Price Check on the Liberal Arts Education

[An article I wrote about some recent difficulty at King's College of London, where I am studying a semester abroad]

It has been passed down like an old time decree from inside the walls of 10 Downing Street to the office of the Board of Directors and then, less formally, trickling through the halls and classrooms of King’s College – funds are drastically low, redundancies must be corrected.To be more precise the “redundancies” are, in fact, members of the King’s College staff and the “correcting” is going to be carried out through a sacking of roughly 10 percent of the professors and administrators that make up the King’s College staff. More frightening still, the board of directors overseeing the budget cuts has suddenly decided that this is the perfect opportunity to rethink this strange college curriculum referred to as the liberal arts education.
When Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State, announced the 12.5% budget cut for the funding of higher education the blow was absorbed by King’s staff and students alike with gritted teeth but steely resolve. After all, what else could be expected? For over a year now the financial markets worldwide have been characterized by down-turning lines and governments from the United States to China have been struggling to find the money necessary to continue on with at least some of the business as usual. But for the United Kingdom, one of the strongest economies in the world, the strain is everyday becoming more apparent as many areas are forced to make do with less funding. King’s College along with the other eighteen members of the university of London system are being put to the test – can a school that regularly makes it into the rankings of the top 25 universities in the world still make the cut after being put on this fiscal diet?
The higher-ups, namely the board of trustees and the board of governors, seem to think that a massive restructuring is what is called for. When the re-apportioned King’s College budget was released it was a blow to everyone. The lost money would not be, as many thought, distributed evenly over every department but rather the entire liberal arts curriculum would be called into question. The new idea being volleyed around: reduce or eliminate the subjects that don’t have a direct and evident correlation to post-graduation areas of employment. Say Auf Weidersehen to the German literature department, Au Revoir to the French equivalent and as for the King’s paleography department, the only one of its kind in all of London, it can go the way of most of its reference material – the history section. At the same time the economics department and the school of business remain untouched.
The decimation of choice departments might help tighten the school’s belt in the short run but will also have a much longer lasting effect on the well-rounded quality of the education that King’s students receive. Despite the relatively small percentage of students who will be directly affected by these cuts there has been a backlash that has united the campus in a way that few other issues have. The feeling around the campus is one of great anger. Students who appear apathetic as they day dream in their morning Medieval Book lecture are alight with indignation as they rally and petition for the subjects they chose to study and the professors who continue to inspire them.
What the board of directors do not seem to understand is that the liberal arts education has an intrinsic role in the forming and nurturing of many social and intellectual skills; skills that are crucial to the workforce and cannot be manifested in students in any other setting. A student of comparative literature doesn’t simply study the semiotics of great and impractical literature but also how to read, write and think critically about any topic that should present itself. Students in the Africana studies department don’t just sit and chronicle a history but learn to decipher social codes that help us to better understand the world we live in.
We are all becoming painfully accustomed to tightening our belts as the world economy trudges up slowly from its steep fall. We must all make sacrifices both superficial and significant. But in a time when we are continually let down by the status quo, when we are brought face to face with the harsh realization that the perfect system was in fact imperfect, doesn’t it make sense to, at the very least, not put all of our eggs into one basket again? The workforce may demand recruits with particularly relevant skill sets but the world demands the creativity, free-thinking and dexterous intelligence born of a liberal arts education. Here is a useful thought exercise for the well-educated men and women who sit on the King’s college board of directors: if you eliminate the classes that study metaphor and the never-ending epistemological dialogue, if you downsize departments dealing in the subtle distinctions of language, if you deem unworthy the classes that help us understand being, then what will we have to look forward to once we meet our precious bottom line?