How are professors hired or fired? It’s based on their knowledge productivity—this is how the idea of the “knowledge worker” and “knowledge economy” emerges. This is the thing that really interests me as a philosopher: that the gold standard, the epistemic norm is expertise; it’s no longer wisdom or something broader that everyone is thought to need. The university becomes balkanized into completely siloed forms of expertise
A conversation with Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg
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“The tragedy of the contemporary academy,” wrote Jennifer Frey in a New York Times op-ed this July, “is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.” Frey, a philosophy professor and former dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, was speaking from direct experience: though she had built up a vibrant classical liberal arts college at Tulsa, with surging student enrollment and robust philanthropic support, the university administration decided to “go in a different direction,” discontinuing the college’s signature small-seminar class format and eliminating critical staff positions (including hers).
On September 29th, Frey joined Anastasia Berg, Point editor and UC Irvine philosophy professor, to discuss the hostilities and challenges liberal education faces today. What is it that we’re seeking to defend by means of humanistic study? And in an age of decreasing literacy and the rapid creep of artificial intelligence into education, can this fight be anything but a losing battle?
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Anastasia Berg: I want to start by trying to understand how we got to inhabit the educational-institutional situation that we do now. When we say “the humanities” today, in the American context, we’re referring, however obliquely, to two things. First, to a set of specific specialized disciplines—English literature and languages, philosophy and classics, sometimes history. But at the same time, what also refer by the “humanities” or “liberal arts” to something a little murkier—it’s that something that makes the American college experience unique compared to, say, European models of higher education. In addition to their major or concentration requirements, American college students must meet an independent set of requirements in other fields. This takes the form of anything from the University of Chicago’s Common Core to the general-education requirements of the large public universities. Jen, could you tell us a little bit about how we got to this place, and how you see the relationship between these two different things we’re talking about when we say “liberal arts” or “humanities”?
Jennifer Frey: I could talk all night about the history of higher education in the U.S, but I’ll just give you a really quick-and-dirty version of what happened. In the late seventeenth century, you started to have institutions of higher education in the United States, and they were all small private liberal arts colleges. All these institutions were very intentionally established to be about what the Germans would call Bildung, or what the Greeks would call paideia — they were about the formation of leaders. The course of study was “liberal” in the sense that it wasn’t for the sake of some specific trade or line of work, but it was really about forming you into a free person and citizen. Non-accidentally, in these institutions, the capstone senior courses, which were taught by the university president, were in moral philosophy or moral theology. And the course of study was entirely prescribed: learning classic languages—your Greek and Latin, obviously—as well as classic literature, history, philosophy.
There is a sea change in higher education in the nineteenth century. To make a long and complicated story short, the federal government gets involved with land-grant universities. But the more fundamental change is that we decided that we needed to be like the Germans, taking the German research university as a model. And from there things start to switch: the lecture becomes the primary modality of learning—so you sit quietly and listen to your professor profess about specialized disciplinary knowledge. Knowledge becomes the thing that the university is about, rather than character formation, which had been the goal of liberal education. Around the same time, knowledge gets balkanized into specialized departments while general education becomes mostly elective. This started with Harvard——and everybody wants to be like Harvard, so it just kind of proliferated from there. The idea was that the students’ passions and interests should be determinative, and you just study what you want, whatever floats your boat.
By the time you get to the twentieth century, you have things like the Higher Education Act of 1965, where the state really gets involved in higher education. And you also have an academic landscape in which hyper-specialization becomes the norm. If you look at what happens to general education —undergraduate education outside of disciplinary knowledge — instruction gets, by and large, transferred over to graduate students, to nontenured professors or adjuncts a variety of kinds. For universities in particular, it’s an afterthought. After all, what’s really going to move you up in the rankings and the Carnegie system? It’s research dollars, research outputs. How are professors hired or fired? It’s based on their knowledge productivity—this is how the idea of the “knowledge worker” and “knowledge economy” emerges. This is the thing that really interests me as a philosopher: that the gold standard, the epistemic norm is expertise; it’s no longer wisdom or something broader that everyone is thought to need. The university becomes balkanized into completely siloed forms of expertise. If you’re an academic, that’s the university in which you live and move and make your make your living.
And, as a philosopher, I think that that situation hasn’t been great for philosophy. It’s unclear why more than a very small minority will need expertise in metaphysics or the things that philosophers work on. Only about 7 percent of incoming freshmen at Harvard will report planning to major in any humanities, any single one of them.1 How can that be? Well, I think a lot of it obviously comes down to the fact that we are told that education is for work. If education is for career, philosophy looks like a bad bet. (Actually, empirically, it’s not that bad, but prima facie, it looks like a bad bet.) And so when higher education is no longer, in any meaningful sense, liberal, it’s not the sort of education that everyone needs to be a free person and citizen. It’s reduced to a credential that you need, or a set of skills that you need to get a high-paying job.
It’s really no surprise that the humanities are suffering in that context. I believe that they will continue to suffer until that sort of status quo is disrupted somehow. So, if I had to put a thesis on the table for us to discuss it would be that the crisis of the humanities cannot be solved until general education is fixed, and general education should be unapologetically liberal in the strong sense of an education that befits a free person and citizen. We can talk about what that sort of education might entail, but I think we need to go back to the origins of that way of speaking—that there was a difference between a liberal and a servile education. And what marked off a liberal education was that it’s an education that is not yoked to some specific trade or line of work but just makes you free.
Anastasia Berg: How much of that old model of liberal arts should we aim to preserve? And how much of it can we realistically preserve today?
Jennifer Frey: That’s a hard question to answer, but let me just say this. When we think about general education, it’s what we think everyone in an institution of higher education needs to study. Whatever it is that we come up with there, we need to be asking: What is it that is going to make them wise? “Higher” education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person. And to me that means that you need to be searching for something more than expertise; you need to be searching for wisdom.
Why do you need to be searching for that? Well, because you have to live when you graduate, right? You have to make choices. You have to be a person. And it turns out that systematic, serious reflection on what it means to be a human person and a citizen, and to live right as a tiny thing in the vast cosmos, is something that you need to have a real grip on. I have my own very particular ideas about what course of study might help you with that, but I think, just as a framing mechanism, we need to be thinking in that way about higher education. And we are absolutely not thinking in that way.
I can tell you how most universities are thinking when it comes to general education. Every balkanized department is just thinking how they can benefit from whatever the system is. Nobody’s actually thinking about the student, because nobody’s incentivized to think about the student. And, quite frankly, nobody even really knows how to think about the student. The student is just an abstract unit. When we think about general education, we need to be thinking about the student. And what is it that we actually think the student needs to know? I would suggest the student doesn’t need to know how to do scholarship in any of these fields; they don’t need to know how to publish or be up on the latest literature or analytic methods or whatever. They need to know how to think and reflect and communicate in a serious and disciplined way. They need to know how to write—not merely as a skill, although there is a skill and a craft there, but as a way of expressing how they have learned to think about things that actually matter to them as human beings and citizens.
Anastasia Berg: Your interest in the “humanities” is in them as the foundation for liberal education. Do you think that disciplinary expertise in the humanities has any role to play in general education, vis-a-vis that special liberal education? Or do you think that the condition of successful liberal education requires rethinking the idea of disciplinary expertise in the humanities altogether?
Jennifer Frey: I don’t want to completely get rid of disciplinary expertise. I just want to put it in its place. It’s just a fact that the emphasis on disciplinary expertise has been bad for the humanities—we just have real data on this. Most papers in the humanities are read by literally no one, they’re cited by no one. So whatever new knowledge you’re producing, it’s not really making a dent in anything. And, look, it’s still knowledge—it’s good in itself; I don’t deny that. But we need to understand ourselves as teachers, not only as experts. Because if you’re the expert in the room, then really, most questions should just be settled by you. As in, if you want to know what Aristotle said, ask me—I’m the expert, right?
That’s a terrible model for the humanities. What our students need isn’t an expert who can just convey information—frankly, we’re entering a world where artificial intelligence can probably do that pretty well if you just want information-delivery services. What we really need is a space where we are actually forming students, and that means a space where they can enter into a conversation that is much bigger than themselves—that they learn how to enter that conversation in a deep and serious way, that they learn habits of thinking and reflecting with other people. These are not merely intellectual habits; they’re actually moral habits that are required for conversation about difficult, contested topics to go well.
So it’s not the university’s job to tell you how to live, but it is the professor’s unique privilege to help you figure out who you are and how you ought to live in a serious way. The reason that I became me is because I did have professors who helped me enter that kind of great conversation. And we really need most professors to be able to help their students do precisely that. But we’re not trained to do that. We don’t seem to care about it. In fact, we think it sort of reeks of charlatanism or demagoguery, and I think that’s really to our discredit.
Anastasia Berg: I heard you say recently that the contemporary university is the place where authentic liberal education is least likely to thrive. We’ve been talking tonight about all these oughts and shoulds with regard to the university, but why do we insist that the university is where we should be fighting for authentic liberal education in the first place? Do you think it can be revived within universities? What would it take for that to happen? And if, as your own experience at Tulsa might suggest, the university is no longer reliably the place for that authentic liberal education anymore, can it take place anywhere else?
Jennifer Frey: These days if I’m in a hopeful mood, I’m like, Yes, of course! All we need are the right administrators and we can do this. All we need is to show that it works. But of course I did that and it was still a disaster. So, I’m a bit chastened by reality.
At the same time, for me personally, I came to the university when I was eighteen, and it just changed my life. It changed me. It changed the imaginative possibilities that I had for myself, and I just want that for other people. I came to the university a very smart idiot, and I received a real education.
I just want to call universities back to their purpose. I think it would be enormously devastating if we gave up on them. I’ve spent my entire adult life in these institutions, and in some deep sense, I love the university. It doesn’t always love me back, but I love the university, and so I’m going to keep fighting. Having said that, of course, liberal education existed before universities, and it will exist after universities, and it will exist because it addresses a fundamental human need. But it would be a crime if our universities just walked away from it entirely. So I hope that they won’t.
Attendee: Is what’s happening right now in education the continuation of something that’s been going on for the past century—e.g., specialization, and the move away from shared knowledge—or has something meaningfully changed in the past five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years?
Jennifer Frey: What I’m inclined to say is that in 2008, a certain kind of rot that had been there was finally exposed. During the Great Recession our universities were publicly defunded, and also just suffered from the general financial collapse, and what we saw in response to that was that universities needed to make decisions about what they really valued—and it was never the humanities. It has continued since then. Every budget decision really reflects a value judgment. So why is it that the humanities aren’t valued? I believe that’s because universities are no longer committed to liberal education in any meaningful sense, and until they recommit it will continue to be the case.
The people who have the most power in the university need to reflect more deeply on the ways they are responsible for the fact that no one studies classics anymore. You can’t say to someone, especially in a discipline that’s quite difficult such as classics, “Well, we’ve in no way communicated your value to anyone. We’ve in no way meaningfully supported you, and now you don’t have students, so we’re going to cut you off.” I think that is exactly the way that it looks. This is all part of a continuous trend, but a lot of chickens are coming home to roost now.
Attendee: I’m wondering if there could be very large benefits accrued to expanding liberal education to teach kids, you know, that are younger than undergrads. I have two kids that are college age and high school age. And when they hit high school, in civics class, they’re reading the Bill of Rights. But so much of the context gets lost. I’m thinking, this is a very radical thing; before you even talk about the Bill of Rights or how our government is structured, you have to ask, well, what is government?
Jennifer Frey: One of my side projects in life has been getting involved in the K-12 classical education space. I think a lot of the problems in higher ed are inherited from K-12. Depending on what sort of institution of higher education you’re in, you’ll see different aspects of that problem, but the status quo of K-12 education is not worth defending in any way, shape or form, and needs to be fundamentally reassessed. But until we manage that, we are dealing with the products of that system that we inherit. And this is why I like to go back to the claim that I was a very smart idiot when I entered university. I had been in gifted and talented classes since first grade, and I did all AP, yada yada yada—and I knew almost nothing interesting, honestly. Once I started to see how vast the space of what I didn’t know—and didn’t even know I should know—was, at first I was kind of horrified, but then I was like, “Oh my gosh. I really want to know all this stuff.” In high school I never had someone so much as pose any kind of philosophical question to me. It never happened. It’s just not the way we were taught.
Attendee: I’m a scientist, but with two daughters who are deeply involved in humanities. And just as you said, Jen, my whole life changed in university because of my exposure to a real liberal arts education. I’ve been a professor and my colleagues sometimes leave the sciences out of a discussion of liberal arts and of general education, which I find really sad, because it is a different way of knowing. So I’d love to know how you perceive the sciences and their role in general education.
Jennifer Frey: One of the joys of starting a new college and really working on curriculum was sitting down with professors, and the professors who were into it were really into it. A fair number of them were what I would call people in STEM. We would sit down once a week for an entire semester, and we would talk about what a liberal education in science would look like.
I was trying to grow this Honors College, and I was like, “Hey, we have this great books core, it’s amazing.” But I also felt that we needed to have honors classes, really, in every college, and those classes need to be liberal. I had the most amazing conversations with physicists, with biologists, with mathematicians, about how to do that. What we shared in common across disciplines was not just learning a technique, but the importance of asking fundamental questions about our chosen disciplines. The scientists had all reflected on these fundamental questions and really wanted to do that with students, but were never given an opportunity to. So, for example, in biology: What is life like? What actually is life? Which is a difficult question. Once you start thinking about it, it’s not so clear what life is. And then, similarly, in physics, physics shades into metaphysics really quickly. They were also very interested in studying the classical texts of their field. Biologists really wanted to study Darwin with their students and finding a way to integrate it into a biology class. So I don’t think there’s any one way to do it, but I think it’s about turning the class into a form of knowledge for its own sake, with deep, serious reflection on what the discipline is and more foundational questions.
Attendee: I’m the associate director of the humanities center at my university, and I am proud to say I’m a part of a department that still puts students first. We are struggling with big questions about the role of education. I completely agree that it is to help our students think and write and be able to make good choices in life after they finish a university education. But we are being squeezed constantly because of the low enrollments. And I’m wondering if you can offer any practical solutions about how to convince administrators, deans, the provost, of the value of humanities education. The people in administration seem to acknowledge that there is intrinsic value in the humanities, but when it comes to the curriculum and support for the humanities, it’s not there because our numbers are low. The initiatives that come from the administration are sort of just focused on training—from college to career. We are not a vocational school, and we try to remind them of that, but there are no substantive changes and no real support.
Jennifer Frey: That’s tough, and I’m very well aware of the problem that you’re talking about. If you think about the way that power is held and exercised in higher education right now, it’s very hierarchical and very top-down. Most of the power is held by deans, but even deans are limited by what their provost wants, and the provost is responding to a board and a president. I would recommend having a serious talk with your dean about enrollments and how to strategize as a department. I think general education is the best way for a department such as yours to get a real foothold, and deans are always impressed when a department actually is strategizing about this, because they have this idea that faculty are just in it for themselves and don’t ever think about the bigger picture. I definitely have seen departments thrive when they can really situate themselves such that they are serving the university, so even if they don’t have a lot of majors all their classes are filled regardless. However, when you’re relegated to being a service department, you’re still going to be second fiddle to the big research departments. So we also need, as faculty, to be pressuring administrators to think seriously about the fact that they’re not just middle managers, but we’re supposed to be educators. We need to push back against a completely elective system and think about the value of whatever it is that we’re offering.
Attendee: I work at a think tank here in Washington, D.C. Some of my work touches on the future of the humanities in higher ed, and I’m also broadly interested in the humanities, so I have an interest in their future. My question is, if I can glean anything from your story, Jen, it’s that it’s very difficult to convince consumers of the value of the humanities. And I’m wondering why. Will, at least initially, the suppression of some consumer preferences be necessary in order to advance our favored form of education?
Jennifer Frey: Yes, first of all, because if our model of education is based on consumer preference, we’re just not educating. But secondly, I actually don’t think it’s that hard to sell people on a liberal education. That’s not been my experience. So we have to ask ourselves: How are we doing recruitment, who is getting put in front of the consumer, and why is it them and not someone else? And how can we calibrate our pitch?
I have a very old-fashioned view, and I was very upfront about it, and I would also tell people, this kind of education is really hard. It’s not easy. But I would also tell them that everything was at stake in doing it—and that got their attention, because no one’s telling them that. What people are saying is, “Oh, you might study this. You might study that. Who knows, it’s up to you to figure it out.” I think what we need to expose is this idea that an eighteen-year-old really knows what they’re supposed to study. I didn’t. I actually didn’t even know that philosophy existed. It just so happened, by the grace of God, that I got put into a philosophy class because it fulfilled some requirement, and that’s how I ended up knowing that philosophy was even a thing that still happened. So I think consumers do respond when they learn what it actually is, but the trouble is, they’re not learning what it is, and so they’re not responding. Now, is everybody going to respond? Of course not, but again, in my experience, the majority of people do. We should create those conditions where people are sort of getting the full monty, as it were, for liberal learning.
Attendee: I recently graduated from Swarthmore College, a great liberal arts school, a little over a year ago, and I have just started a Ph.D. in philosophy at NYU. So I love liberal arts, loved my time at Swarthmore, and it very directly led me to the Ph.D. But I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what a liberal education would look like that isn’t oriented toward academia. A ton of my friends are already in grad school just one year out of out of college, and I have some strong instincts about how the practical life is a very virtuous life, and I think it would be kind of a shame if a true liberal education only led us into the academy rather than toward other forms of flourishing. I’m just struggling to imagine: What does the class look like? What do you read? How does conversation go?
Jennifer Frey: I agree that philosophy should not be ordered just to get people into NYU. That should not be how philosophy functions, because very few people are going to need, or even want, a Ph.D. in philosophy. I want to resist the teaching of philosophy as a pre-professionalizing endeavor. It wasn’t that way when I was an undergrad. I had a completely amazing undergraduate education in that the philosophy classes were small and freewheeling and we had this department where it was amazingly comprehensive and also eclectic, and you could do hardcore logic, or you could do philosophy of literature. You could learn Hegel, you could learn Sellars and Quine. I mean, it just was all over the place, and that was wonderful for me. But very, very few of us went on to get a Ph.D. in philosophy.
The main difference is that if you’re training someone to be a scholar in a discipline, you’re training them to create scholarship. They have to know what the top journals are and what the practices are they have to learn to write for them. The fundamental thing they have to learn is how to narrow their thinking. But I think that should only be done in basically the third year of graduate school, at least for philosophy. What you want as an undergrad is broadness of thinking. In terms of what we were doing at Tulsa, it was reading a ton of great books—we did not do secondary literature. We did not have the professor lecturing or being an expert, the professor would just ask some questions. That was it. And the whole thing was a dialogue, and you never really knew where it was going to go. You would teach the same material to different classes, and it would go in wildly different places, because the point was for them to be able to initiate and carry on a very serious, sophisticated conversation about big ideas. And to give them the confidence and ability to keep having that conversation outside the classroom. That’s a very different sort of enterprise.
Attendee: I’m here from UNC Chapel Hill, where I teach in the history department, and then I also work with a lot of community colleges doing public-humanities work. And my question is about the cost of higher ed. I’m at a point where I don’t want to get people into my history class by telling them it will get them a job. I want to have conversations about how this will help them to live. But that’s a really hard conversation to have with someone who you know is going into extraordinary debt for this education, or for someone for whom a lot is actually riding on their earning potential on the other side of this. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that hard obstacle of what seems to be just the inescapably rising cost of higher ed.
Jennifer Frey: This is something that I have thought about a lot, because I had to work 32 hours a week as an undergrad and pay for my own college, and also went into debt. So this is something that I feel very deeply: I believe everyone needs a liberal education, and it does a disservice to those of us who have to pay our own way or go into debt to say, “Well, for you, education is merely vocational.” I want to double down on general education. General education is for everyone, regardless of what you go on to specialize in. Not to mention, paying for higher education is risky for everyone and a merely vocational approach doesn’t always work out. Just take the most recent example of computer-science majors. We told everyone for twelve years to major in computer science and they would be rich, but the job market has totally collapsed. Students from very good schools who majored in computer science are not getting jobs. So I think your best bet is to get a liberal education where you are not trained just to learn a very specific, narrow thing. Those skill sets are constantly changing. Those job markets are in flux. No matter what happens, you still have to be a person. I cannot solve the problem of the skyrocketing costs of higher education, but if you’re going to get a higher education, it might as well truly be higher.
https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/can-the-humanities-be-saved
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