It is surprising how often those of us who teach the liberal arts have to defend the importance of the liberal arts within the academy. Outside the academy, we expect this; most people don’t dwell on (or in) the liberal arts, and it would be unreasonable to ask the average person to explain them well.

But inside the academy, the pressures of financial reality always press upon us, and as universities and colleges have become more bureaucratic, they have also been increasingly led by people whose professional skills lie in administration and management, or in law and policy, or in fundraising. Honestly, most of them do a better job of navigating the shallow and treacherous shoals of federal funding and its labyrinth of associated laws than, say, the typical philosophy or English professor would. We have the patience for fine-grained texts, but that patience feeds on beauty and goodness and truth, all of which are in scant supply in governments.

The downside of this is that those administrators also tend to forget what we mean by the liberal arts. The name gets used in so many ways that it loses most of its meaning. In most places, it becomes a touch of varnish to give sheen but not bulk to training in a profession. A few classes that have no meaningful connection to one another but that satisfy some “distribution requirements” that can be reported to the government as proof that we have done the thing we agreed to. And as those classes are removed from the center of an education to the margins, it should come as no surprise when a class that once taught great texts and great questions now teaches some theory and some critique but does not dwell too long on the depths of being human.

I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.

Socrates, in Plato’s Meno, 86b-c

From time to time I find it helpful to reacquaint myself with the foundations of the liberal arts.

They are arts, which is to say they require practice over a long time, and one never completes them.

They are liberal, which is to say they are practices of those who are free or who wish to be free.

They make connections between the increasingly isolated disciplines.

This is illustrated by the many ways we use words like “art” and “law”, by the time we (hopefully) spend considering not just what is legal but what is good and just. (“Lex iniusta non est lex”)

Or considering what is not just useful but what is beautiful for its own sake.

Or seeking truth rather than pretending already to have mastered it.