Much of the recent political debate over the function and value of higher education, and in particular public higher education, centers on the economic worth of a baccalaureate degree, the short and long-term material outcomes for the individual and for society at large. Higher education's "return on investment," once framed in terms of intellectual exploration, personal growth and professional competencies, is today often narrowed to the cash nexus.
For the better part of the last decade, conservative governors and state legislators, many of whom are graduates of public colleges and universities themselves, have scaled back investment in their respective university systems. These leaders focus attention on the job-creating potential of so-called "applied" or "professional" academic majors, insisting that the principal function of the college experience should be local, regional and statewide workforce development. Often decrying the alleged impracticality of degrees in subjects like anthropology, philosophy, history, English, classics, modern languages or fine and performing arts, the liberal arts are cast as an expensive distraction to the work at hand.
But while the rhetoric of job creation and economic development plays an outsized role in today's conservative political agenda, especially in this presidential campaign season, a much longer and richer tradition in Western conservative thought has been neglected.
That tradition began, arguably, with the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish political theorist and member of Parliament Edmund Burke (1729-1797). Burke helped set the foundations of modern conservative thought with his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). After taking the highly unpopular position of defending the American colonists in their opposition to new British tax policies in the 1760s, insisting that the colonists were the ones on the side of tradition while Parliament was playing the dangerous innovator, Burke subsequently condemned the French revolutionary regime for its senseless and ideologically-driven abandonment of time-tested political practice.
Burke maintained that civil society was "a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants" and that only those who worked within the framework of existing national institutions and practices could successfully guide the state. Effective political orders were for Burke akin to organic systems, complicated and delicate, and while these systems should evolve over time, forcing change through revolution was self-defeating.
For Edmund Burke, and for leading conservatives until quite recently, the value of tradition, the usefulness of precedent, the function of cultural context in shaping and reshaping our goals and values, all matter -- and ought to inform our decisions about the type of world we want for ourselves and others.
Given this background, it is somewhat ironic that leading conservative voices in our current debate over the content and purpose of higher education overlook the fact that subject fields normally associated with the liberal arts are, in essence, deeply conservative in content and application.
The majors listed above, for example, require students to explore, understand, preserve and in many cases reinterpret and critique a long tradition of intellectual and artistic production. They look back, each in their own way, to foster the development of new perspectives in light of previous human experience. They oblige students to engage with tradition before constructing and defending their own positions. These subject areas undermine parochialism, challenge myopic world views, press students to consider and experience age-old creative processes that take us outside the ordinary, the transient, the mundane.
Indeed one might argue that these varied experiences, compressed into a four-year course of study, are the real prerequisites to advancing the public good, including individual and collective economic good. What better preparation for the conservation and defense of the ever-fragile democratic project than a broad exposure to subject matter in the liberal arts? What more salutary route to diversity and inclusion in our own day than a broad-based exploration of both the kindness and the cruelty of our global forebears?
More to the current debate, what skill sets and intellectual journeys are likely to assist graduates now entering the twenty-first century workforce? How might recent graduates best leverage their baccalaureate degrees for personal and professional success in a global economy, one where local and regional economic health is tied to international markets and trends? If the recent emphasis by political conservatives on the role of colleges and universities as economic engines is to be credible over the long term, an unacknowledged partner awaits their call.