Back to the Basics

For more than a century, Indiana has received esteem on a lineage of great artistic and scientific minds – Theodore Clement Steele, Hoagy Carmichael and Alfred Kinsey, to name a few. The Jacobs School of Music holds an international reputation on par with the Kelley School of Business. Former Chancellor and President Herman B Wells staked his career on IU’s success as an international cultural center, while championing civil rights and the broad-mindedness that has helped Bloomington’s diverse communities flourish. He was a man who appreciated ideas and wanted to instill this appreciation in others. It was because of this affinity for broad educational traditions that our nation’s great state universities were created. IU’s cultural bedrock has made it one of the finest schools in the country for those seeking to study the humanities. Yet today, these traditions of reading classics and answering “the permanent questions,” as University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom wrote 20 years ago, are in decline. Our current modes of education are sparking a fiery national debate about the relevance of the humanities. Doubt lingers as to how higher education is doing justice to these questions. Over the past few decades, “classic” modes of teaching and learning at the college level have become more or less obsolete. The result: Schools may take their humanities departments seriously, but society as a whole seems to scoff at them. Truly diligent and driven students, consistent with popular belief, do not spend their college years wholesomely pondering and meditating on the human condition. They “hit the books” so they can make money, expand the scope and productivity of business and find ways to fight cancer, AIDS and terrorism. These are, of course, worthwhile endeavors. But without a baseline level of liberal arts knowledge, can our graduates, then, truly be considered “educated”? Aristotle’s postulates, Picasso’s questioning of perspective and Shakespeare’s immortal eloquence may stoke the fires of curiosity for some. Yet however uniquely original these thinkers and artists are, however vast their stamp of influence upon the world, the titans of higher education have done a lackluster job at best celebrating and furthering that stamp upon the world. Federal and social programs, like those put out by the National Endowment of the Arts, fail to garner widespread attention to and appreciation for the works they purportedly cherish. Even local attemps to further cultural knowledge usually fall flat. No one wanders into Shakespeare; they have to be introduced. And while IU grads shouldn’t have to be fluent in Latin or Ancient Greek or have to prove the Pythagorean theorem, they should be at least somewhat aware of the principles that their nation was founded on. Indeed, the problem cannot be solved at a national level. Even if we as a society are troubled by our deficiencies as a nation of specialists, the change must come from universities. It must be educational institutions that require of their students a general level of liberal arts knowledge, so that in addition to being better at their jobs, graduates are better citizens.