The decline of the liberal arts

At his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates defended himself by justifying his life’s work, famously maintaining that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Lamentably, he was found guilty of the charges and ironically sentenced to death via drinking poison hemlock.

Yet human life is undeniably worth examining. So how do we best do so?

The liberal arts curriculum in Western post-secondary education — liberal as in “to be free” and art as in “learned skill” — has historically been perhaps the primary means of examining the human condition and experience, in contrast to vocational, professional or technical fields of study in universities.

Today they comprise the humanities, such as history, philosophy and literature, as well as the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology and political science, with psychology bridging onto the natural sciences.

Focused on the study of people, the liberal arts more than any other field of study develop the “soft skills” of critical thinking, cultural awareness, empathy, problem-solving, creativity, communication, teamwork, leadership and integrity.

According to philosopher Angel Pinillos, “we teach a set of skills that you cannot get anywhere else, that AI has made more rather than less valuable, and that matter not only at work but in every domain of life where careful thought and careful expression have consequences … We have just built machines that produce fluent, confident, plausible text by the ocean — and in doing so we have made the ability to tell good reasoning from bad, true claims from merely well-phrased ones, the single most valuable cognitive skill a person can have.”

Or as historian Nils Gilman put it, “if the goal of a college curriculum is (as it should be) to inculcate oral reasoning and persuasion, ethical analysis and moral judgment, historical and comparative thinking, and the cultivation of taste and discrimination, then we are precisely in the domain of the classical curriculum of the liberal arts.”

Alarmingly, student enrolment across these academic disciplines has declined precipitously the past several decades, with the humanities now in near freefall. In Canada, enrolment in the humanities decreased by 27 per cent during the 10 years between 2013 and 2023. Likewise in the USA, where enrolment in the humanities decreased by 28 per cent during the 10 years between 2012 and 2022. High profile examples include only seven per cent of first-year Harvard University students planning to major in the humanities in 2022, down from nearly 30 per cent during the 1970s.

The myriad contributing factors include the rise of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), the public frustration with the perceived politicization and polarization of what is deemed the left-leaning academy, the turn away from deep reading of demanding classical texts by contemporaries with diminished attention spans due to media technology and the liberal arts simply caricatured as “ivory tower elitism” disconnected from ordinary, everyday reality and producing nothing but under-employed, poetry-spouting baristas.

However, the most significant, perhaps sufficient factor in the collapse of the liberal arts is the commodification of higher education. A commodity is a good or service offered in exchange for something else, usually more money.

No longer devoted to, or seemingly even interested in intellectual exploration in pursuit of insight, enlightenment and wisdom, most of higher education has been reduced to “vocational credentialism,” “return on investment” and “monetizable outputs,” all occurring to make universities “more responsive to market demands.” Literal, quantitative, financial profitability for both graduate and institution has become the primary metric of successful higher education.

Consequently, students now understand themselves as consumers instead of citizens, rightfully preoccupied with their own self-interest instead of understanding themselves as members of a community for which they share responsibility. Perceiving humans as ‘homo economicus,’ both students and administrations increasingly view higher education as a utilitarian means to the end of mere financial enrichment, not deep human flourishing.

Unwittingly and simplistically employing their own version of the Socratic method of dialogue — a co-operative, synergistic method of philosophical inquiry used to stimulate critical thinking, draw out underlying beliefs, expose contradictions and uncover truths — they argue that the unexamined life, when combined with a degree in business administration, is nonetheless highly marketable.

And this is precisely why the liberal arts are so desperately needed today to enlighten, guide and redeem. Tragically, our post-modern, post-truth society is instead forcing them to ingest hemlock.

Dennis Hiebert teaches in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba.