Last week on my radio show, "Making the College Choice," I had the pleasure of interviewing Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra.
As I said in the introduction to the show, I’ve met some fascinating people through the years—from the late Grace Kelly, when she was Princess Grace of Monaco, to the irascible Dan Rather, when he was anchoring the CBS Evening News.
But of all the people I’ve met, Botstein is the most brilliant. Indeed, when we first met, I was so overwhelmed by the power of his intellect that I was tongue-tied; I literally had nothing to say. People who know me know that doesn’t happen very often.
Why was I so taken with Botstein? It had to do then, and still does today, with the breadth and depth of his knowledge. He simply knows more about more things than anyone I’ve ever met.
An essential reason why he does has to do with his belief in, and embodiment of, the benefits of a liberal arts education.
For those unfamiliar with the term, I want to spend this column on my less articulate yet still fully convinced sense of the liberal arts; for that commonly misunderstood and too-often-maligned phrase, liberal arts, is at the heart of what a life-changing, truly transformative undergraduate education should be.
The first time I heard the phrase “liberal arts” was 35 years ago as I was finishing the one and only college application I ever filed. Applying Early Decision to Amherst College, I had somewhere come across the notion that the liberal arts were “a preparation for everything, yet a training for nothing.”
I loved the idea of learning for its own sake. My father, a suburban Republican insurance salesman who had voted for Richard Nixon for president on all three occasions he ran, would come to call me “The Student Prince” for my perpetual engagement in learning, for my love of reading literature rather than studying anything practical.
My father still chuckles ruefully over all the tuition that turned me into a teacher of a progressive, left-leaning political bent. Where the pre-law went, he’ll never know.
Where my interest in law evaporated was when I disliked the personalities of the other pre-law students and found the standard path of political science courses not particularly to my liking, either.
What captivated me over time were classes in English, Classics, and Russian Literature.
I found myself reading novels that captured my imagination, wondering one year if Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” was the best work I’d ever read, only to judge Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” superior the following year.
But as much as I loved literature, I was too busy and immature to delve as deeply into it as I could have. I always went to my classes, but I couldn’t keep up with all of the reading, because my extracurricular life of football, lacrosse, glee club, and beer pong in the fraternity house was too full.
Graduating in 1980 with a bachelor’s in English, I went straight into teaching, coaching and, soon, college counseling. Then I ran off to join the circus of television news, earning a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University along the way.
After two years in television, including 18 months as the 10 o’clock anchorman for a CBS station in Wausau, Wis., I came to the wildly idealistic conclusion that no one was learning anything from my broadcasts, and I needed to go back to teaching.
My father, who loved my time on television so much that he bought me a TV and VCR so I could send him tapes, was disappointed, but not surprised. His “Student Prince” was headed back to the books.
Where I went specifically was to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., home of the so-called “Great Books” curriculum. Over four summers, I read the classics of Western Civilization in Literature, Politics & Society, Mathematics & Natural Sciences, and Philosophy & Theology.
In each term we would begin with the ancient Greeks, always featuring Platonic dialogues starring Socrates, and work our way forward through the great conversation of the past 2,500 years. We rarely got into the 20th century with what we read, for there was so much that was so significant from well before our modern era.
Most important of all, I read every single word of every single text, often going over the material twice, and sometimes, especially with philosopher Immanuel Kant, scouring the text three times—just to try to glean some understanding from the truly challenging material. I loved those four summers of study.
What did they give me? A more certain grasp of how to read, think, calculate, speak and write. The classes were all small: the largest, the seminar, had 18 students and two tutors (there are no “professors” at St. John’s), and each class began with a question.
Guided by the persistent but gentle questioning of the tutors, we would spend two hours seeking to understand the text. In the even-smaller preceptorial and tutorial classes, our study would be even more intent on the books before us.
An English major/journalist, I learned from William Harvey’s original writing how to thread a wire through a sheep’s heart to comprehend the muscle at the heart of the circulatory system, and I used Euclid’s geometric proof to demonstrate to myself visually, for the first time, the Pythagorean reality that A squared plus B squared does indeed equal C squared.
For four summers, I learned how to learn.
Such learning, and the ability and desire to keep learning throughout life, is absolutely essential, yet it is too often shoved aside by the well-intentioned but misguided notion that career training is the purpose of an undergraduate education.
Botstein would submit, and I would agree, that a broad, deep liberal arts education is ultimately the most practical route to take because, over time, knowledge changes, technology changes, every profession changes, and the only way to stay competitive is to be able and eager to continue to learn. The liberal arts, properly understood, are “the arts of freedom.” The motto of St. John’s translates, as I recall: “With these books and a balance, we will make men free.”
Especially in a down economy, when anxious parents and confused kids understandably employ “will that major get you a job” thinking, it’s all the more important to step back and ask whether that particular job will even exist a generation from now, and consider whether the habits of mind fostered via the liberal arts wouldn’t ultimately be the more beneficial route to go for long-term insight, flexibility and competitive viability.
As I say to my students, the trick going forward is not going to be finding a job; it’s going to be creating one. The future belongs to those with the strongest foundations in the liberal arts, possessing—paradoxically—the surest grasp of the past.
Such lifelong learners will be able to meet new challenges as they arise throughout what one hopes will be many decades after the completion of college. Such is the credo of Leon Botstein and his humble interlocutor, yours truly.
Chris Teare is the college counselor at Antilles School on St. Thomas. Read him here every Monday and listen to his show, “Making the College Choice,” on Radio One, AM 1000, Wednesdays at 4 p.m.
