“Colleges and universities that are dedicated to liberal arts ideals have three fundamental purposes: the pursuit, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.” – Robert P. George, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, p. 261.

I’m not sure that every college and university is dedicated to those ideals, though many claim they are.

This morning’s news about Syracuse University cutting its majors in Classics, Fine Arts, and Russian (inter alia) is a reminder that even wealthy and prestigious universities are finding that students aren’t all that interested in studying the liberal arts.

Of course many schools will object and say they have a rich liberal arts core, by which many of them mean that they require their undergrads to take a smattering of courses at the introductory level before moving on to the real work of getting a degree in a professional program. From what I’ve seen, those cores tend to be dis-integrated and unconnected, and neither the students nor most of the faculty have much interest in them.

For my part, I keep returning to the words in the Book of Common Prayer that describe something akin to but richer than what Professor George describes:

“Sound learning, new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom”

Knowledge is good, and I agree that we should pursue it, preserve it when we find it, and then hand it on to those who come after us. But we should do more than that. A liberal arts education–one that aims to help people be free and to share that freedom with others–should pursue wisdom as well. Wisdom is more than knowledge; wisdom involves knowing what to do with that knowledge. Such wisdom is not easy to impart, especially if our understanding of the liberal arts is just a distribution of a few box-ticking classes. If our education lacks integrity, we should not be surprised if the same is true of the knowledge it imparts.