THE LIBERAL ARTS AND CAREER EDUCATION AT BARUCH:
A Position Paper by Martin Stevens

     From the time of the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century, the so-called “liberal arts” were the traditional areas of study in a university curriculum. The subjects comprised by the liberal or free arts were those which were considered necessary as an introduction to the learned professions (in former days essentially the fields of theology, canon law, and civil law), and historically the liberal arts are traceable to the medieval trivium and quadrivium, hence the subjects of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and those of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, respectively. Essentially those were the subjects taught in universities up to the twentieth century, with the study of the vernacular(s) as the only major concession made to modernity (or what we sometimes call “the real world”). A university education was seen as a unifying experience that would constitute a proper intellectual preparation for the higher pursuits in life. In 1852, Cardinal Newman made this point clear in a lengthy essay, “The Idea of a University,” which is still quoted freely by those who see the liberal arts as the heart of a university education. He saw the task of the university essentially as the preparation of young men (indeed, “gentlemen”) “to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility.”

     Here in America, we inherited the European structure of education, which in essence was an elitist enterprise established at first for the sole purpose of training ministers of the faith. Harvard had nine students in its first graduating class. All had taken the same subjects, including the Bible, the classical languages, and literature, and every class was taught by the president. (Imagine how uncomplicated tenure meetings must have been in those days.) In contrast, as the recent report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching tells us, today there are over “2 million classes taught by a half million faculty members to about 10 million students in about 3,000 institutions.” We have over 1,500 degrees.* What has happened between then and now?

     Clearly we cannot here engage in a minute examination of the history of higher education in America. But in tracing its broad outlines, we can speak of two major periods of higher education, and perhaps the beginning of a third. The first of these marks the era between 1636, the foundation of Harvard, and roughly 1875, a period when new educational models were being built, perhaps exemplified by Johns Hopkins University, which established graduate education on the German model and created the first truly professional medical school in 1893. The first period was one that perpetuated the study of the liberal arts, and it continued to prepare clergymen, though also doctors, teachers, lawyers, and primarily “gentlemen.”

     The second era brought forth the professional schools, technology, and the explosion of knowledge, a series of developments which led to further and further departmentalization on American college campuses. The traditional liberal arts were gradually compressed in the total curriculum, and, as new subjects like Psychology, Anthropology, Economics, and Art (among many others) were formalized into disciplines, the liberal arts themselves were subdivided into the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and fine arts, all of which became components of what was to be called “general education” (a term that is sometimes credited to President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard). It was not until the twentieth century that Departments of English, to cite one example, came into existence, replacing the ancient discipline of “rhetoric.” And, of course, gradually the expansion of the traditional liberal arts was matched by the proliferation of technical and professional disciplines which formerly were taught in polytechnic and normal schools. Those interested in “general education” tended toward two methods by which to forestall excessive specialization (the domain of “major” and “minor” fields). These were distribution requirements and core curricula or courses. The former called for a distribution of the various liberal arts in some pattern requiring study in each of the major divisions; the latter was accomplished in such widely imitated courses as the one created at Columbia College in 1919 under the title “Introduction to Civilization.” With the expansion in curriculum, colleges and universities, furthermore, became concerned about the element of free choice of courses against requirements, and the history of education in the twentieth century has been one in which the elective has been alternately in ascent or decline. In my mind, the 1960’s reached the culmination paradoxically of both free choice and professionalization. The result has been that a surplus of professionals was created, and the old patterns of distribution-concentration on the undergraduate level were eroded. The University is now regrouping, and while the “elective” age is in decline, so is the principle of general education. We seem to be bringing the concept of the graduate school into the undergraduate curriculum, and more and more the university is the training ground for a consumer society.

     The liberal arts tradition, thus, either as the entire focus of a college or as the basic component of a general education, holds a tenuous place in the academy of the eighties. We at Baruch know that fact only too well from the crucible of our experience. The nationwide statistics corroborate (and even understate) our demise:

58% of American undergraduates major in Professional Schools
8% in Social Sciences
5% in Humanities
15% in Sciences
6% in Arts
8% in other fields or in combinations

     It is clear from these figures that, especially for four-year colleges, the baccalaureate degree is now career-centered, and the liberal arts are, in the main, service-oriented. That is, rightly or wrongly, they serve the dominant concentration—that of the professional schools. What these figures tell us is that the model of higher education that many of us ourselves experienced is now probably outdated. The University of the eighties is inescapably tied to the market place and the vocational curriculum has become a mirror of the institutions that have inspired it. Students learn the theory and practice of our worldly craft (often the classroom imitates rather than inspires that world), and in the process the American University, which “once emulated British and German models, has run out of European antecedents for curricular adaptation and is now on its own” (Missions of the College Curriculum, p.5).

     What then is the role of the liberal arts and sciences in the career-centered college of the eighties? What specifically should it be at Baruch? Clearly, it cannot be conceived as providing a vast number of majors. Indeed, if from 10 to 20% of all our graduates major in one of the liberal arts or sciences, we can be gratified. To justify the presence of a comprehensive liberal arts program primarily on grounds that we must offer a wide choice of majors is, therefore, unhappily not only unrealistic but also self-defeating. Much more to the point is the role that the liberal arts are now playing in the process of general education, and that process must be seen in terms of three quite separate components: (1) advanced learning skills courses, (2) “breadth” or “distribution” courses, (3) integrative or synoptic courses or curricula. I would like to address myself to each of these components after taking a brief look—if only for the sake of nostalgia—at the liberal arts major.

     As I have already stated, the present educational, economic climate in America, and more particularly at Baruch, argues against the proliferation of liberal arts majors. While, in the long run, this condition may, indeed, be temporary, the fact remains that corporations, regardless of what the Chairman of the Board may say at cocktail parties, prefer to hire accountants rather than English or History majors. And our students, who are mostly the first members of their families attending college, come to us obliged to prepare themselves for careers. As the Ph.D. in such traditional areas as philosophy and history, among many others, has recently shown in dramatic and sad numbers, there are very few suitable career opportunities even for the best and most highly prepared liberal arts majors. It follows, therefore, that the major in liberal arts at Baruch College must be scrutinized for the career opportunities that it provides for our students. Certainly we should maintain liberal arts majors for that percentage of our students, however small, who wish to advance into graduate schools. Such, of course, has been the traditional “market value” of most undergraduate degrees in the liberal arts. This is not to say we can afford to offer majors in all of the traditional areas, but we should make an effort to retain the ones that we already have. We should do that in any case because the educational climate in America is all too changeable. The current popularity of the business major may be a flash in the pan. The history of education has proved one thing incontestably: the liberal arts survive.

     But apart from the traditional majors which once served as the nearly exclusive preserve of the leisured and professional classes, what fields of concentration can the liberal arts offer in the proletarian urban college of the 1980’s? Clearly, since the major is finally the significant factor in a career education, we should continue to offer those of our majors that through years of adaptation have developed their own markets, like Psychology, Mathematics, Political Science, Sociology, and Business Journalism. These deserve the same level of support and the same opportunity for growth as successful major programs in the Business School. There are also the bridge majors, which, potentially offer unusual and rich opportunities for our undergraduates. But the bridge majors are as yet amorphous, and they have raised questions about their marketability. These questions need answers before the College can commit itself squarely to their growth.

     I, therefore, recommend that the College undertake the following steps:

• Conduct market studies involving supply and demand for candidates in each of our bridge majors. Such studies obviously must consider the existence of competing programs in other New York colleges. We need to know whether museum or galleries, for example, really find an arts administration major desirable or whether they would continue to hire, as they have in the past, persons with more traditional degrees.
• Examine the administrative form of bridge programs. Should they be independent majors like journalism, business communication, and arts administration? Or should they be specializations within more traditional majors, as the Management of Musical Enterprises is now within the Department of Music? Another question that begs to be answered is whether bridge majors should lead to a B.A. or B.B.A. degree. Since the concept of the bridge major, while interesting, has found little successful implementation at Baruch, we may have identified it with the wrong riverbank. The bridge major, after all, is a cooperative enterprise. There is no reason why it should automatically be identified with one of its shores rather than the other. There should be no hard-and-fast rule that says bridge majors belong to the School of Arts and Sciences. After all, the liberal arts have traditionally not objected to living on the left bank.
• Study the possibility of establishing new interdisciplinary programs, in content and in form. Why shouldn’t the largest business school in the country offer a humanistically oriented urban studies program? And what about a joint program in business and ecology? Or perhaps one in New York City’s most significant growth industry, tourism and travel? There are many possibilities for innovative courses and programs, and there is also room for experimentation with forms of degrees. What about double majors? Is it possible to build a five-year M.B.A. program of which the first part is a B.A.? Can we thus provide a broader education while still satisfying the market requirements of our students? Or perhaps to offer simultaneous majors in English and Management, or History and Economics, or Mathematics and Finance, and awarding both the B.A. and the B.B.A. degree simultaneously?
• Study the experiences of recent Baruch graduates. Let us find out whether there is a gap between their expectations in college and the reality of their post-graduate lives. What did they wish to have gotten that we didn’t give them?

     So much then for my comments about the major. Let us move now to consider the first of the three general education functions I propose to discuss—the advanced learning skills. I have borrowed this term from the Carnegie Commission, and I use it to refer to the skills in mathematics, writing, reading, foreign languages, and information retrieval that our students need in order to be successful college students. I haven’t time here to ask the vexing questions that arise in the area of remediation and compensatory education. Whose responsibility is it to prepare students to master the basic skills? Have the high schools failed? Have we? Are television and new styles of life as well as new standards of taste responsible for the low capability of our entering students in the skills? Why is it that as many as sixty per cent of our students do not pass the Writing Skills Assessment test that we must now give by mandate of the City University to all applicants? We are certainly not alone in this plight as we survey this problem on the threshold of the eighties. Note the following words:

A great outcry has been made lately, on every side, about the inability of the students admitted to Harvard...to write English clearly and correctly...[Secondary] schools have been held up to derision and scorn because they not pay enough attention to English composition.

1. Skills imply practice. We cannot give the students an infusion—remedial or standard—of writing skills or mathematical skills or library skills at the outset of their college education and assume they will now sail with ease to their occupational destinations. Skills need reinforcement. The student who passes freshman composition but who never writes again in his or her three remaining years of college will not be literate. As muscles become atrophied without use, so do the powers of expression. Writing, to cite one of the skills, must be an ongoing and constant activity. It should be structured into the curriculum. It might be mandatory as part of the credit of selected courses in all departments. For example, offer certain appropriate courses for four hours of credit and require a term paper to satisfy the requirement of the fourth hour. Require every student to take at least five such courses in their last two years of specialization. For those who have trouble writing, set up a College-wide Writing Referral Service staffed by professionals as well as peer tutors.
2. Don’t confuse means and ends. The instruction in skills is not the same as a liberal education; it is but one part of that education, the part that provides the tools for study and for broadening. It is not enough to know how to use the library; we have to have reason to use it. It is not enough to learn French conjugations and declensions, we must speak and read the language. It is not enough to know how to spell, or write effective sentences; we have to have something to say. Last year in the heat of debate over the minor in the faculty meeting of the Business School, I heard over and over again the sentiment that the only really important contribution that Liberal Arts can make to the education of business majors is to teach them how to write. This is a serious misapprehension.

     As I said, the teaching of the learning skills is a complex subject. I can only suggest at this point certain attitudes with which we must assess our needs in this important area. I want now to move to the second major function of general education requirements: breadth and distribution. As the Carnegie report (which I cited before) tells us:

The object of distribution requirements...is to assure that every student has some exposure to the content, traditions, and methods of the main subject fields (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and—too infrequently—the creative and performing arts). Such breadth is the counterweight of concentration. (p. 169).

     As already mentioned, breadth requirements can be designed in two ways: they can be implemented through common core courses (which are often inter-disciplinary), or they can be amassed by the choices of designated introductory courses in selected areas of learning (usually the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts). The most recent trend, led by Harvard, has been toward a core curriculum which combines these two ideas. The Harvard plan provides not for common core courses but for common core experiences. At Stanford, a new core program has just been announced in which all entering freshmen must take a one-year course in Western Civilization and, in addition, must enroll in at least one course in the following seven broad subject areas (of which at least one must focus on a non-Western culture):

Literature and the fine arts
Philosophical, social and religious thought
Human development, behavior and language
Social processes and institutions
Mathematics science
Natural sciences
Technology and applied sciences

     Let me give you an example. Here is the transcript of a June, 1979 graduate in Accounting (see Fig. 1) who ranked in the middle of his graduating class. I selected him truly at random, and I am not suggesting that there are any abuses of our requirements reflected in his record. In fact, I think he is probably quite typical. What I want you to do is ask whether you think he has been given a good general education at Baruch College. Here are the details of his curriculum. He took

13   courses in Accounting for a total of 38 credits
2   courses in Economics for 6 credits
3   courses in Law for 8 credits (2 were in Business Law)
3   in Statistics for 9 credits
1   in Management for 3 credits
1   in Advertising for 3 credits
1   in Business Policy for 3 credits
1   in Marketing for 3 credits
1   in Finance for 3 credits
2   in Mathematics for 8 credits (1 was in Math of Finance)
2   in Political Science for 6 credits
1   in Anthropology for 3 credits
2   in Psychology for 6 credits
1   in Philosophy for 3 credits
1   in Music for 2 credits
2   in Art for 5 credits (Photography)
2   in Astronomy for 8 credits
1   in Speech for 3 credits (Business Speech)
1   in History for 3 credits
2   in English Composition for 6 credits

     I am not quite finished with our specimen transcript. Certainly, on its example we have to conclude that our curriculum, even under the watchful eye of AACSB accreditation (for which I hasten to add I am extremely grateful), does not provide with any certainty the goals that are set forth in our Catalogue to describe the Bachelor of Business Administration; namely to give students

• “a basic core of general knowledge and capabilities to permit them to understand and participate in organization environments”
• motivation to “continue to learn and to grow intellectually throughout life”
• “a broad perspective of society and a sense of values that foster pride and responsible participation in civic affairs” (p. 23)

     It is work noting something else. The student who managed to squeak past English Composition with grades of D sailed with remarkable ease past the Scylla of his major and the Charybdis of his remaining general education credits. It is true that he came close twice to scraping his bow on the former (a D in Economics in his third semester and another D in a two-hour Cost-Accounting course in his senior year, after having had an unsuccessful run past it once before with a W in the preceding semester.) Yet he navigated well. In his last two years, he took 27 courses out of which he received B’s and A’s in 20. One wonders, did he ever write again after his freshman year?

     Here’s another anomaly. Did you notice that our “victim” took a freshman introduction to Modern Europe in his very last semester? This is, no doubt, the result of that last minute effort to get his gradation requirements in order. I would like to suggest that such scheduling is putting the horse rather dismayingly behind the cart. Sure, we all know that seniors sometimes stock up on freshman courses for various good or bad reasons. They may be hankering for an introduction to a field that they neglected. They may be coming to terms with their own need for a general education after having concentrated too heavily in their specialization. So I would not wish to rule out the possibility of such a choice. But in this instance, the choice involved one of only two humanities courses—the sort that should have provided a framework within which to study the modern world of business. At very least, then, I suggest to the shapers of our curriculum that students be forced to take some of their so called “liberating” courses early enough that they will help them to put their specialization in perspective.

     And that leads me quickly and, I promise, tersely to a review of third general education component in the curriculum—those courses that the Carnegie Commission calls “integrative” or “synoptic.” We at Baruch College have offered—at least up to the establishment of the minor—very few such courses.

     To make my point about integrative courses and curricula, I have to say first that their absence is notable virtually everywhere in American higher education. We have somehow convinced ourselves that education should proceed in a Darwinian progression: from the simple to the complex. More so, it should move from the general to the specific, from foundation or broad base (terms we have widely adopted) to narrow summits, or, as Tony (the Virgil of Baruch College) has it, to greater heights. This, to carry our the metaphor, is said to lead finally, though in my mind not incontestably, to the survival of the fittest. On a value scale it somehow also communicates that the higher we advance in our climb toward the summit, the more worthy our activity. This view of educational sequence leads not only to the high estimation of the specialist (both among students and faculty) but to the unrealistic assumption that general education is a matter of preparation rather than application. Take a look for a moment at the AACSB statement that defines our business curriculum:

An undergraduate school of business should concentrate its professional courses in the last two years of a four-year program, and should offer only a limited amount of work below the junior year. The objective of this is to permit the student to acquire a foundation of work in the basic arts and sciences.

     The basic sequence that leads from the general to the specific is open to question because it fails to provide the opportunity for application. The average student who learns about ethics in his Philosophy class as a freshman is likely to lock his new-found knowledge into a cell of his mind which will never again be opened, at least in a systematic attempt to make use of it. That same student might profit much more from his class in ethics if it were to confront him at the time when he or she is enrolled in “Principles of Salesmanship.” And, less directly, it can be argued that certain kinds of learning take firmer root as students approach greater maturity and as they become comfortable with the thought that college should give them more than career preparation. It is likely that the calmer psychic environment of the junior and senior year provides the right opportunity for students to discover the great writers, artists, composers, and social thinkers of our history. Conversely, it can be argued that the initial years of college are the right period in the lives of many students for the acquisition of concrete, pragmatic career training. It is precisely at the time of his/her admission to college that the average freshman has reached the point of greatest ennui. School has dragged on for twelve long years. All this was preparation for life. Now suddenly, there will be two more years of the same, at a time when most young men and women are curious to discover their particular niches in life. Let them find out whether accountancy or marketing or banking will, indeed, provide them with satisfying careers. Let them take at least a few courses in their specialty from the very start to make this important self-discovery. And let them—one hopes—gain the confidence and assurance that will finally liberate them to appreciate what is liberating in the liberal arts.

     The junior/senior Business sequence at Baruch presents yet another danger. Because of that sequence, the School of Liberal Arts is in danger of becoming a junior college. We have a number of distinguished departments with faculties that could comfortably teach in the best liberal arts colleges in the country. Yet, because the requirements for business students are lodged mostly in introductory work, these departments can rarely confront students with the complexities of their specialties. And with our necessarily heavy reliance on adjunct faculties—in the current semester a startling 40% of all courses were taught by adjuncts in the School of Liberal Arts—the distinction between the rank of senior, and even distinguished, professor and that of adjunct lecturer is less and less clear. In view of these facts alone, the concentration on liberal arts strictly in the first two years is a clear and imminent danger to the future of the College as a multi-purpose institution.

     As the sample transcript has shown us, it is not impossible at least in the case of some students, to leave room in the last two years for a few “integrative” or “synoptic” courses. In our particular environment, it would make sense that such courses, or even series of courses, should make an attempt to bring the student’s specialization into contact with the broad traditions and subject matter of the liberal arts. This can be done effectively with our newly created minor-field concentrations, or it might be done by team-taught interdisciplinary seminars in which the resident senior faculty of the Schools of Business and Liberal Arts would participate. One can think of a great many possible match-ups: in Philosophy and Marketing, Psychology and Management, Speech and Advertising, History and Economics, Ecology and Business Policy, Modern Languages and International Marketing, and many more. Here, too, lie all sorts of possibilities for grant applications, and it might well be in this phase of an integrated educational plan that our successful pilot grant from the NEH in “Capitalism Today and Yesterday” might be extended into a development grant. The significant point to be made at this, the last stage of our students’ career at Baruch, is that we are not the fragmented confederacy of schools that we now not only appear to be, but actually are. It is crucially important, I believe, that we give our graduates the sense at the end of their years of formal study that they have been in college, not a succession of schools. One way to move in this direction is for us to create college rather than school requirements, and such a move, of course, implies that we sit down together—we, in the separate schools—to discuss our joint curriculum.

     I have by now exhausted your patience. Yet I beg your indulgence for a moment longer, because in closing these very prosaic remarks about a liberal education at Baruch, I would like to leave you with something better than my ruminations about the narrow topic of our curriculum. And so I thought I should end these remarks with some words from Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote a famous essay, “Universities and Their Functions” in 1929, to honor the establishment of the business school at Harvard, his University. What he says about the relationship of this erstwhile new school (a novelty in his day) and the University at large still has meaning for us in our time. He says:

Today business comes to Harvard; and the gift which the University has to offer is the old one of imagination, the lighted torch which passes from hand to hand....Imagination is a gift which has often been associated with great commercial peoples—with Greece, with Florence, with Venice, with the learning of Holland, and with the poetry of England. Commerce and imagination thrive together.

* Missions of the College Curriculum (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1977), p.1

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