Precipice or Crossroads?: Where America's Great Public Universities Stand and Where They Are Going Midway through Their Second Century

Challenges to Equilibrium: The Place of the Arts and Humanities in Public Research Universities

Challenges to Equilibrium The Place of the Arts and Humanities in Public Research Universities Daniel Mark Fogel a discussion of the importance and value of the arts and humanities seems to me to be essential to the architecture of a volume that otherwise would not only have omitted an intrinsic element of Justin Morrill’s vision and legacy but also would have missed a chance to correct a disturbing imbalance in the reigning cases for support of public higher education. Those cases appeal heavily to the vocational aims of higher education and to the undeniable importance of university-based research for economic development, innovation, and national competitiveness—always emphasizing research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the sTeM disciplines). When the case for higher education touches at all on the arts and humanities (or, for that matter, on such traditional social sciences as political theory and anthropology), it is almost always to attribute to them some marketable utility. Typically, communication skills and a capacity for critical thinking are valued as prerequisites for business success, or modern language and area studies as handmaidens of global commerce. With a little more flair, the arts may be invoked as drivers of “the creative economy,” or, alternatively, liberal education may get a perfunctory nod as important to citizenship in a democracy. Probably the most influential case statement for research and education of the last ten years—the National academies’ superb 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future—was 241 242 daNieL MarK FoGeL very effectively focused on the sTeM disciplines and their importance for economic vitality and competitiveness and for national power, with hardly so much as an implied reference to any other disciplines.1 even for those who do not in their hearts place the sTeM disciplines above all others, the temptation to promote public higher education to policymakers as offering high returns on investment is irresistible. in asserting a university claim on declining public resources, proponents of higher education are eager to promise big bang for the public buck in terms to which legislators, business executives, and opinion leaders are presumed most likely to assent. i have made that pitch many times myself in the Vermont statehouse to education and appropriations committees as well as to chambers of commerce and to rotary clubs. in an opinion piece i wrote for the Washington Post in october 2005, i recalled the lecture my fourth grade teacher delivered with fearsome vividness in 1957, right after the launch of sputnik (the message was that “we would all have to buckle down, focus, and apply ourselves assiduously to the study of math and science”). i went on to describe the intensity i had recently observed in the students at china’s leading technological university, Tsinghua. and i asked, “do our students understand that they must work at least as long, as hard and as smart as their chinese peers if we are to maintain a viable place in the economy of a chinese century?” We do what we have to do—if the argument of this essay is taken as a critique of all who have resorted to making utilitarian and economic cases for support of public higher education, then i myself plead guilty. i would argue that we have virtually no choice, given our fiduciary responsibilities to our institutions, except to make the only case that seems to have any currency. But we do so at a real cost, and it is incumbent on us to take stock of that cost and to be as constructive as we can in offsetting it by instituting corrective and recuperative measures. First, however, i want to come back to the proposition that a treatment of the land-grant movement that leaves out liberal education would not be true to Justin Morrill’s legacy, a vision of democratic opportunity in education across all disciplines, concisely captured in ezra cornell’s motto for his land-grant university, “i would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” (cornell). in sponsoring the Land-grant act, Morrill was motivated by his urgent sense that the United states must not fall behind europe in the advancement of agricultural science and technology. The historic legislation was headed thus: “aN Challenges to Equilibrium 243 acT donating Public Lands to the several states and Territories which may provide colleges for the Benefit...