lay undeniable claim to the title of "liberal arts college."
Over a decade ago, David Breneman, an expert in educational policy and economics, pointed out that in terms of their prevailing curricular focus a majority of the 637 colleges listed in the 1994 Carnegie Classifications did not really appear...
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