The New Liberal Arts

by James J. O'Donnell, Professor of Classical Studies 
and Director of the Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts,
University of Pennsylvania

The following is based on an article of the same title published
originally in Ideas, the magazine of the National Humanities Center,
in September 1995.  A further discussion in the same vein between Dr.
OUDonnell and Sheldon Hackney, Chairman of the National Endowment for
the Humanities and former President of the University of Pennsylvania,
appeared in Humanities, September/October 1995 and on the World Wide
Web <URL:http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/hackney.html>.

The present state of the humanities can only be understood as a
product of the times, chiefly the long generation of constrained
budgets and intellectually timid leadership in Academe.  The 1960s,
about which everyone has a favorite myth and few seem to have any
accurate "memories" at all, scared the bejabbers out of academic
administrations and left them scrambling to manage budgets suddenly
tight to the point of snapping.  The strategy of choice has been to
concentrate on management and to forego involvement in the
intellectual life of the community.  Perhaps presidents and provosts
fear that if the imputed naturally leftist tendencies of the faculty
are given too much attention, the imputed naturally rightist
tendencies of trustees and donors would rebel.  If so, this strategy
has backfired.  Faculty, left to theorize without serious engagement
in the leadership of the institution, have been self-indulgent in the
extreme, and have succeeded in getting themselves called on the carpet
by a squadron of journalists and sophists.

It has also been an age of hand-wringing and indecision.  When I
attend meetings that are called to address one or another "crisis" in
our profession, they regularly end with timid observations that we
aren't actually doing all that badly and that if we just work together
cooperatively, perhaps we can make things a little better.  And isn't
awful that people outside say such awful things about us, when we're
really such virtuous people?

But a powerful new variable has entered the picture.  It is no panacea
and it offers no path to a promised land.  It changes and will change
the economics and the landscape of higher education dramatically.  It
offers us ways to get beyond our intellectual and institutional dead
ends, to demonstrate the irrelevance and futility of our left-right
squabbles, to reconnect what we think with what we do, and to suggest
a novel future for the humanities.

The sudden invasion of our carefully constructed social awareness by
talk of the information superhighway is more than hype.  The power of
the computer and the network as tools for enhancing our communication
with the world around us is nothing short of majestic.  In the history
of culture, only the introduction of writing itself and of printing
technology can be compared with this moment.  Determinism is a natural
temptation in the face of powerful technology, but a mistaken reading
of what actually happens.  Put simply, the new technology is very
nearly as much a response to newly expressed needs and ambitions as it
is a shaper of them.  Determinism can be very reassuring, but all we
can be sure of is that a tidal wave is coming.  Where any individual
boat will wind up afterwards is a matter highly susceptible to the
application of prudence beforehand and skillful manipulation betimes.

The first reports from the front lines of higher education on the
information superhighway are coming in.  I've been responsible for a
few of them myself and paid close attention to the others.  What is
unmistakable is that technology does what it always does: provides
tools.  Those tools may eventually shape their owners, but they are
always assuredly instruments with which their owners may pursue their
own aims.  What will we do on the superhighway?  What happens to
higher education when every student has a link to a flood of words and
images of every imaginable kind from around the world, and when every
teacher and every student can reach out to each other at all hours of
the day and night?  The short answer is that we don't know; we will
soon find out; and in so doing we will reinvent pedagogy as we know
it.

In many ways we have already reached the place where this
transformation will take place.  At the University of Pennsylvania,
multimedia textbooks, World-Wide Web online teaching resources,
interactive email between faculty and students and between Penn and
the rest of the world, and even such apparent exotica as MOO online
conferencing software (where a student from Idaho and a student from
Georgia can share a virtual can of soda from a virtual soda machine,
and engage in soda machine conversation, before entering a plush
virtual "seminar room" for high-level scholarly discourse--all without
leaving their desks far from Penn)--all these tools have already
become everyday practice for many of us, and we are hard at work
exploiting their power (and trying to make sure their power does not
overwhelm us).  Even where faculty have only started to struggle to
use the new technologies, the librarians are already creating balanced
information centers that lead the struggle to find a way for print and
pixel to coexist for as long as we need and cherish both.

The deepest barrier on our campuses separates the liberal arts from
the "pre-professional" schools.  No one ever thinks of law or business
or accounting or dentistry as "liberal arts".  Those who know from the
beginning of their university careers that their ambitions lie in
these directions are curiously privileged second-class citizens,
rather like the "equites" (knights) of old Rome--of lower social
standing than the senatorial class, but for the most part quite a bit
wealthier.  The pre-professional student has the prospect of economic
success and the brash American prestige of money, while the student in
the arts and sciences is encouraged by her elders and betters to
accept a lower economic prospect in return for a more venerable, but
perhaps now more threadbare prestige.  Venturesome and imaginative
humanists will find a way to bridge this gap.

So what will the pragmatics of this reconfiguration look like?  What
will we "do"?

Some of it we already do in many institutions, heuristically,
chaotically, opportunistically without any concomitant theorizing.
The tools are already in hand to make transformative change--and I
would not have said that as recently as 1993.  We can make some good
surmises about technologies that are coming to help us further, but
even if we have only the PC and the Internet of 1995, we have enough
to revolutionize education in startling ways.

"Resource-based learning" is a buzz phrase, but it points to a
powerful trend.  We can create teaching tools interactive enough and
rich enough to let the student seek them out and work with them at her
own pace.  Such tools do not directly address the central educational
mission of motivation and direction but instruction that is available
when the student needs it and powerful enough to sweep the student
along can reinforce motivation and accelerate progress.  This can be
done most obviously for content-based instruction in specific
disciplines at a fairly elementary to intermediate level (whether to
replace traditional courses or to supplement them).

Resource-based learning is immensely powerful for "distance learners"
of all kinds.  The market for higher education among people whose
lives do not allow them the regular assignment of time and presence
that traditional teaching requires has hardly been touched.  I have
taught Internet-based seminars on Augustine and on Boethius with
hundreds of auditors from around the world and now even paying
customers getting "credit" from my university for rigorous work
carried on far from Philadelphia.  These experiments suggest to me
that this market is a significant one precisely for an arduous
discipline like classics.  The secondary school Latin teachers of
America, for example, work often with little contact with other or
with the academy, and they are too few and too scattered to justify
classroom-based course work that can reach more than a fraction of
them.  But in the aggregate, the Latin teachers of America and are
more motivated and better qualified to take advanced work than our
regular undergraduates.  If we can deliver high quality instruction to
them reliably via the electronic networks, we do ourselves a favor
(more students), we do them a favor (re-energizing and re- directing
their teaching), and so we do our profession a favor (building from
the school level up) and whatever benefit the study of the ancient
languages confers on society as a whole is measurably increased.  And
somehow--perhaps this is the most important point of all--the joy and
the wonder of it all, the magic of education at its best, spreads
farther and deeper across the land.  (A state university that thus
increases what we may call its "market penetration" may find remote
rural legislators no longer so skeptical of its value to the
citizenry.)

And of course, education is not just downloading information.  The
most valuable part, all agree, is the personal contact that motivates,
ignites, and guides.  American higher education has long struggled
with the right model for facilitating this kind of connection between
faculty and students.  Woodrow Wilson's preceptorials at Princeton,
somewhere between an Oxford tutorial and a German seminar, are an
institution that all who know it praise and all are quite sure died
some time ago even, or rather especially, the most skilled
contemporary practitioners of that local art.  But it offers a model
for what the professor of tomorrow should be doing.

For that professor is no longer what he was in the days when the
university embodied all studies in a single location.  The university
was once a microcosm, a miniature world offering the whole of
knowledge in a restricted arena.  Every discipline represented had its
professor who was the supreme local authority on the subject.  That
supremacy faded long ago and students found more ways to learn about
their subject than to sit and listen to the local professor (the
growth of our great libraries over the last century brought the world
to our door--historians may yet decide that it was the librarians who
invented and have real right of ownership on the information
superhighway), but the structure of the institutions we have still
reflects that origin.  An old model of that kind may be powerful and
useful, and we should think long about how to adapt it to the future;
but new metaphors can be useful as well.

I venture to suggest that the real roles of the professor in an
information-rich world will be not to provide information but to
advise, guide, and encourage students wading through the deep waters
of the information flood.  Professors in this environment will thrive
as mentors, tutors, backseat drivers, and coaches.  They will use the
best skills they have now to nudge, push, and sometimes pull students
through the educationally crucial tasks of "processing" information:
problem-solving, analysis and synthesis of ideas.  These are the heart
of education and these are the activities on which our time can best
be spent.  Apart from that, the professor will be a point of contact
to a world beyond the campus.  (For if the student is already in touch
with that world directly, then the local microcosm is of no "special"
value unless it aids you in your exploration of the larger whole
outside.)

A few things to read of particular relevance  here:
 
Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993) * theory and practice of the new, enthusiastic

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber, 1994) * theory
and practice of the new, skeptical

Ann Okerson, ed., Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks
(Washington: Association of Research Libraries 1993, 1994, 1995) * a
series of symposia on current issues and developments

J.J. O'Donnell, "The Pragmatics of the New: Trithemius, McLuhan,
Cassiodorus," forthcoming in U.  Eco et al., The Future of the Book
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), available as
preprint at <URL:http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/publications.htm l>.

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ARL 183
A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions
Association of Research Libraries
December 1995