One of my alma maters, the University of Notre Dame, has been slower to abandon some of the traditional elements of classical education than most schools. If you require evidence of this, visit my office and see my diploma which is written in Latin and printed on the traditional sheepskin rather than paper.
Along with courses that we generally associate with the liberal arts, every undergraduate student at the University of Notre Dame was expected to take calculus, and often another quantitative course with the objective of instilling the capacities of inductive quantitative analysis and deductive formal reasoning. Without these, it was believed that one could not begin to understand the full breadth of creation.
What we call the liberal arts today looks very little like the classical definition. The boundaries of the “liberal arts” changed over time and place, while in the United States it started with Latin and Greek. (Modern languages were considered vulgar and not sufficient for one who is truly educated.) This archaic restriction gave way over time. As it did so, classical literature was slowly replaced by English literature and then American literature was added. Logic declined as a formal subject and courses in history often found their way in.
At the same time, math and the sciences ascended as fields of study, valued for other reasons. It became possible for calculus to be studied with only the intention of building a bridge (and eventually a skyscraper, then a rocket ship, then a complicated financial product). These new uses allowed these disciplines to be pulled into the realm of the applied, vocational, non-liberal arts.
While there is little way to verify it, I suspect that many of the humanities faculties were happy to see these courses fade from liberal education because they drew on such a different style of knowledge and understanding. Countless professors felt that they could understand their own discipline without them, so why bother requiring them.
This process has led to our current state. From an academic perspective, the term “liberal arts” is now generally perceived as interchangeable with “the humanities.” I suspect that this is at least present behind the scenes at Covenant College. In the week prior to writing this, I have heard one member of the faculty define the traditional liberal arts as English, History and Art and read where another wrote that “subjects such as English and Philosophy have always been included [in the liberal arts].” One could also look at the plethora of humanities courses in contrast with the relative absence of quantitative courses in Covenant’s core.
Is this an issue? I suspect that it is. If a liberal education is one that expands the mind by drawing on an array of disciplines, our current conception of the liberal arts threatens the very objective of what we are pursuing. The narrow definition of the liberal arts as non-vocational humanities courses must be tempered, if not abandoned altogether. We should also embrace that the ideals of liberal arts education are absolutely compatible with majoring in math (whose membership in the liberal arts long precedes that of English), but also engineering, computer science, business and education. Likewise, we should embrace the reality that courses in those fields add greatly to our broader understanding of the world.
Let me pause to remind you that I am not making a case against any of the courses of study that we have included in our contemporary, muddled definition of the liberal arts. Instead, I am arguing that those other disciplines, which have been held in the periphery of our approach to liberal education (and often derided from within) must be invited back in and given their appropriate weight.
The skills instilled through the study of the humanities are essential, but if we are to understand the factors that lead to academic pressures that we face, we must also draw deeply from disciplines such as economics, sociology and computer science to help us understand how the careerist pressures that academic institutions face are largely rooted in the institutions from which they derive their authority and funding, and how what students learn is shaped by the technological structures (whether they be Canvas or generative AI) that are present in their lives.
What am I suggesting? Right now I simply believe that our conversation would be more productive if we appreciated the tradition of the liberal arts but ceased using it to describe what we do. By so doing, we might have a better chance of escaping a too narrowly drawn approach to Christian higher education.
Much of the world has a negative reaction to the term “liberal arts” anyway. Rather than fight a battle about a term that external constituencies dislike, and that may be restricting the scope of our educational vision, the faculty should take on the task of carefully narrating the purpose and structure of our vision (a task that is under way).
Students, as we the faculty work this narration out, my recommendation to you is to take a broad array of classes, pick up a second major or a minor, or take a class that is way outside of your comfort zone. I pray that your experience may be like mine and that you’ll find yourself changed in the process. And don’t be afraid to ask what you can do with what you learn, because our educational process can widen the scope of your vision for its usefulness wider than you previously imagined.