if they do get in, they will be required to check their cultures at the door and assimilate into an historically white environment. And for those students who do make it over the walls, who weather an insanely competitive admission system that forces them to take every AP class under the sun, win their state’s science competition, invent a cure for Alzheimer’s, and write an admissions essay expressing both their uniqueness and the ways in which they have done exactly the same things as every other applicant? Those students arrive to campus anxious and exhausted rather than energized and ready to think on their own terms.
This book calls for these walls to be torn down. We want small liberal arts colleges to reimagine themselves as part of a new and expansive culture, to rededicate themselves as spaces that will serve, educate, and learn from those who desperately want to attend them. This renewed focus, we argue, is the best path forward for the survival of these colleges. It is the best way to address the concerns of people, including parents and prospective students, who have been dismayed by rising costs and who have grown distrustful of schools’ stated goals.
We feel the urgency of this work more now than ever before. Everything about the COVID-19 crisis has underscored the importance of expanding the model of liberal education, which stresses studying broadly across disciplines as well as deeply within a few, encourages collaboration and compassion, and couples risk-taking with responsibility. We are living through a crisis that has made a mockery of rigidly segmented approaches to problem solving or educational models that train students for jobs that robots might take over tomorrow. Controlling this pandemic will require not just the specialized knowledge of virologists and epidemiologists, but the combined efforts of health care providers, doctors and nurses, urban planners and engineers, economists, logistics experts, journalists, public officials, and many others. And they are all going to have to collaborate in teams, understanding where their specialties merge into the expertise of others. The shutdown has also taught us more broadly about what we need to survive. In a new era of social distancing, we have quickly come to appreciate the companionship and good cheer that writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers bring us. In a time marked by fear and anxiety, we have come to more readily understand the moral suasion of empathy. In a world of intensifying nationalism, we observe that viruses ignore borders and that we will only be able to solve wicked problems like pandemics or climate change through global cooperation. In short, this crisis has shown us the importance of the exact kinds of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are the beating heart of small liberal arts colleges.
On May 25, 2020, as we were in the midst of writing this book, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, killing him in broad daylight as three additional officers, ignoring the pleas of a crowd who had gathered around to bear witness, did nothing to stop him. This was just the latest of so many grotesquely violent killings of Black men, women, and children by police officers. As we watched, a country already reeling from a pandemic exploded in furious protest, and it struck us with renewed urgency that our colleges also must do much more to address the historical legacy of anti-Black racism. Despite the missions that many liberal arts colleges espouse—to promote social justice, equity, and access; to build welcoming, diverse, inclusive learning communities; and to enact what the schools value, not what the corporate marketplace dictates—we find that SLACs are actually reinforcing the insidious patterns that manifest most graphically in anti-Black violence and that have been revealed (yet again) by the unequal toll the novel coronavirus is extracting from Black and Brown bodies. This crisis forces us to look at who we—liberal arts colleges—have become, at the fact that many elite colleges admit more students from the top 1 percent of income earners than the bottom 60 percent, and that students, faculty, and administrators of color are significantly and historically underrepresented at our institutions.
We’re struck by the paradox in all of this. The system that we willingly replicate has placed us as gatekeepers, but has also stripped us of our power to be who we say we want to be. It seems to us that we have collectively handed over our power to forces that none of us really support. If SLACs want to emerge whole on the other side of this pandemic, if they want to truly embrace their missions and be who they say they want to be, they must reclaim that power. SLACs have to imagine and enact a new set of practices and structures—a new culture—that removes them from the toxic culture in which they currently find themselves and that challenges the injustices embedded in these institutions. This is a moral imperative as much as it is a financial one.
We write this book—to borrow Kevin Gannon’s phrase (and the spirit of that phrase)—out of a “radical hope” that we can change our institutions, that we can create a wholly new paradigm that will harness the promise of SLACs to be authentic engines of equality, shattering the “crisis of cowardice” that has kept many of our institutions immobilized for too long (Ellis). The statements circulated by many liberal arts college presidents in the days following George Floyd’s murder are one indication that our hope may not be misplaced. These statements have been forceful in their description of the anguish that results from still finding ourselves immersed in a world that views African Americans as less than human and unworthy of dignity. These statements are also determined in their call for liberal arts colleges to dedicate themselves to fighting for justice (Val Smith, Swarthmore), and to “work so that the marginalized are no longer at the edges but rather at the center” (Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin). It is, it must be, the work of our institutions to take responsibility, support risk, and change the system we inhabit. The structure of this book is built on a simple assumption. In order to shape the future, we have to be able to identify and name those conditions that restrain us in the present. SLACs have to acknowledge unflinchingly who they are before they can become who they most want to be. Part 1 is intended as a snapshot of the days leading up to, and the weeks following, the pandemic shutdown, the moment in the spring of 2020 when campuses came “screeching to a halt.” Focusing in particular on Beth’s experience with DePauw’s closure, the section points to the ways the abrupt transition to virtual learning demonstrated how vital the residential component is to the educational mission of SLACs and the ways that this residential culture is currently falling short of achieving its full potential. Part 2 lays out some of the broad economic and ideological forces (neoliberalism and structural racism) that have undermined higher education in general, and then examines the specific forces that have pressured small liberal arts colleges away from their proclaimed missions. Finally, part 3 offers our vision for reinvention, our “manifesto.” It charts the key changes we believe SLACs can and must make to address their structural inequities and to create a more dynamic, equitable, and relevant classroom culture. Though we are decidedly not economists, we suggest ways to reconcile one of the most intractable problems facing SLACs: how they can square their economic constraints with the moral imperatives embedded in their diverse yet kindred mission statements. Liberal arts colleges must be financially sustainable if they are to have a future, but they also must admit students without regard to financial need if they are to be true to their stated missions of equity and social justice. To argue for anything less is to maintain that the institutions are more valuable than the principles which define them.
A note on who tells “our” story in this book. As you’ll see, the two of us often use the first-person voice to talk about many of the problems and challenges facing small liberal arts colleges. “We”—that is, Steve and Beth—often refer to “our” colleges, “our” missions,” and what “we” have to do to change SLACs. Because we both have spent our careers teaching at small liberal arts colleges, it shouldn’t be surprising that we view many issues from a faculty perspective. But over the decades we have learned invaluable lessons from students, staff, administrators, and community members. On a broader level, then, the “we” that populates this book includes everyone who has a stake in the survival and success of SLACs. Besides faculty, administrators, professional staff, and students, the “we” includes dining hall workers, admissions counselors, coaches, residence hall directors, service workers, lab technicians, prospective
