Lacking self-awareness, many liberal arts professors blame “soulless” business schools and STEM programs for their woes. Capitalist greed and technocracy are at fault, they insist. In fact, motivated, highly industrious students, who come from modest circumstances and are often foreign-born, are exactly what colleges and universities seek out. Their outlook toward higher education tends toward the contractual and transactional. Coming as likely as not from distressed circumstances, they want to monetize what they have learned. Family expectations that graduates will do something to advance their finances and status often drive the education project. Such students are not mere careerists and grinds. They want to avoid economic hardship that they have known firsthand, unknown to cosseted children of privilege. Forgoing shared assumptions of reality, and making ambiguity and uncertainty their studies’ core, the liberal arts might seem pointless in the minds of increasingly practical students.
At college, I was required to study theology for four years. I also had classes in logic, metaphysics, rational psychology, ethics, aesthetics, existentialism, and the history of philosophy. If you think any or all of that was worthless, think again. Of course, if you study the past only in order to edit and revise it, you will learn nothing from it.
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