Anxiety about the state of the "liberal arts" is nothing new. Henry Adams, teaching history at Harvard in the 1870's, is said to have been so puzzled by his students’ indifference to the subject matter that he finally asked his class why they were there. One young man volunteered an answer: "Because a Harvard degree means money to me on the Chicago Stock Exchange." Adams was so disgusted that he sent the class home, guaranteeing them gentlemen’s C’s if they never darkened his door again.

This event, if it is not apocryphal, occurred in the midst of socioeconomic, technological, and curricular change that in interesting ways parallels our own moment. The Civil War and the decades after had produced a new bourgeoisie, eager to have access to the cultural capital associated with prestige educations such as those offered at Harvard–a "liberal arts" education which had long been a luxury for sons of the hereditary leisure classes. Along with the rise of this new educational leisure class came revolutions in the forces of production, distribution, and communication: the coalescing of an integrated national transportation system (at least East of the Mississippi) in the form of railroads; the spread of long-distance communication via the telegraph; and the growth of new industrial aggregates, such as mail-order merchandising, centralized manufacturing and warehousing of everyday goods: in short, the evolution of a "market society" on a national scale.

Ironically, the appetites of the new bourgeoisie for prestige higher education eventually led to changes in the way that very education was structured. Under the leadership of Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard abandoned its integrated Classical curriculum in the 1870's and moved to a new "elective" system which allowed students to assemble a degree piecemeal, according to their own taste and interests (within limits, of course). One of the reasons for this: to accommodate increasing demand for "practical" degrees, including majors in business. Other trends that accompanied or flowed from these changes: The teaching staff became professionalized (professors less and less frequently came from the ranks of the dilettante rich, who like Adams could afford to teach for practically nothing, and therefore were more difficult to fire). There was a shift from studies in Greek and Latin to studies conducted in "modern languages," including American English. And, perhaps inevitably, there was an increased emphasis on education as form of economic rather than cultural capital.

It’s useful at this point to go back to some basic definitions and conceptions implicit in–or perhaps masked by–the phrase "the liberal arts." The American Heritage Dictionary defines "liberal arts" as follows:

Academic disciplines, such as languages, history, philosophy, and abstract science, that are presumed to develop general intellectual ability and judgment and provide information of a general cultural concern, as distinguished from more narrowly practical training, as for a profession.

While this notion of the "liberal arts" may seem inconsistent with the current status of many of these disciplines as preprofessional undergraduate "majors," it’s also noteworthy that the disciplines listed in this definition are themselves not identical with the original disciplinary "set" that comprised the liberal arts. The medieval university conceived the "liberal arts" as consisting of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric); and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic, and music). One might note that the study of such now-familiar "liberal arts" studies as literature, history, sociology, and perhaps even psychology is either absent or only remotely implicit in this disciplinary array–and that many of those listed are now considered the special province of rather arcane specialties rather than studies useful to the development "of general intellectual ability and judgment."

I review this scenario, and these definitions, only to suggest that we’ve been here before–or rather, that we’ve never left. The changes occurring at Harvard and elsewhere during the 1870's and 1880's suggest that the shift away from the dictionary definition of the "liberal arts" has been always and already a feature of the American university, and not a recent trend; and that in fact even before the 1870's there had already been a departure from the structure of the "liberal arts" as it originated in the great medieval universities. For at least a century now, the interests of "liberal arts education," with its emphasis on the enculturation and civic empowerment of the person, have existed in tandem and in tension with ongoing economic, social, and technological changes that continually reshape the identity and mission of the institution–the University–in which the practice of the liberal arts is predominantly housed. But a reshaping of the "liberal arts" themselves has been a constant feature as well, as the mission of "developing general intellectual ability and judgment" and conveying "information of a general cultural concern" has migrated from one discipline to another, and even energized the development of new disciplines.

Pedagogy, too has changed–from the prepared lecture of Adams’ day to the current emphasis on discussion and (more recently) small-group collaboration in learning. Rules of inquiry in the disciplines have been modified, challenged, and modified again as different waves of intellectual critique have flooded through the academy, leaving new intellectual deposits in their wake. What has remained constant is the notion that the "liberal arts," however else they might be constructed or situated, represent an arena of study that is prior to, independent of, and in some ways above, knowledge and training of an applied, practical, or professional nature.

Certainly this distinctive character of the "liberal arts" is threatened by the increased pressure on the educational system generally to produce not "good citizens" but rather "good workers," complete with desired skill sets for corporate enterprise. The question facing us, I think, is whether the emerging technologies and other "educational delivery systems" of the dot.com age are in and of themselves hostile to this distinctive character, or whether they can be used to reconfigure the "liberal arts," both in disciplinary and pedagogical terms, in a way that will preserve their essential difference from forms of "more narrowly practical training," including "professional" ones.

As I see it, the greatest danger comes not from any particular "delivery system" for education, but from the tendency to finesse this distinction between the missions of the liberal arts and other, more "practical" kinds of training. Certainly both kinds of learning go on in the University as it is currently constituted. But the distinction between the two is rhetorically blurred in most undergraduate curricula–or worse, the "liberal arts" are represented in a kind of service role to professional training, as a prerequisite "general education" set concentrated in the freshman and sophomore years.

This is an issue that is different from the question of educational delivery, but is affected by such considerations as cost and access, as universities decide how to direct resources to different sectors of the curriculum and to different student populations. As long as the liberal arts are rhetorically constructed as an integral but subservient element of professional or "practical" training rather than the other way around, they will be starved for the resources–technological or otherwise–which will enable them to pursue their distinctive but always evolving mission.