Musings on the Liberal Arts: Rest in Peace?

I've been grieving lately, and only now realize the process. For a good while there has been a trend in higher education away from the pursuit of wisdom and toward the fast-track to jobs. No one would doubt the importance of college for success in careers, and certainly those with vested interests -- taxpayers, donors, and parents, as a start -- deserve to see "results." But the myopic fascination with speed and precision, technical perfection and immediate relevance, costs and benefits, distorts the central importance of the life of learning itself. Despite the common knowledge that a broad-based education in the arts and sciences best prepares one for the world of work and living, today's colleges and universities are racing toward a glorious goal of streamlined trade schools. There is no room, we are told, for the luxuries of "irrelevant" courses in history, philosophy, astronomy, or art. These courses merely slow down the productive process, and their professors simply cost us too much.

C. S. Lewis once discussed, in an essay on "Learning in Times of War," the importance of the pursuit of knowledge and beauty for their own sake and for God's sake. Speaking to students at Oxford just after the start of World War II, he urged them to focus on their current vocation, their present "calling," and to diligently oppose the enemies of learning -- excitement, frustration, and fear. Too often, he says, students and faculty alike are drawn away from study by the distractions of urgent events, job preparations, insecurities, and the allure of the novel. How much more so today with immediate diversions at every finger. And how very strange, and sad, that those whose central mission is to advance learning and wisdom are among the most prolific models of their own failures.