Remarks on the liberal arts by Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board - Perspectives - excerpts from remarks made at the International Understanding Award Dinner of the Institute of International Education, 2002

Liberal Education, Summer, 2003 by Alan Greenspan

Yet the liberal arts embody more than a means of increasing technical intellectual efficiency. They encourage the appreciation of life experiences that reach beyond material well-being and, indeed, are comparable and mutually reinforcing. The intense pleasure many experience from listening to Mozart's great D Minor Piano Concerto has much in common with the deep satisfaction of solving a complex mathematical problem.

The challenge for our institutions of higher education is to successfully blend the exposure to all aspects of human intellectual activity, especially our artistic propensities and our technical skills. The challenge is particularly daunting because scientific knowledge expands and broadens the measurable rewards of its curriculum at a pace that liberal arts, by their nature, have difficulty matching. The depth of knowledge in nuclear physics is today far greater than it was a century ago, and useful teaching hours have doubtless expanded many fold. But do the same possibilities exist for courses in English literature?

Similar differences between science and the arts arise in the nonacademic world: Engineering and metallurgical insights have reduced the number of people required to produce a ton of steel, but the same number of musicians will be needed to perform a Beethoven quartet this evening as were needed a century ago. Many of you will recognize this application of Baumol's law. To make the point even more graphically, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has noted that the Minute Waltz could be played in fifty seconds, but he wondered whether it would sound as good. Overwhelmed with the increasing scientific knowledge base, our universities are going to have to struggle to prevent the liberal arts curricula from being swamped by technology and science.

The advent of the twenty-first century will certainly bring new challenges for our society and for our education system. We cannot know the precise directions in which advances in technology, conceptual thinking, and the transmission of knowledge will take us. However, we can be certain that our institutions of higher education will remain at the center of the endeavor to comprehend those profound changes and to seize the opportunities to direct them toward ever-rising standards of living and quality of life.

A global society reflects an ever more open economic environment in which participants are free to engage in commerce, finance, and education wherever in the world the possibilities of increased value added arise. The breaking down of barriers to commerce fosters ever-greater cross-border contact and further exploitation of the values of specialization, but on a global scale.

Excerpts from an address at the International Understanding Award Dinner of the Institute of International Education in New York, October 29, 2002. This article is in the public domain.