The term “liberal arts” does not have the most glorious reputation these days. Online, there’s a starter pack of associations: useless degrees, fake jobs, oat milk, pink hair, Marxism. When a newspaper reports on college graduates struggling to find jobs, somebody asks how many have STEM degrees versus “the usual liberal arts,” like dance or “sexual intersectionality.” The Babylon Bee — which is like The Onion, but with conservative commonplaces instead of jokes — runs the headline “‘Liberal Arts Degrees’ Renamed ‘Non-Essential Worker Degrees’” and imagines colleges admitting that “the pottery, French literature or zero-gravity space station basket weaving classes you’re taking are completely useless.” Even the individual words are unpopular: liberal and arts! One educator writes about a rural college president who stopped using them after a neighbor asked: “What’s wrong with ‘conservative arts’?”
There are also some long-suffering people who keep pointing out that these critiques may be misunderstanding what “liberal arts” means. (One even took The Chronicle of Higher Education to task for how it used the term.) In 2022, a physics professor named Chad Orzel grumbled about people constantly confusing “the collection of academic disciplines shorthanded as ‘the liberal arts’ with the idea of liberal arts education.” That’s not a major; it’s the simple idea that every student should “study a broad range of topics. A range that, in any sensible formulation, includes math and science.”
Orzel is correct: “Liberal arts” traces back to ancient Greek ideas about teaching a full spectrum of knowledge — arithmetic, music, rhetoric, astronomy, etc. — in order to cultivate agile-minded men capable of wise self-governance, not peons trained for a single task. It’s liberal as in free, not the much-newer political label. The idea was sustained across centuries in Europe — people were writing about “liberal artes” in Middle English — and built into the foundations of higher education in the United States, where Ben Franklin imagined students at the future University of Pennsylvania learning art and oratory and debating “justice and injustice.”
But Americans have come to use “liberal arts” for loose sets of specific disciplines. One community college administrator wrote that some on his campus used it for “anything nonvocational” while others used it for “anything not math-based.” Fine arts and humanities like philosophy almost always count; social sciences like anthropology sometimes do. Law is curiously exempt (people point “liberal arts” at things they consider indulgent or impractical); the proverbial “basket weaving” is not (despite probably being a trade). In memeafter meme, “STEM” is presented as liberal arts’ utilitarian opposite — a lucky break for pure math, where you can study stuff that makes literature look like HVAC repair...
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