Don’t Scrap the Liberal Arts Majors

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/liberal-arts-majors.html

Version 0 of 1.

To the Editor:

Re “Aristotle’s Wrongful Death” (column, May 27):

Frank Bruni is on the mark to lament the fact that some colleges are doing away with liberal arts majors in favor of career preparation. But he conflates two different strategies for preparing students for jobs. To do away with many traditional majors, as Assumption College is doing, is not the same as the way the University of Illinois is responding to career preparation pressure.

Smart schools are encouraging students to major in liberal arts, but they are also coupling practical career and professional training with them. If Illinois is pairing anthropology with computer sciences, it’s on track with Stanford, which is offering Art Is My Occupation: Professional Development for Creatives.

A number of community colleges are heeding the research of Mark Schneider and Matthew Sigelman, who recently outlined skills in five high-demand career areas that could be added to a liberal arts associate degree. These skills are obvious and include communications, project management and data analysis.

As a Ph.D. in comparative literature (U.C. Berkeley, 1971) who has spent nearly 50 years working to open postsecondary opportunities to young people, I would choose that major again, but in my next life, I’d also get a management certificate and a good dose of statistics.

NANCY HOFFMAN, BOSTON

The writer is co-founder of Pathways to Prosperity Network.

To the Editor:

My older daughter attended a school with a classics-based curriculum, St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. She told me the first semester they would be learning ancient Greek in order to read Plato and Aristotle in the original, and I remember thinking, “She’s going to be able to say, ‘You want fries with that?’ in ancient Greek.”

However, it turns out that the ability to think critically and write persuasively still has some value in our modern world, and she has an excellent job writing proposals for the City of Boston Community Centers Department.

Nothing wrong with a classical education.

MARC CLAMAGE, MANSFIELD, MASS.

To the Editor:

In defending traditional majors, Frank Bruni made a compelling case, though he still misses the core value of a major. While majors emphasize depth of knowledge, taking a dozen courses in a single field doesn’t always create an expert. An economics major isn’t an economist, and majoring in history doesn’t make a historian. If vocational expertise isn’t the purpose of a major, what is?

Majoring in a field isn’t so much about specialization. It’s about learning to learn and think deeply, to appreciate the quality of ideas and the importance of context, to learn tools and methods of analysis, and to imagine alternatives and apply knowledge acquired through practice and hard work.

Colleges may not always equip students with the soft and hard skills needed for professional success, but that alone isn’t a reason to dismantle nonprofessional — really, liberal arts — majors.

SONIA CARDENAS, HARTFORD

The writer is dean of academic affairs and strategic initiatives and a professor of political science at Trinity College.

To the Editor:

College education should also help students for the decades after work. The classics, English, philosophy and other non-STEM majors do that. Woe to retirees who successfully followed “clear career pathways” into jobs only to find themselves afterward unprepared to appreciate literature, history, art, explorations of cultures and other mindful pursuits.

TINO CALABIA, CHEVY CHASE, MD.