The Liberal Arts Life

Lindsay Wells is the Liberal Arts Commencement Speaker

The College of the Liberal Arts does have a commencement speaker: our student marshal, Lindsay Wells. Lindsay is a triple major in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Art History, and Medieval Studies.

What we don’t have is a second commencement speaker from inside or outside the University. Although we have traditionally had two speakers, this year colleges were given the option not to have a non-student commencement speaker. We in the College of the Liberal Arts decided to give that a try this year in order to highlight our student marshal and to try to limit the length of the ceremony.

We grant over 2000 degrees each year and call out the names of over 1500 students at the spring commencement ceremony. Calling individual names is important for the many families who have gathered to celebrate the accomplishment of a specific, unique individual.

I believe we are the only College that still has a student speaker at commencement, and we decided that was the tradition to continue as it expresses well the student-centered spirit of the ceremony and of the approach to education we take in the College of the Liberal Arts.

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Celebrating our excellent liberal arts graduate students and faculty today at the NLI.

Sam Richards (by Paige Wasilewski)

@iunlearn “If you’re not confused, you have no idea what’s going on.”

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The way forward, then, is simple. Instead of seeing college as a private investment, we must consider it a public good. If we remember the generation that was educated after World War II, generous public support meant that they could afford — economically — to spend four years studying the subject that most interested or spoke to them, and then they took their education and did millions of things with it that helped us develop a richer society, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of knowledge, art, and citizenship. That generation could do so because they did not have to take on thousands of dollars in debt and to worry all the time about how to pay for it. They could do so because public support for their education — meaning low tuition for students thanks to tax support for America’s colleges — gave them the freedom — the leisure — to study.

Don’t make an economic case for the liberal arts (essay) | Inside Higher Ed

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The diversity of U.S. higher education is widely regarded as one of its strengths,” Baldwin said. “But American higher education will be diminished if the number of liberal arts colleges continues to decline.

Are liberal arts colleges disappearing?

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Collaborative Summer Reading at Catholic University of America →

Here is a great model of collaborative reading with first year undergraduate students on the Catholic University of America website.

I love the way it integrates undergraduate and graduate education, how it uses technology to provide access to a shared text and facilitates an ongoing conversation. It is really something to think about for our own honors sequence at Penn State.

David Foster Wallace, in this 2005 commencement address at Kenyon, speaks of a liberal arts education in terms of what might be called intentional attentiveness.

In the first part of the speech, DFW himself speaks of the need to be

“conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (at 8:18).

His point, in part, is that we need to consciously and conscientiously break ourselves of our “default settings,” which most often means stepping outside of our narcissistic selves in order to imagine our way into the experience of others. Our default setting, he says, is to be “uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out” (9:20).

(Strangely enough, at the end of part I (at 8:55), he appeals to the idea that most people who commit suicide with a firearm shoot themselves in the head, an indication, he suggests, that they are attempting to kill the master, the prison that their mind has become. I say “strangely” here because DFW himself committed suicide in 2008, three years after giving this address. He hanged himself.)

Here is part II:

To learn how to think is to learn how to pay attention. ”You get to decide what to worship” (7:51). What do you worship? Does what you worship “eat you alive” or does it enrich your life? DFW suggests you learn to worship the real freedom a liberal arts education makes possible:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race”–the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Bill Zandi already had an idea of what he wanted to do when he enrolled at Wake. As a high school freshman in Pennsylvania, he wanted to find a way to help students like him after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. That eventually led to two tractor-trailers of school supplies and furnishings donated from local schools being shipped to New Orleans, and to the group Students Helping Students, which is now a nonprofit group that has expanded to include schools in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. For Zandi, who plans to continue running the group after he graduates, philosophy is perhaps the most practical discipline he could have studied in college. “I wanted to gain certain skills from this major,” he said, including critical thinking, formulating arguments and counter-arguments, and improving his writing and communication skills. “I really do believe that it gives me a greater perspective on how we’re living life today and maybe how we should strive to be living.” Mark Zandi, who spends his days training his perspective on everything from the inner workings of the Federal Reserve to the rising cost of gasoline, might have felt initial surprise at his son’s decision, but he said it makes good practical sense. “I hire a lot of kids in my work, and the skills I look for are: Are they articulate, can they present a thought in a cogent way, do they write well, can they express a perspective and a point of view?” he said. “I think we need more scientists and engineers, but there’s always going to be a demand for people with a varied educational background.” That’s something that’s been noted in rapidly growing Asian economies like China, Chan said, where universities are scrambling to launch liberal arts programs of their own. “Ironically, at the same time that’s happening in Asia, in the United States we have people saying we should forget the liberal arts because they’re not preparing students for careers,” he said.

Wake Forest examines value of college education - Education - NewsObserver.com

Here is a nice little article suggesting the importance of a liberal arts education for future employment.