Artes Liberales: Alma Mater*

A reflective response to Donald Kagan’s Farewell Speech, "Ave Atque Vale"

Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible.

This past year, I struggled to understand the value of a liberal arts education. I was in chemistry, choir, great con, and French both semesters. It’s not that I didn’t value the learning, the process, the knowledge gained—but it felt irrelevant to the “real world” at times. Chemistry filled my time and my mind with technical, memorized knowledge about ions, batteries, crystalline compounds and heat capacities. It was the most practical knowledge and yet the least useful given my interests. The time to spend musing on Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine, or Dostoyevsky was few and far between, and the improvement in my French minimal. Without a clear vision for which discipline to focus on, the joy in learning itself lessened—the knowledge gained will fade, and the study of many things sadly limited the depth of each of them.

Kagan says that in the liberal arts institutions of today, there is “no attempt to shape good character, for the better universities lead the country in the direction of a kind of relativism, even nihilism.” Education that is value-free, undirected, and uninformed by historical and geographical perspectives leaves “a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness.” Not knowing enough about liberal arts colleges at large, I can only speak of my experience at St. Olaf and the periodic rootlessness I feel. Yet, St. Olaf College is a formative place for faith, friendships, ethics. I am sometimes disappointed with the institution, but the college and its students are mutually accountable to the goals of the liberal arts. They cannot be achieved without the help of one another. As a student, I have a large responsibility for my own learning.

The ideals of a liberal arts education—liberal learning, the value of knowledge for its own sake, and the exploration of ethical and moral foundations upon which to build a life—deeply resonate with me. The liberal arts ought to foster awareness of the many perspectives and lenses we can wear, the philosophies underlying our disciplines; it should nourish us in practicing virtue and, as a virtue itself, should foster exploration of what “the good life” is, to borrow from the Greeks. It’s confusing for these values to be competing with financial and stewardship concerns of today. But I think that we reconcile these perspectives by finding the common values between them, even if we may have to dig below the surface at times. As Mary says about fundraising at LSS—it may seem like we care only about money because that’s what we talk about, but the money is a means that allows us to build community and love the neighbor.We must continually ask ourselves what drives us, and inquire after the common good together--both in and outside of higher education. May the four years of liberal arts raise our hearts and minds to that end.

*alma mater, latin for "nourishing mother"