The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
“We shall call those studies liberal which are worthy of a free man; those studies by which we attain and practise virtue and wisdom; that education which calls forth, trains, and develops those highest gifts of body and of mind, and which are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue only.” –Vergerius, On Manners and Studies
Following this statement, the medieval Italian statesman and educational philosopher Vergerius went on to detail what studies he believed are “liberal” and “worthy of a free man.” They included history, moral philosophy, eloquence, letters, gymnastics, music, logic, rhetoric, poetry, and mathematics. These “liberal studies” had defined what a university education is since the era of the ancient Greeks, and they would continue to do so, for the most part, into the near future. Vergerius outlined how receiving a liberal education is an essential part of acquiring and developing virtue and wisdom.
However, it is important to note the “for the most part” aspect of how these disciplines define university education, because throughout the past two centuries, liberal education has been in decline (replaced by vocational education and single-subject education) and seen as increasingly irrelevant in modern society. Education nowadays is seen as nothing more than a means to acquire a good job. I believe that although Princeton places some value on the importance of a liberal studies education and learning for the sake of learning, it too has been affected by the decline in liberal education and the rise of a consumerist view of the university as an institution, and these are concerns that should be addressed if liberal education is to survive.
Princeton, like many American universities, offers a curriculum that attempts to combine liberal studies with single-subject education. Princeton’s distribution requirements ensure that students receive at least some breadth among the liberal studies and various ways of knowing, though the number of requirements is not large. Furthermore, distribution requirements are much more limited for engineering students, and the nature of departmental requirements for most majors means that in a student’s third and fourth years, most or all classes they’ll take are exclusively from a single department—the department they’re majoring in. Furthermore, the option to “P/D/F” distribution requirements defeats the purpose of having such requirements and treats the distribution requirements as nothing more than a checklist that needs to be completed. The mixture of liberal studies and single-subject education that Princeton believes it has is a facade, and Princeton must pick which approach it prefers.
Admittedly, the liberal studies situation could be worse. At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the concept of an education based around the liberal studies doesn’t exist. Instead, when high school students apply, they pick a major, and if they’re accepted and decide to attend, the classes they’ll take for the next three to four years are all from a single department. Having students focus on a single subject allows them to become experts in their field, but they miss out on the benefits that liberal studies could provide them: wisdom in multiple disciplines and virtue. The UK has A levels, but like AP classes in the United States, high school classes taught at a college level are different from college classes. Princeton’s retention of some aspects of liberal studies should be commended, but the liberal studies aspect is insufficient, compared to what the university may think.
A key question arises from the modern lack of emphasis on a liberal education: why? Why have we abandoned the concept of a liberal education? I believe that the lack of emphasis on the liberal studies, especially at Oxford and Cambridge but also at American universities such as Princeton and Harvard, is due to the modern consumerist view of education, which stipulates that education is merely a means to acquiring a “good job,” whatever that means. Instead of learning about multiple disciplines and doing so for the sake of learning, students learn about a single discipline (or, in the case of Princeton with its distribution requirements, a single discipline with a sprinkling of liberal studies) and do so in order to become skilled at that discipline in the hope of getting a job in that field.
In an essay entitled “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, expressed my sentiment on the consumerist view of education and how it is most responsible for the decline in liberal studies education. Edmundson spent much of the first page of his essay describing his personal experiences with course evaluations, how they are one of many symptoms of consumerism’s steady takeover of higher education, and how consumerism is inherently at odds with liberal education. Many of the course evaluations for Edmundson’s Freud class featured comments about Edmundson’s personality as a teacher (his irony and jokes), as well as how certain topics within the class were exciting (such as the Oedipus complex). At Princeton, I’ve had to do course evaluations for my first-year fall semester classes, and something I noticed among my peers was that many of them commented on our professors’ personalities or how lenient in grading they are—just as Edmundson described. In an ideal world where knowledge for the sake of knowledge is valued more than consumerism, course evaluations would instead focus on topics that were taught and express appreciation for the opportunity to learn for the sake of learning.
Consumerism remains at odds with liberal studies and learning for the sake of learning to this day; though Edmundson’s essay was written decades ago, the problems plaguing higher education that he described persist, as I’ve seen in my recent experiences at Princeton. As mentioned above, Princeton has some liberal studies education requirements—its distribution requirements—but the P/D/F option in addition to course evaluations defeat the purpose of such requirements. Students can either P/D/F a class—and given that the bar to earn a C-range grade for most classes at Princeton is very low they don’t have to do the assignments or attempt to learn—or they can look at a course evaluation to determine which classes are taught by professors who are lenient graders or have “fun” personalities.
To conclude, it is my belief that while Princeton attempts to incorporate liberal education for its undergraduates, its efforts are insufficient and, as in most American universities, corrupted by consumerism. This state of affairs has led to an emphasis on single-subject disciplines that are illiberal but economically valuable instead of a well-rounded, liberal education. There are still opportunities for Princeton to revise its curriculum and save liberal education, but it will take time and effort to overcome American consumerism.
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