The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College. Steve Volk

       INTRODUCTION

      Warren Buffett once remarked, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Within the world of colleges and universities, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 sucked the tide out in a heartbeat, revealing many of the fractures that had already been pulling higher education apart. The financial breaches are most readily visible—all but a top tier of wealthy institutions are teetering on the edge of disaster, caught between rising costs and declining public support. And for small liberal arts colleges (SLACs), reliant as they are on a residential model, the shutdown and its economic fallout have had particularly dire financial implications.

      But we believe that this crisis involves a lot more than financial instability. This crisis is existential and moral in nature. The financial straits many SLACs find themselves in serve as a vivid marker of the ways they have failed to deliver on many of their core promises. At the risk of sounding like Cassandras, we believe the pandemic is issuing a stark ultimatum to these institutions of higher education: change or die. The question is, of course, why should anyone care? Liberal arts colleges are a particularly American innovation. They primarily serve undergraduates who opt for breadth and depth in the arts and sciences, rather than pursuing a narrower vocational, technical, or preprofessional approach employed by other institutions of higher education. They are usually small in size, residential, and they thrive on “high-touch,” “face-to-face” teaching methods. There are not many of them. In 2018, fewer than 200 four-year colleges and universities (out of more than 4,000 across the United States) focused on arts and sciences undergraduate education (Carnegie Classification). Graduates from SLACs account for less than 1 percent of all college graduates every year. Their critics, and there are many of them, charge that liberal arts colleges don’t prepare their graduates for the labor market, they are absurdly expensive, and they coddle their students to boot! The only stories about them that make the news seem to be ones that feature students shouting down unwanted speakers, harassing local merchants, or refusing to read novels that “offend” them. So for many families who are struggling to pay the rent, and who are now staring into an historically deep economic abyss, the survival of residential liberal arts colleges is just not on their radar. Nature, as Alfred Lord Tennyson reminds us, is “red in tooth and claw.” Let nature take its course, the thinking goes, and just let the SLACs shut down.

      We, Steve and Beth, shudder at the thought. We don’t want SLACs to die. We love the two institutions where we have taught (collectively) for over half a century, the extraordinary students who have shaped our lives, and the rich, vibrant, multifaceted approach to meaning-making that marks the liberal arts tradition. And we’re not alone in our high regard for these institutions. Study after study has confirmed the transformative power of a liberal arts education, finding that SLACs “produce a pattern of consistently positive student outcomes not found in any other type of American higher education institution.” (Oakley 7, Kuh 122). But SLACs have to change if they are going to remain true to their historical missions while also being attentive to the challenges of the contemporary moment. Liberal arts colleges are, by definition, small. If you were to stretch Union College in Schenectady, New York, to be the size of the University of Michigan, you no longer would have a liberal arts college. And that size dictates selectivity. Yet our central argument in this book is that instead of using their small size to become more integrated, inclusive, collaborative, and visionary, SLACs have instead transformed into privileged and exclusionary spaces. To a troubling degree, they have allowed their selectivity to act as a restrictive barrier, narrowing and homogenizing those who can access this kind of education. The colleges we are so passionate to protect have been building walls around themselves that make it harder for people who truly want this kind of an education to get it. Low-income students are pushed away by the high price of a liberal arts education and are thwarted by an unjust, discriminatory K–12 educational system that makes it clear they shouldn’t even bother applying. Black and Brown students are discouraged by the knowledge that they will not find many peers, faculty,

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