Liberal Ed in crisis: Trinity College President Dick Hersh talks frankly about the landmark Greater Expectations report—and what we can expect from it - Interview

University Business, Jan, 2003 by Katherine Grayson

University Business: Dr. Hersh, as one of the national panelists behind the recently released AAC&U report, do you believe that liberal education can keep its promise of purpose in a world where it is accessible to all? Or, will a liberal education only survive in a culture where certain individuals wish to pursue that high ideal of education and others attend community, vocational, or professional schools?

Dr. Hersh: Will it be difficult? Yes. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. A liberal education in the best sense--in the deepest and widest sense of the term--is an education that we have always argued is the best education for citizens and particularly for leaders in a democracy. That doesn't mean that we have only liberal education institutions out there; there are community colleges and others we would think of as more vocational, and there is no attempt to pretend that they offer a liberal education, per se. But big universities, public and private, all make the claim that they already, ought to, and are providing what they would call liberal education. So, the Greater Expectations report, at the very least, is responding to that claim of what American higher education is--that is, that liberal education is a fundamental basis for a traditional bachelor's degree.

So, we're not talking about hanging onto a foothold; you're not concerned that with the growth of community colleges and vocational and professional schools, a liberal education as we know it will become a smatter piece of the higher ed pie. The report is addressing the quality of the delivery of a liberal arts education, correct?

Well, that's an interesting question; I don't think we ever discussed the issue of proportionality. It's that we're not as efficacious as we ought to be, wherever we claim we're doing it. But I honestly don't think that we can afford people to not be liberally educated in the long run, independent of whether they eventually go through a professional or so-called vocational education. The reason I suggest that, is that at one point, we all assumed that high school education was de facto liberal education and we now admit that it's no longer that. So now, in some sense, college and university education is somewhat compensatory for everybody.

But is a liberal education compensatory?

Society has to ask the question, "What is the purpose of higher education?" It has multiple purposes, one of which is indeed to get people to the point where they are more employable and capable of moving into the work world. But also of going through a series of learning curves--that is, being able to change the kind of work they do over time. That's the nature of the work force today. What better kind of education to get than the kind that gives you the toots and the competencies and the basic knowledge to continue learning? Liberal education is the bests for that upward and onward triangle of learning.

But if today, people are being educated more and more along specialty, professional, and vocational lines, doesn't that mean they will have less flexibility, less adaptability, less opportunity to think out of the box, in leadership mode?

Yes. That's why liberal education ought to have a much more powerful and pervasive presence in our educational system. The notion of Greater Expectations has multiple meanings. It means there ought to be a much better articulation between what happens at K-12 and what happens in higher education. But it also means greater expectations for what we think of as the meaning of a higher education. But you're right: There is a centrifugal force in higher education, as well as in American culture, which is pulling people away from being liberally educated, and toward being narrowly educated. We're not so much freeing people in the sense that a true liberal education would, but we're in some sense constricting them. What an irony! And the word "higher" in higher education has increasingly been reduced to less than higher; to the lowering of standards, to grade inflation, and lower expectations. They have all conspired to the narrowing of what we mean by education and liberal education: getting a degree; getting a piece of paper as opposed to getting an education. So Greater Expectations not only talks about making sure that we are as broad and as deep and as demanding and as challenging as we ought to be at the expectation level, but it also says that we should be holding greater expectations for our students than we do, and much greater expectations for ourselves as higher educators. It's a statement about what we, as the academy, have allowed ourselves to become as a part or product of American culture. But it's also about us--the people who help to inform and perhaps change American culture. Are you saying our own inability to see the real value of a liberal education may be the greatest danger?

That's exactly the issue. We're increasing people's myopia by going after what we think is deep and narrow learning. There's a real question about whether we're getting the deep learning, and we certainly understand the consequences of too narrow learning. Given that our life span is already 20 to 30 years longer than it was at the turn of the 19th century, and that we've now increased access to the large proportion of our population, are we facing the reality that we've added a minimum of four years onto formal education? If so, and we're providing access to it, then let's make sure that we don't just provide access, but provide access to something worthy of access. Access without quality is a hollow promise. There's the notion that we've "won" because we've made huge progress on the issue of access. And though that absolutely needs to be maintained and strengthened, we have to ask the question, "What is the access to?" We have to ask if we are satisfied with the product of what we're producing. And the answer is, we're not.