Introduction

Liberal education is becoming rare in America. At the time of the American founding a liberal education was de rigeur for anyone who aspired to public life. In 1900, it remained the norm in America’s colleges. And as the core curricula of colleges and universities in 1950 attest, it remained the central, defining feature of undergraduate education as late as the mid twentieth century. Today it is uncommon. While liberal education is not synonymous with education in the humanities, the two are closely tied, and so visible trends in the latter can help us see the fate of the former. Data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education show that only 7.6% of bachelor’s degrees in 2010 were awarded to majors in the humanities, down from 14% nationally in 1966, ¹ a trend especially prominent among women. Recent news reports indicate that the trend away from the humanities is visible not only in state schools but private universities like Stanford and Harvard, and indeed is worldwide. ² The vast majority of students graduating from state universities and colleges follow curricula that prepare them, or so they hope, for lucrative jobs. As for private universities and liberal arts colleges, whether secular or religiously affiliated, it often seems that only administrators charged with raising funds still claim that there is or should be a coherent and common liberal education of their students. Their watchword is “diversity,” and their courses are more and more specialized in areas of peculiar interest to their faculty.