What is a Liberal Arts College?

When I started at Bryn Mawr I was excited to be a professor at a liberal arts college. I loved the ideal of an education which focuses on the overall growth of the student, and I was eager to be part of structures which enabled that for students. As an undergrad at Cornell I got a liberal arts education, as it is commonly called, but the experience of the small, liberal arts college was foreign to me.

At Bryn Mawr I came to know students who chose to come there instead of going to a big university, either public or private. These students came with a contrast in mind between a liberal arts college and a professionalized university. Call this the contrast. As with any school, some students at Bryn Mawr seemed to find themselves there rather than actively haven chosen to be there. But other students seemed to thrive and revel in the fact that they were making a choice by coming to a college like Bryn Mawr, where they hoped that free of any professional training they could explore whatever they wanted and grow as human beings. As a professor, I was like these students. I had a choice to see if I wanted to teach at a university, and I chose the Bryn Mawr experience instead. I too, like the students, was driven by the sense of the contrast. I hoped the contrast was true, and that being at Bryn Mawr would offer me a different way of being an academic than I had seen at Cornell and Harvard.

The contrast was played up by administrators at Bryn Mawr. It was an easy thing to fall back on to sell the college. The reason to choose Bryn Mawr was encapsulated by two messages. First, a liberal arts college might be better for you than a university, and second, as a woman, being at a woman's college might be better for you than a co-ed school. I wasn't sure I believed the latter. Or, at any rate, I wasn't sure what to think about that. I thought it was good that students had the choice to go to a women's college. But naturally for myself it was the first message which moved me: yes, I thought to myself, universities are professionalized spaces, where one is dictated to by the professional norms, whereas at a liberal arts college one can be more free of that. I was in the grip of the contrast, and hoped it was true.

Freedom and Professionalization

One appeal of philosophy is that it enables one to reflect on any aspect of life, without external constraints. Want to think about mind, culture, values, art? Go ahead. When doing philosophy you don't have to take other people's ideas for granted, or live under their tyranny. You can reflect for yourself. Start afresh. Be your own person. Call this the freedom of philosophy (Freedom, for short).

For a long time I wanted to be a philosophy professor because I assumed that it was the best way to have the freedom of philosophy. If I was a non-academic, wouldn't I have to make myself fit into the norms of society, be trapped within social constraints and pressures? I looked at my family, most of whom were non-academics, and looked at them with a kind of pity that they had to do what their bosses wanted them to do, had to move like sheep within the social structures, and had to define themselves by already preexisting roles and identities. I wanted to avoid that. Where could I get the freedom to just think and become whoever I wanted to be? Like many people, I fell in love with philosophy because it seemed to provide that freedom. I wanted that more, for the rest of my life. So I wanted to be a philosophy professor. Call this the protection of academic philosophy (Protection).

As a graduate student and a professor I started to realize that academic philosophy has lots of problems. Lots of ways in which it needs to improve in order to become even a nominally fair institution to all of its members. I also started to feel that part of what made things worse is that there was no shared sense in academia about how academic philosophers should act, what norms they should all follow. It seemed to be a free for all, where anyone for the most part can do, or atleast try to do, anything, as long as they have tenure. This very freedom seemed to be an obstacle for creating meaningful change in the profession. Perhaps I want the profession to be a certain way; well, somebody else doesn't. What then? Nothing seemed to follow. All there would be were fraught department meetings or repressed agressions, but outwardly no confrontation was possible. For confrontation presupposed that there were some norms that apply to all of us, and that we are bound by them. And people wanted to protect their own freedom too much to adhere to such shared norms. So I started to care more about having such shared norms, as a way to make progress in changing the profession. Call this the internal push for professionalization (Internal Push).