Featured Article: The Place for Research in a Liberal Arts Education
By Joel Schwartz, Charles Center Director and Professor, Department of Government, College of William and Mary; 2012 Institute Participant
I recall that when I was still a school-boy I worked hard to know the names of things that my eyes fell upon or that came into my use, frankly concluding that a man cannot know the natures of things if he is still ignorant of their names.... Often I proposed cases and, when the opposing contentions were lined up against one another, I diligently distinguished what would be the business of the rhetorician, what of the orator, what of the sophist. I laid out pebbles for numbers, and I marked the pavement with black coals and, by a model placed right before my eyes, I plainly showed what difference there is between an obtuse-angled, a right-angled, and an acute-angled triangle. Whether or not an equilateral parallelogram would yield the same area as a square when two of its sides were multiplied together, I learned by walking both figures and measuring them with my feet. Often I kept watch outdoors through the winter nights like one of the fixed stars by which we measure time. Often I used to bring out my strings, stretched to their number on the wooden frame, both that I might note with my ear the difference among the tones and that I might at the same time delight my soul with the sweetness of the sound.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, written in 1161 (1978, 136-137)
To what extent is the liberal arts mission of a college or university compatible with its research mission? Is it possible that, undertaken properly, undergraduate research can even refresh and re-energize a very traditional liberal arts agenda? This essay is a preliminary consideration of these questions that draws heavily on the experience we have had over the past several years at The College of William and Mary, made possible in part by a series of generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After a brief consideration of some of the most prominent features of the liberal arts tradition, and a historical and theoretical inquiry into the role of research in this tradition, I conclude that undergraduate research and the liberal arts can play a mutually supportive role in colleges today.
The Liberal Arts Tradition
Hugh’s Didascalion is a prominent example of a complex tradition of reflection on education in the liberal arts. This reflection became formalized in pedagogical writings associated with medieval Scholasticism, a literature that began with Augustine and included Boethius, Cassiodorus, Bede, and others. It also self-consciously reached back to the didactic works of Cicero, Quintillian, Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras. It became conventional in the medieval world to associate the liberal arts with the sevenartes, or domains of knowledge: the artestriviales, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the artesquadriviales, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. However, views on the actual number of artes that should be taught in a comprehensive education varied considerably. For example, “music” often referred broadly to all of the subjects over which the Nine Muses presided, including, for instance, history and music in the narrow sense. Hugh divided knowledge into four primary branches - the theoretical (truth), the practical (morals), the mechanical (“occupations of life”), and the logical; these, in turn, he subdivided into 21 artes.
Hugh’s text exemplifies three overarching themes that rested at the heart of this liberal arts tradition. The first is a conviction that knowledge as a whole is unified, something that is assured for him by the axial role that the Creator plays in the Creation. It followed that, if knowledge is unified, education can be comprehensive, embracing the unified whole of which each fragment of knowledge is a part. Second, just as a liberal education conveys the whole of knowledge, so does it seek to educate the whole person, including the cultivation of the student’s intellect, soul, and civic and social capacities. To use a modern vernacular, liberal education has always been student-centric. The artesliberalesdid, of course, exclude education in the art of money-making (the artesilliberales), but it is important to observe that this referred to the intent of the instructor and student more than the subjects that he or she taught or studied. For example, the study of architecture or agriculture, undertaken for the sake of knowledge alone, not for the purpose of making money, had a legitimate place in Hugh’s system of knowledge.
There was, finally, an emphasis on the activeness of the learning process itself. The “freedom” at the heart of the term “liberal” was not just a reference to the social class for whom liberal education was intended, i.e., well-to-do citizens, as opposed to slaves, who were legally un-free, or the lower classes, who lived a necessitarian life that makes free thought impossible. Freedom was not just a negative absence of impediments; it was also a positive and active attainment of the individual intellect striving to be reunited with God. The passionate commitment to student engagement can be seen in the quote that heads this essay: while students should be introduced to a broadly integrated body of knowledge, they should also be encouraged to engage vigorously with the subjects they are studying – analyzing, judging, criticizing, creating, and so on – because mere spectators to life cannot, in the end, be free human beings.
Hugh was writing on behalf of the liberal arts in a time that was experiencing many challenges that sound very familiar to us today. The small rural monasteries that had carried the liberal arts torch were being replaced by large cathedral schools in the emerging urban areas. As Jerome Taylor has pointed out, Hugh’s text was a defense of the unity of knowledge and the importance of a comprehensive education in the liberal arts against the encroaching growth he saw in specialized and pre-professional education, including schools of law and medicine, and narrow schools of theology that forbade the study of secular subjects (Hugh of Saint Victor 1978, 4).
The Liberal Arts Tradition and Research
Research, it is often assumed today, is the thing that faculty do when they are not engaged in enabling this liberal arts education. Where the liberal arts seek to uncover the interconnectedness of all knowledge, research seems to be successful precisely because scholars can isolate narrow questions from the great tangle of data and human speculation. A biologist might spend her career asking increasingly precise questions about a single virus; a Shakespeare scholar might dedicate an article to comparing the Bard’s use of the gerund phrase in the history plays. Moreover, the specialized knowledge and skills associated with answering these narrow questions are characteristically tied to specific professions for which research experiences are designed to prepare students. Perhaps, then, it is better if faculty maintain a sturdy partition between their duties as researchers and as liberal arts teachers. Liberal education, it would seem, would be threatened if research were allowed to play a significant role in the undergraduate curriculum.
“Research,” an Old French word, does not appear in Hugh’s text. However, it is profitable to consider how it might have been understood in the context of the classical/medieval liberal arts tradition out of which this text emerged. Put differently, how did Hugh experience what he was doing when he judged the soundness of arguments, worked out geometry problems in the dirt, or kept records of his observations of the stars? If we call this “research,” itself a medieval term, what could this have meant?
There are three perspectives on medieval “research” that make it a complex but ideal word for describing Hugh’s investigations, and they all flow from a consideration of the meaning of the ambiguous prefix “re-.”
First, “re-,“ in Latin, can denote intensity (not repetition or going back), as it does, for example, in “resplendent.” So research could simply be an intensive, careful “searching” for or after knowledge, a meaning that fits the meticulous attention to detail that Hugh brought to his investigations. (Hugh did not just “distinguish,” he “diligently distinguished.”)
But there are also two senses in which the implication of repetition or going back (consider not just repeat but also regenerate, refurbish, retrace, revert) or “searching again,” may also be a good fit with liberal arts sensibilities. First, as Hugh makes clear, much of the task of the scholar is to recover the wisdom of the ancients, a theme that permeates the Didascalicon. From this point of view, all scholarship, including medical or biological scholarship, is a historical act of recovery, renaissance – “research.” It is well known that liberal arts schools placed a surprising emphasis on the cultivation of their students’ memories, which primarily meant detailed memorization of the documents that they had inherited from antiquity. As we have seen, Hugh does not just evaluate the validity of arguments on their own merits, he judges their validity by categorizing them into the venerable categories of rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry.
There is also, finally, a view of knowledge in Hugh’s writings that we often associate with Plato’s Meno: knowledge of universal truths is present in the soul from birth and learning is really an act of re-membering. For instance, Hugh’s text begins with a reference to the Appolonian injunction to “Know Thyself” and with the claim that all wisdom comes from self-knowledge, or “self-searching” (Hugh of Saint Victor 1978, 46). To Hugh, this meant that education and re-search were at base a recovery and restoration of the knowledge of God’s creation that man had before the Fall and that remained latent in the soul; a more secular formulation, also advanced by Hugh, proposes that humans, including Meno’s uneducated slave boy, are born with the rational capacity to learn and understand. Education, from this perspective, is a “drawing out,” not a “putting in,” a perspective that fits well with the overall student-centered orientation of the liberal arts tradition.
Liberal education and medieval “research,” then, were fundamentally compatible. The intense and meticulous attention to detail that research demanded was naturally affiliated with the active and dedicated learning demanded of all liberal arts students. Moreover, research cultivated both a historical and an ontological memory that was closely aligned with the learning/recovery of theartes: it required a research into the interconnected whole of knowledge that went backwards in time, to the ancients and the historical Garden, and that developed the student’s native spiritual and intellectual capacity to grasp knowledge.
The Liberal Arts Today
The liberal arts tradition is complex and interpenetrated with the remnants of dispositions and assumptions that do not today always appear to be fully compatible or shared. Take a single question: should the liberal arts seek to cultivate intellectual independence or interdependence in students? This question rests at the root of many of the debates between advocates of libertarian/minimalist approaches to requirements and advocates for an extensive core curriculum. The “free” mind, to Hugh, exercises independent, critical judgment, yet the pursuit of knowledge is a collaborative process and knowledge itself is an interconnected whole to which all students are introduced. On one level, the goal is fierce critical independence; on another, the liberal education of a future doctor is the same as the liberal education of a future musician. Small wonder that faculty charged with the responsibility to identify learning objectives and assess outcomes for accreditation authorities find it difficult to operationalize “critical thinking” and other components of a liberal education. This frustration is a common refrain in the writings of social scientists who have tried to empirically study the efficacy of liberal arts curricular practices (Glyer and Weeks 1998, x; McClelland, D.G, D.C.1981, 13-14; Bird, C 1975, 109).
Yet there are good reasons to believe that “liberal arts” is not just a slogan that we should discard because it cannot easily be factored into specific, operationalized propositions. Many of the studies of the efficacy of a liberal arts education have found that practices commonly associated with liberal arts institutions (close faculty-student contact, a residential student body, etc.) have positive outcomes for students. Moreover, other studies have gone further to demonstrate that these practices have a more pronounced and enduring impact when they are employed together in a “seamless learning environment” (Seifert 2008, 110.) Liberal arts experiences for students, then, should not be seen as the outcome of specific institutional “best practices” that could, for instance, be transferred individually with success to a university that lacks the larger matrix of practices of which each is a part. The convictions and practices that have come down to us as components of a liberal arts education do not just share a common intellectual pedigree; evidence shows that they also work together to achieve positive and measurable student outcomes (Astin 1993, 1995, 2000; Pascarella, and Terenzini 1998; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005; Nussbaum, 1997)
There have been many attempts to enumerate and study the “experiences” and “outcomes” that are intrinsic to the liberal arts. We should not be surprised to see that for the most part these schemes can be grouped into the three basic categories emphasized in Hugh’s text. There may be a diminished temptation today to assume an underlying unity of knowledge, but it remains core to liberal arts institutions to introduce students to a breadth of subjects and to provide them with opportunities to appreciate the contributions that a range of disciplines can make to our understanding of the world. While only a small number of institutions still identify the pilgrim’s progress to salvation as a discrete learning objective, liberal arts schools continue to assert a mission to cultivate the whole person, including their students’ civic capacities and appreciation for diversity, in addition to their specific training in their majors. The persistence of a commitment to engaged learning explains why liberal arts institutions place a high value on maintaining a favorable teacher-student ratio so that essay assignments, classroom dialogue (and, I will soon add, research opportunities) are a regular experience for students.
The liberal arts tradition remains a useful concept because it gives us a vernacular for capturing the embeddedness or interconnectedness of the full range of liberal arts goals and practices. For example, while it is possible to separate the teaching of writing (for example, in freshman composition courses) from the teaching of the content of disciplines, a liberal arts sensibility tells us that writing, learning, and thinking will each profit if all three are infused throughout the curriculum. From the point of view of our students, there should be a playful interaction between the subjects they are studying in their courses, the debates they are having in their residence halls, the articles they are writing for the student newspaper, and the films they are seeing on Saturday night. A liberal arts sensibility is skeptical of distance learning because it is predicated on the view that writing or history can adequately be taught if they are individually extricated from this embedded context and conveyed over the internet to discrete markets of consumers who want to be able to write a better job resume or learn the causes of the Civil War. Advocates for distance learning see increased efficiency in product and market differentiation and segmentation; the efficiency of liberal arts schools, difficult to demonstrate, is that they simultaneously accomplish a comprehensive set of learning and personal growth objectives in a compact campus setting.
The Liberal Arts and Research Today
Undergraduate research became a specific and intentional institutional focus on college campuses in the early 1980's. For instance, the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) was initiated in 1978 and formally incorporated in 1981. Today, undergraduate research has become a distinct consideration in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and it is not easy to find a college web site that does not shine a prominent light on its superior undergraduate research opportunities. The growth in research programs has been accompanied by a growing body of literature on the impact of undergraduate research experiences for students (Boyd and Wesemann; 2009; Hensel 2012). This literature has, for instance, documented the positive effect that research experiences can have on grades, retention, and graduation rates, and on the attainment of discipline-specific learning objectives and the promotion of post-baccalaureate education (Osborn and Karukstis 2009).
However, commentators have not addressed in an explicit and systematic way the relationship between the goals of providing students with research experiences and of providing them with a liberal education. At The College of William & Mary we have learned that an ambitious undergraduate research program can be a significant ally of very traditional liberal arts objectives, but we have also learned that there is nothing inevitable about this relationship – that to achieve this goal it is critical to build research into the curriculum and the co-curriculum in a careful way. To accomplish this we have orchestrated several transitions over the past 30 years that collectively have improved the alignment of the research and teaching missions of the College.