by Joe Miller
Last week, my alma mater celebrated its 250th birthday.
Hampden-Sydney College, located in Southside Virginia, was the last of the so-called colonial colleges – the set of colleges founded prior to the American Revolution.
Hampden-Sydney was founded as a college for men – American women couldn’t attend college until 1837, when Oberlin College became co-educational. These days, all public colleges and universities and almost all private ones are co-ed. Hampden-Sydney remains all male, one of only three liberal arts colleges to do so. (Morehouse College in Atlanta and Wabash College in Indiana are the others.)
Hanging on to its all male heritage isn’t the only way in which Hampden-Sydney is unique.
From the colonial era through the first half of the 19th century, the liberal arts college was by far the dominant model for American colleges. The name “liberal arts” might lead you to think that it means a focus on the arts. But that’s not quite right.
The term comes from the Latin artes liberalis and was meant to describe the knowledge that was appropriate for people who are free.
In the United States – which, as I’ve argued before, is the first country to be founded on the idea of freedom, not on a specific people or place – the liberal arts took on a special significance. After all, if all Americans are free, then a liberal arts education should be for everyone.
And so liberal arts colleges proliferated. By 1850, there were 239 colleges in the United States. For comparison, there were four universities in the UK at that time, even though the UK’s 1850 population was 20% larger than America’s.
America’s early colleges aimed at producing people who could govern themselves – people who could both survive and thrive in a democracy.
This sort of education is crucial in a country whose very motto is E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). As author and academic Mark Slouka notes, “We can’t get to the unem [one] until we’ve imagined the pluribus [many].”
The liberal arts help us understand the world around us, which in turn helps us to find common ground with our fellow citizens.
Hampden-Sydney’s mission statement reflects this aim.
“Hampden-Sydney College seeks to form good men and good citizens, in an atmosphere of sound learning.”
The idea that college is a place for producing good citizens seems a little quaint now.
Most Americans these days view college in a much more transactional way. Parents, students and legislators increasingly see college as a job training program. More recently, the view has crept its way into university administrations, which now routinely slash programs that fail to produce high-earning graduates.
So, it’s not really surprising that degrees in humanities disciplines – the heart and soul of a liberal arts education – are in freefall.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences reports that bachelor’s degrees in the humanities accounted for only 8.8% of all degrees awarded in 2022. In 2005, the figure was just under 15%.
Overall, the traditional humanities disciplines are awarding the lowest share of undergraduate degrees since systematic recordkeeping began in 1949.
Students shun the humanities in favor of degrees that provide concrete job skills.
Accounting, computer science, design, marketing and communications are on the rise. Students major in social work or elementary education. They take degrees in nursing or major in STEM disciplines in preparation for medical school. They study government or “pre-law” in advance of law school or major in business to prepare for an MBA.
Above all, students complain about general education courses, arguing that literature and philosophy and history do nothing to prepare them for the jobs they want.
Hampden-Sydney has a long history of resisting these trends.
The college did not offer degrees in the sciences until the 50s (the 1950s, mind you!) on the grounds that a Chemistry or a Biology major seemed a little too much like vocational training.
As a freshman, I took a required, two-semester humanities sequence in which we worked our way through a traditional canon that included the Bible, Homer, Plato, St. Augustine, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens and a whole pile of poets and essayists.
Students interested in business studied economics, which included healthy doses of the history of economics and political economy. Aspiring computer scientists majored in math. Math 101 was calculus.
There were no professional or pre-professional majors offered.
Treating college as a trade school for jobs that can be done sitting down is wildly inefficient. After all, very few of those jobs require four years of intensive training.
Those four years are much better spent learning about the world we live in, about our culture and how we got to where we are.
The fact that so many people are coming out of college without any sense of those things explains a lot of what has gone wrong in recent years. Or, as Slouka puts it, “it’s our inability to imagine the pluribus that’s fracturing the unum.”
