The 'Suicide' of the Liberal Arts

"'Mr. John, are you an Athenian or a Spartan?" A group of Iraqi students put that question to John Agresto in 2003, when he was in Baghdad working to rebuild Iraq's university system for the Coalition Provisional Authority. After a classroom discussion of Thucydides, he says, "I thought I knew what they were driving at. So I said, 'I hope I'm an Athenian, cultured and sophisticated. I don't want to be a Spartan, rough and warlike.'"

That was the answer the students were looking for -- but Mr. Agresto had misunderstood the question. They wanted to know if Americans were like the Spartans. "The Spartans talked a lot about honor, their alliances and their friends," he says. "And then they betrayed them. 'Are you going to do that to us?'" Today's educators like to talk about reading texts that are "relevant." Nothing was more relevant to these young Iraqis than the "History of the Peloponnesian War."

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education -- the subject of his new book, "The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It." It's an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans -- old ones, too -- don't see the point of liberal arts: "We are suspicious, because we don't know what good they are and we don't know what use they are," Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were "allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what's the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind" while also being "a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything."

Mr. Agresto lives in Santa Fe, N.M., but retains enough of his native Brooklyn, N.Y., accent to remind listeners that he didn't come from the rarefied world of higher education. His Italian immigrant grandparents didn't know how to read, and his parents kept no books in the house. He is disappointed that too many students today don't have the opportunities for deep reading he was offered at his Catholic high school, let alone at Boston College and Cornell.

He classifies the death of the liberal arts as "suicide," not "murder." Americans, regarding themselves as a "practical" people, have always been suspicious of the liberal arts, Mr. Agresto says. Today's inflated prices make them even more so: "A liberal education, thanks to the infinite wisdom of university and college administrators, costs as much as getting an engineering degrees, but with little in the hope of secure future recompense," he writes.

Recent trends within the academy have exacerbated the problem. Start with "specialization," especially the growing prevalence of obscure theory and criticism, which tends to crowd out great works. In the book he asks: "If it was once hard for a graduating college senior to convince a prospective employer that studying Shakespeare and Cicero was useful, how much more difficult is the task when the fringes of graduate school are pushed down into the undergraduate curriculum?"

In our interview, he tells the story of a high-school student who told him: "I am so excited about history. I am learning how to think like a historian." That distressed Mr. Agresto. "Have we so vocationalized the liberal arts?" he says. "The object of our teaching is not to make mini-me's" -- not to turn every student into a professor. "It's fine to have the professionalization of medicine or engineering, but for liberal arts, I want amateurs," he says. "Specialization in building an atom bomb is fine. Specialization in reading Chaucer is not."

He worries that students are "making themselves small too soon" by picking a major without first getting a broad education. He contends that no matter what you want to become -- one of his daughters is a nurse; the other operates a lighthouse -- the liberal arts have something to teach you. "We should teach ordinary people to learn ordinary things," he says, such as "the War of the Roses, the American Revolution" and "who Plato and Descartes were." And not only because these are things an educated person should know, or because they may help you land a job, but because they can help answer "childish questions."

He rattles off a list of such questions: "How should I live my life? What is justice? What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe others? Is democracy the best way of life? What is love?" These sound like deep philosophical inquiries. Does he really mean to call them childish? "You bet," he says. "There's hardly a child that doesn't want to ask these questions." And they are "the kind of questions that literature and history and philosophy and classical studies raise."

The emphasis on credentials produces mediocrity, Mr. Agresto says. A degree tells you little about what its holder knows. Referring to the controversy over whether First Lady Jill Biden should be addressed as "Dr. Biden" because of her doctorate in education, Mr. Agresto says he doesn't understand why she wants to be. "The best teacher I had in college didn't have a Ph.D.," he says. When Mr. Agresto was president of St. John's College, a small Great Books school, its catalog said: "While we expect most of our professors have Ph.D.s, we hope they rise above it."

Mr. Agresto also faults the tendency to judge historical figures by today's standards. Few read Plato, Rousseau or Madison anymore without introductory throat-clearing about how they lived in a different time when people held backward views. "I think the effort to put books, literature, authors, statesmen, in the historical context is a way of trying to be nice," Mr. Agresto says -- perhaps trying to be nice himself by attributing benign motives to the objects of his criticism. "It's a way of saying, 'Yeah, everybody has failings. They surely had feet of clay. But back then everybody had those. And so they're no different. They're just people connected to their time and place.'"

The trouble with that is that it strips great men of their relevance: "The kids will say, 'I don't live in that time and place. Why should I care?'" It's also "a way of puffing ourselves up. Students can say, "Jefferson? What a hypocrite, I'm better than he is. . . . Back then, they were benighted and not so smart. We know more than that."

Sentiments like these have accompanied a change in the attitude of students, which Mr. Agresto has noticed over his half-century career as a professor and administrator: "They have gone from docile to uninterested to fiercely combative." He rarely disagrees with Allan Bloom, who taught him at Cornell, but he thinks Bloom was wrong in his 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind," when he blamed higher education's decline on relativism. "The people who are destroying the universities, who have killed the liberal arts, they're not relativists," Mr. Agresto says. "They 'know' what's true, and they're going to impose it."

Mr. Agresto has been heartened by the backlash against censorship on campus. But he thinks that while free speech is necessary, it's insufficient. "That's not what college and high school are about, the study of clashing views. It's the study of literature and history."

"Shakespeare examines all the stuff we want to examine: justice between nations, justice between different ethnicities, what it means to be fully human, what it means to betray your friend, what it means to die for your friend." It is part of Mr. Agresto's charm that once he starts on these questions he can hardly stop: "Why does Cordelia love her father?" he muses about King Lear. "He's a damn fool, but she still seems to love him, but in an odd way, in a way that doesn't just give in to him, but that tries to raise him up."

It's a little like Mr. Agresto's relationship with higher education. It's full of damn fools, but he loves it and wants to raise it up.

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Ms. Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "No Way to Treat a Child."" [1]

1. The Weekend Interview with John Agresto: The 'Suicide' of the Liberal Arts
Naomi Schaefer Riley. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 Dec 2022: A.15.