The Tenth President of Sarah Lawrence College
The Future of Liberal Education
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”—Heraclitus
Dean Pauline Watts introduced the Inaugural symposium, “You Can’t Step into the Same River Twice: Reimagining Liberal Arts in the 21st Century,” by describing how liberal arts education, like the proverbial river, is both eternally the same and continually evolving.
“Our understandings and practices of the liberal arts have changed rapidly at certain points in time as they responded to historical moments of dramatic change in education and culture,” Watts said. “We seem now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be living in such a historical moment. Or are we? Is it change? Or is it the illusion of change?”
The panelists—three college presidents and one distinguished neuroscientist—identified several challenges and opportunities facing liberal education today.
Democracy and Community: Nancy Cantor ’74, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University
One of the things we all read about a lot right now is the culture of individualism. That is, in the sense in which education is a private investment for private gain, and pits individuals in a sort of zero-sum competition for a place at the table in this so-called flat-world knowledge economy. We see this as the subtext of so many national debates on affirmative action, on immigration, on global security, and more.
What I would argue is that in this environment, questions of social justice and moral consideration are all too easily marginalized, and communal responsibility is relegated to some corner of political correctness. My question for all of us, as we think about the role of a liberal arts college, is how do we put communal responsibility back in its rightful, central place—in the place it’s got to be if we are to recover our democratic practices?
Benjamin Franklin, right before signing the Declaration of Independence, said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” When I think about what I learned at Sarah Lawrence, sure, it’s about the sciences and the arts and the humanities. But at its core, it’s really about learning to hang together.
