The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) was founded in 1993 to accredit liberal arts colleges, including undergraduate liberal arts colleges within universities. This summer, the U.S. Department of Education granted the academy official status as an accrediting agency, thereby authorizing it to serve as the primary accrediting agency for colleges that select it. In fact, since its inception, AALE has been attracting and moving to accredit a number of colleges that take liberal education as their primary mission. But the Department of Education's decision effectively bestows a good housekeeping seal of approval that grants the academy, as primary accreditor for those who select it, equal status with the six regional accrediting agencies that, until now, have ranked as the only primary accrediting agencies.
The importance of accreditation, as college and university administrators know all too well, cannot be exaggerated, for primary accreditors serve as the "gatekeepers" to federal programs, including the federally guaranteed student loan programs. Not to put too fine a point upon it, colleges that lack "official" accreditation face countless difficulties beginning with the inability to secure federal financial resources and extending to a dubious reputation for intellectual and educational quality.
Ironically, the regional associations have, in recent years, moved away from the attempt to define and implement specific curricular standards. Rather, they have focused upon resources, ranging from the number of volumes in the library to the diversity of the faculty. Whatever one thinks of these criteria, it should be clear that many smaller colleges, which provide students with an admirable and even superior undergraduate education, may have difficulty in meeting them. From the start, the purpose of the academy has been to refocus the criteria for and process of accreditation squarely upon the curriculum itself.
More, AALE is grounded in the conviction that no assortment of "distribution requirements" can substitute for a core liberal arts curriculum, including western civilization, foreign language requirements, the reading and writing of English, philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences. A solid liberal education provides coherence, discipline and depth by ensuring that students have some introduction to the ways in which writers and philosophers have viewed human nature, political society and the relation between continuity and change in human affairs. A solid introduction to the ways in which thinkers have understood the problems of scientific and moral progress encourages students to think about abiding problems: Which forms of knowledge are cumulative, which forms are not? How do political values and institutions develop? Is it possible to speak of a human condition?
A well-coordinated liberal curriculum also provides coherence in students' educational experience: If students are required to take the same--or closely related--courses, they will, necessarily, have a common intellectual ground that encourages them to think about the experiences, aspirations and values that people of different backgrounds share, in contrast to "who I am" courses, which tend to divide them.
It has been popular to view such a "traditional" liberal education as an elite enterprise that rides rough-shod over the sensibilities and identities of ordinary folk, especially "minorities" and women, yet the discrediting or dismantling of liberal education in the traditional sense has primarily been spearheaded by the elite, which apparently no longer sees a special need for such an education for itself. If you go to an ivy league college and do reasonably well, you are likely to attend the law school or business school of your choice, and you will have made the social contacts that will facilitate your future career.
If one were so inclined, it would not be difficult to argue that the retreat from liberal education actually represents a rather cynical and self-serving attempt to disfranchise the competition--that is, the non-elite college population. For those who grow up in families of modest income in which the parents may not have attended a very good college--and who have not attended private secondary schools, do not have the same cultural background as the children of the elite. A smorgasbord education grounded in a spurious multiculturalism and identity politics too frequently deprives such young people of the sense of coherence and depth that a liberal education can provide. Yet they are precisely the ones who need coherence and depth to compete for entry into law, business and medical schools.
Liberal education provides students who must compete for a place in the world with an intellectual discipline and background they desperately need. It also trains them to think intelligently and confidently about problems that do not obviously relate to their immediate lives, and since their ambitions focus on "leaving the neighborhood," this ability seems essential. (It defies my imagination that some people apparently think the way to prepare students to deal with a new and strange world is to learn to think of themselves as fundamentally different from all others, much less as natural victims. You might just as well try to "invent" yourself as a trained seal.) But then, today, if we may trust the reports that circulate widely among professors in professional and graduate schools, even the most privileged students seem to be losing the ability to think cogently and write clearly about the essential complexity of the human condition and its infinite manifestations from religion to scientific inquiry to politics.
We increasingly--and perhaps understandably--tend to justify "diversity" and "relevance" in education on the grounds that we all belong to global society. Yet paradoxically, one of the premier attributes of our global neighborhood lies in the similarity of the experiences we share, the television we see, and the music we listen to. The colors of our skin, like our sex and ethnic background, may differ, but, from a larger perspective, what contemporary students share, like the individualistic values multiculturalism applauds, vastly exceeds what divides them. And whatever the differences among contemporary students may be, we may be sure that all of us differ in fundamental ways from any one, of whatever cultural background, who was born before the end of the 18th century and the irreversible explosion upon the world of the American, French, Haitian and Industrial Revolutions. Among the many virtues of a liberal education, surely its commitment to helping students to think across the divide ranks high.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is the Eleanore Raoul Professor of History.