Higher Education in America:

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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

A Liberal Education: Building from the Past

Higher education, as an institution of the American educational system, has
experienced many different changes over the last two hundred and fifty years, and
many educational advocates look to the past to influence and inform American higher
education’s future. John Henry Newman, Andrew Delbanco, and Helen Horowitz, a
nineteenth-century scholarly Cardinal, a college professor writing in the present, and a
modern-day historian, respectively, examine what a “liberal arts education,” a term
commonly used today to describe a core curriculum for higher education, includes.
Though these authors recognize the preponderance of vocational training geared
toward predetermined career paths, they advocate the importance of general
undergraduate training to prepare a student for any career. Based on the ideal of a
strong liberal education, Newman and Delbanco advocate undergraduate life as a
pursuit of pure knowledge and a period of discovery and learning, and they each
convey the importance of undergraduate study in many areas outside one’s intended
major. Horowitz, on the other hand, examines the cultural elements of collegiate
education, breaking down college social constructs into four main groups. Together,
these authors develop an all-encompassing ideal for college life, both academically and
socially: for Newman and Delbanco, undergraduate education becomes a means of
preparation not just for work after college, but for life after college as well; even though
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

college students’ life, activities, and academic interests have grown and changed,
students have always understood the importance of fulfilling the college experience.
Newman’s The Idea of a University (edition published 1976; originally published
1852) examines the ideal of higher education and compares vocational training to the
general liberal arts experience. This liberal arts experience, as Newman defines it,
encompasses “the whole circle” of education: where students learn across all disciplines
and develop an established body of knowledge and skills, like writing, analysis, and
deep thought, applicable to many different disciplines.1 Vocational training, on the
other hand, teaches technical skills, instantly applicable and accessible to a very specific
field. Working at a Catholic institution of higher learning, Newman’s approach is
highly atypical (at least for his time), though Newman understands how important a
liberal education can be, since it prepares a student for the challenges outside of a
technical interview or beyond the scope of a specific problem. Additionally, Newman
advocates a strong liberal education paradigm: that “knowledge is capable of being its
own end”; to the Cardinal, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is more important at the
undergraduate level than specific training toward a career, since liberal knowledge
prepares a student for any career. (97) Furthermore, a student can learn vocational skills
in a relatively short amount of time; liberal arts, on the other hand, teaches transferrable
skills that don’t lock a student into a particular area of knowledge. Advocating liberal
1 John Henry Newman, The Idea of the University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 95.
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

education, Newman believes that undergraduates should study how to learn, interact,
and communicate—as well as a core of diverse academic disciplines—to prepare for life
after classes and the lifelong learning that follows.
Andrew Delbanco, similarly, champions liberal education as a modern day
preparation for any career. In his recently published book College: What It Was, Is, and
Should Be (2012), he makes the provocative claim that the meaning and purpose of
college has not drastically changed over the last two centuries. Delbanco argues that
students of the liberal arts—the relatively few students whose education pivots on pure
knowledge rather than vocational instruction—do not come to college simply to prepare
for a career. Instead, these students use college, and the college experience, to learn
about the world and discover what they want to pursue: quoting another Columbia
professor, Mark Lilla, Delbanco explains that “[college] students have convinced [Lilla]
that they are far less interested in getting what they want than in figuring out just what
it is that’s worth wanting.”2 Delbanco, a Columbia professor, understands that
undergraduate life extends well beyond the simple academic world, and he advocates
for a core liberal arts curriculum, that same all-encompassing academic program
teaching skills and broader knowledge across all subjects, based on his experience with
Columbia students. Outside the classroom, students participate in all sorts of

2 Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2012), 33.
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

extracurricular passions, including outdoor and athletic pursuits, social societies, and
academic interests and research; thus, undergraduate development can (and should)
come in many other ways than academic training for a specified career. With the goal of
general academic development in mind, Delbanco understands that such a curriculum
exposing students to knowledge for the sake of knowledge will engage students
intellectually and help them find their passions. In his first chapter, Delbanco shifts his
focus, moving toward an ultimate goal of democratized, highly available education;
using several statistics correlating wealth and college attendance, he argues that an
educated populace can serve to heighten and proliferate American prosperity. To
Delbanco, college should be more than just vocational training—college should be a
chance to learn one’s passions, heighten one’s knowledge—what Delbanco frames
through John Henry Newman’s understanding of knowledge for knowledge’s sake—
and to simply enjoy one’s life.
These two advocates of liberal education—one in the 1850s, another in the 2010s
—understand that the basic goals and aims of undergraduate education should not
fundamentally change over time, and, despite the ever-advancing complexity of the
changing world, students still need the basic set of skills and knowledge that empowers
them to excel in any environment. For each of these men, moving education forward
isn’t preparing students for new and different careers; rather, moving education forward
should include the new and different types of knowledge necessary for the modern
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

world. Newman envisioned a world with ever-expanding research opportunity and
knowledge, and he felt that a liberal arts degree would prepare any student for
challenges in the future of academic research. For undergraduates, a liberal arts
curriculum complements specific knowledge to give students the skills and exposure
they need along with the knowledge they crave; for Newman and Delbanco, this same
path pursued for centuries—albeit with different specific knowledge as the world
advances—best serves higher education in today’s modern climate.
Though Newman and Delbanco primarily focus on the academic advantages of a liberal
arts education, Helen Horowitz’s Campus Life: Undergraduate Culture from the End of the
Eighteenth Century to the Present (1987) focuses on the changing environment of college
social life, another area of significant flux over the last two centuries. Horowitz’s
argument breaks down college students into four simple categories of social life: the
“college men,” who fought faculty and strove for connections and school status over
academic achievements; the “outsiders,” who worked for top grades and embraced the
academic environment; the “rebels,” who bucked established campus culture starting
with the protests of the 1960s; and the “new outsiders,” who revived academic
competition and sought top marks across the board in recent years. These four groups
have defined the changing landscape of American campus culture, and their rise and
fall corresponds to the state of American cultural consciousness as it relates to the
liberal arts education.
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

Horowitz’ four categories all relate to the undergraduate student’s relationship to
the faculty: from the college men, locked in war against faculty over school policies, to
the new outsiders, driving performance and academic success forward, every group of
undergraduates pivots on the relative importance of schoolwork to the overall college
experience. The college men, a group formed against the strict faculty across American
higher education (faculty who, most often, tried to teach a core liberal arts curriculum to
students), sought to use their connections and influence, coupled with the brand name
of a fresh college degree, to achieve success.3 Over time, the balance of power has
shifted: the new outsiders have recently begun to overpower college men and drive
success in American universities, impressing employers (and achieving in the
workplace) with their academic skills acquired as undergraduates. Recently, the new
outsiders have caused “fraternities and sororities [(traditionally “college men”
organizations)] [to add] the rhetoric of academic excellence and future connections.”
(72) The shifting importance of academics has now pivoted back toward the idea of
academic excellence, and the debate about liberal education has begun to churn again.
According to Horowitz, academics are becoming far more important once more, and the
idea of a liberal education has returned.

3 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Culture from the
End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 114.
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Matt Gardner

Writing 5: Campus Life

10/5/15

Thus, the overall question of the state of higher education remains: in today’s
academically focused environment, where students can focus and receive specific
training in nearly every field of study, does liberal education make sense? According to
Delbanco, Newman, and Horowitz, it certainly does; since liberal education prepares a
student for nearly anything, this type of knowledge can stand the test of time. As
research continues to expand, campus culture continues to adapt, and new careers rise,
the skills a liberal education teaches will apply for nearly any work experience.
Furthermore—since a liberal arts student knows how to learn, study, and write—
technical skills can be taught quickly. Overall, as an educational system, the ideal of
liberal education seeks to be flexible and adaptive in the modern world, just as it was
several hundred years ago; using the past to inform the future, these authors
understand how the right type of education will garner a student success later in life.

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