Educated non-experts

We wrapped up our second intensive mini-course today. We've meet three mornings in a row (the original plan was to be in person for all three, but it turned out the building we'd been given a room in is closed Sundays, so today's meeting was on zoom), welcomed some inspiring visitors, and read three interesting pieces from New School history. The first session, devoted to the question "What are the liberal arts?" welcomed the dean of my college for a conversation about the nature of the liberal arts and included the school's stab at general education goals, called "Shared capacities." The second session, "Mapping liberal arts majors," looked mainly at other schools' programs, but we also read a new vision for the fine arts major at Parsons, and welcomed two of the students (both joint liberal arts-fine arts students) who wrote it to a discussion of student culture.

Most of today, "Designing a liberal arts major for The New School," was spent synthesizing students' occasionally surprising ideas for what should go into a liberal arts education, but we kicked it off with one final piece of New Schooliana, a summary of the 1983 report of a high caliber commission called to advise The New School on whether and how to set up a liberal arts college. The report (known at the time as the Heilbroner Report after its chair, economist Robert Heilbroner) often sounds very current but its most radical idea continues to be a revelatory bridge too far: instead of having students progressively specialize over four years, the Commission's proposal imagined students starting and ending with interdisciplinary seminars. Specialization happened during the middle two years. 

This hourglass shaped-curriculum (the climax of the history of undergraduate liberal arts experiments at The New School I wrote a few years ago) proved too hard to implement, especially given that many students don't spend a full four years here, but it's an exciting way of making liberal arts more than a background or a foundation for disciplinary learning. It's different also from the programs we'd learned about which devote the final year to an internships, independent or community projects. Certainly starting to apply what you've learned in the the "real world" is valuable (I'm reminded of Naropa's inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale model). But this supplements that with a return to the community of learning.

The "perspective and obligations of the educated non-expert" are that of the liberal arts in a profound way. (We noted the dangerous contrary, "uneducated experts.") Students still should become "intellectual[ly] self-sufficient" but this includes knowing the limits of your expertise, and how to find and work with those who know what you don't. These imagined senior seminars are models of a "complex, rapidly changing and free society" sustained by habits of humility and collaboration, anchored in communities of lifelong learning. Nice!

Beyond the fact that this proved logistically too challenging for The New School of the 1980s, these ideals were at best rhetorical for our students, half of them from non-liberal arts parts of the university and many near or at the end of their studies. But as a dynamic way of thinking about the relationship of disciplinary expertise and liberal learning, I hope the Heilbroner Report offered some useful takeaways. In a tiny way, our mini-course was a taste of what such a senior seminar for educated non-experts would be like.