The following is an excerpt from the annual Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, delivered by Ann E. Cudd at the University of Kansas on May 17, 2015:
I am delighted to be invited to be an honorary member of the University of Kansas chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and to be able to speak with you today. Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most significant honor society for the liberal arts and sciences. Only the top liberal arts and sciences students at the top universities qualify for membership. That means you are the best of the best of the best scholars. Congratulations to all of you on your induction into this distinguished society.
The motto of Phi Beta Kappa is to celebrate and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. I take that as my purpose in this address. Why should the student study and the state support the liberal arts and sciences? The liberal arts and sciences education is distinguished by being broadly engaged with study of the history of ideas, humanity, and things, rather than narrowly focused on a contemporary, practically useful, skill. While this kind of mind-expanding education is being questioned by many today as less important and less relevant to our current situation, the liberal arts and sciences are essential to society today because they teach us the critical thinking, mutual understanding, and creative discovery that is necessary for a vibrant, democratic future. Only through broad education in the achievements and setbacks of peoples of different cultures, in the theoretical tools and empirical knowledge of the sciences, and the training that hones quantitative and communicative skills, can citizens be prepared to analyze, critique, develop, and reinvent the brilliant potential of our democracy and engage productively in the global market. Although the value of liberal arts is being questioned now in many sectors, and faces many challenges from competing interests and manifest social needs, training global citizens in the liberal arts is as crucial now as ever to insuring a vital future for humanity.
There are three ideals that ought to motivate individuals and society to invest in and structure higher education. The first is to enable individuals to lead flourishing lives of their own choosing. The second is to train individuals to collectively provide more and better goods and services, broadly conceived, for individuals in society. The third is to enable more citizens to participate in and contribute to democratic governance. Although flourishing is primarily an individual motivation, all three are social ideals because they concern the effects that education has on society as an aggregate of individuals living together in cooperative interaction. They are ideals because they describe goods that rational individuals would seek in the absence of the threat of the use of force by one individual against another. I will briefly argue that each of the three justifications for education is a social ideal that a liberal arts and sciences education is best suited to meet.
A flourishing life is one that can be pursued with passionate purpose, prioritizing reflection, civic engagement, and friendship. It is an examined life, which the liberal arts and sciences equip us for. By passionate purpose I mean a meaningful life that instills the grit and motivation to embrace challenges and find opportunities. While leading a meaningful life requires personal and autonomous choices, we make meaning out of the language, norms, and values that we are given by our society. In the most basic sense, our values can only be articulated in the words that we learn from our parents, friends and society, and these words are shaped by the trials and choices that our forbearers have faced. In order to flourish, then, one has to understand where one fits in the historical and social context of one’s time and place. Through studying history, the nature of humanity, what has been thought and said, and our creative achievements, we can come to see what has mattered to others, what people have resisted, worked, fought, and died for. In this way we can begin to discern what matters to us, and thereby to define our purpose.
An important ingredient in finding what matters is being able to read, study, and think about a variety of ways of life. Encouraging diverse ways of life, as the liberal arts does, teaches tolerance and respect for different ethnic and religious groups, which in turn promotes peaceful and cooperative interaction. A diversity in ways of life provides what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living,” which can offer different models for people to embrace or reject as not suitable for them. A society in which there are many possible ways of life that seem worthy of pursuing offers opportunities for individuals to remake themselves. If one fails at a certain line of work, there are many others to choose from in which one can still be successful. Furthermore, if different people pursue diverse ways of life, society as a whole is likely to make more discoveries and innovations that make all individuals’ lives better. Although some individuals might want not to be faced with choices either for themselves or others, on the whole, having options in ways of life is good for most persons and for society as a whole for these reasons. Hence, a rational individual will want to seek out this kind of diversity society-wide, even if they are certain of their own choice in a way of life, provided that others may not coerce them into changing their way of life. Developing individuals so that their lives may flourish is thus a social ideal.
To develop flourishing lives, education should provide individuals with the skills and knowledge they need to be able to imagine and create lives different from and better than their current life, as well as to pursue a chosen way of life deeply and passionately. An education in the arts, literature, history, philosophy will help them better imagine, while studying the social and behavioral sciences allows one to see how our imaginations are shaped and constrained by our economic and social circumstances. The natural sciences allow us to understand ourselves as one among many social animals on a small, delicately balanced, life-sustaining planet in a vast universe that was also born at a definite moment in time and will someday cease existing. Together the liberal arts and sciences further the ideal of a flourishing life by enabling us to understand our place in the universe, to discover or create a meaningful understanding of our place, and to develop our own personal purpose as a unique and irreplaceable member not only of society but of cosmic history.
The second ideal is what I call collective provision for society. Higher education is perhaps best suited to provide training for innovators and leaders to maximize economic, scientific, and technological growth in society, and for creating government policy makers and bureaucrats to manage social resources. This is the ideal that one might suspect is better satisfied by a narrow, specialized education. And, indeed, we do need engineers and accountants, social workers and architects. But I maintain that the breadth and imaginative depth that a liberal arts and sciences education allows is in fact deeper and more useful in the long run, and professionals are better off if they have liberal arts backgrounds. First, such an education enables a flourishing personal life, as I argued earlier. Second, a liberal arts and sciences background allows a person to flexibly respond to changes in the economy and society more generally. Technical competence in the digital age is a fleeting skill, and one has to be prepared to retool multiple times. History teaches us that such skills can be wiped out utterly and forever almost overnight. Think of typewriter repair technicians, or the engineers who worked on analog television signals, or the chemical engineers who worked for Kodak on making photographic film, or my own brother who was one of the last COBOL programmers. All of these technical skills became obsolete during my lifetime. Having flexible knowledge that allows one to understand cultures and how they change, individuals and how they tick, or basic science in order to apply deep theory to new problems, allows one to react effectively to change. More importantly, it allows one to imagine and bring about those new things and ideas that will replace our current technologies. As Steve Jobs pointed out, the liberal arts are the engine of innovation because they instill the disposition to think critically and never be satisfied with the status quo or good enough.
Technical innovation in itself will not bring about a better world without a concern for its ethical and political implications. Education in the liberal arts and sciences enables us to imagine the problems and implications of new technologies and to think about how past societies have failed to respond to change effectively. New goods and services that result from innovation must also be ethically developed and justly aimed and distributed if society is to thrive. Through philosophy we can think about the political and ethical implications of our choices in thought in order not to have to face the most negative consequences in real time with no preparation.
I come now to the third ideal of democratic participation. Citizens need to be scientifically literate, culturally sensitive, articulate, critical thinkers in order to be effective democratic participants and leaders in collective governance. They need to be able to see problems with social and governmental initiatives and be motivated to change them. Just as a liberal arts and sciences education enables an individual to flourish with a life of passionate purpose, so it enables individuals to engage with others and create a better future through civic participation. Citizens also need to tolerate and respect each other in order to hear and benefit from each others’ voices and ideas. A liberal arts and sciences education fosters an appreciation of each others’ cultural beliefs, assumptions, and mores, of the constraints and challenges others face.
Developing and implementing the patterns of thought and articulation that liberal arts and sciences teach are important means of achieving respect for our ideas. We must not foster the elitist notion that only through liberal arts and sciences education can one become a respectable citizen. But we also cannot be satisfied with a system that does not reflect the full diversity of society. Everyone deserves the opportunity to study the liberal arts and sciences. Having such diversity is an educational input and produces a democratically representative output of social and technical innovation.
To summarize, there are three social ideals that liberal arts and sciences education is well suited to meet, around which its distribution should be structured. First, it should develop individuals’ abilities to lead diverse, flourishing lives. Second, it should produce competent and creative, social and technical innovators to benefit society by their productions. Thirdly, liberal arts and sciences education should prepare citizens for democratic participation. This means that it must train a diverse elite who will develop public policy and goods and services that will serve all the people. It should also disrupt patterns of social inequality by lifting students from the social, psychological, and practical constraints of socioeconomic class and disadvantaged statuses.
Our world needs critical thinkers who will challenge received wisdom, discover problems and strike out in new ways to find solutions. We need the many disciplines of humanities, social and natural and computational sciences to come together in new ways and with the more pragmatically oriented scientists, practitioners, and scholars in engineering, medicine, the arts to create solutions to the world’s grand challenges. Studying and doing research in the liberal arts and sciences is transformative for both individuals and society. By causing us to think critically, to discover our purpose, and to pursue our dreams with passion, the liberal arts and sciences inspire us to live authentically. By inspiring many citizens to imagine different ways of life and to compare our way of life to others, to discover new truths, and to question tradition, they can transform society. I am passionate about it because I have experienced the transformation that a liberal arts and sciences education can bring about in one’s life. As the best of the best of the best scholars KU has nurtured, I am confident that you have experienced this transformation as well. I hope that as you go out into the world beyond Mount Oread you will from time to time reflect on the transformation that it has brought to your life and help to ensure that others can benefit from this kind of education as well.