Freedom, Leisure and the Liberal Arts

I just finished reading FreeTime: The Forgotten American Dream by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. The back cover of the book describes the author as “an historian and professor”. In the book’s conclusion, the author describes himself as a “professor of leisure studies following the educational tradition represented by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Dorothy Canfield Fisher”.

The first part of this self-description is why I wanted to read the book in the first place. I had read a news article mentioning the book and author, but what jumped out at me was that he was a professor of “leisure studies”. As a professor of chemistry who as department chair has to worry about the complexity of running a department with chemicals, equipment and laboratories, I sometimes wonder if I should be in a different field, perhaps a “simpler” one. This is why I got the book. I wanted to know what a professor of leisure studies does. In my wild imagination, I picture him leisurely musing about the subject of leisure.

The second part of his self-description, learning about the educational tradition of Hutchins in particular, was very eye-opening and got me thinking hard about the nature of a liberal arts education. I found the first part of the book quite a slog as the author goes through the history starting with Jonathan Edwards through to the Labor Movement and Roosevelt’s “Salvation by Works” New Deal. It is clear that Professor Hunnicutt did not whittle the hours away in leisure while doing his research and writing the book. He is thorough and detailed, and my impression of him changed to imagining a professor very hard at work. The book is rather academic in nature, and as a non-historian who isn’t particular drawn to labor relations in America, I considered just giving up on it several times. After all, this was my 20 minutes of leisure-reading before bedtime. Why should it be such a slog? It wasn’t until I got to Chapter 7 that I’m very glad I persevered. The story of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the “Rise and Fall of Leisure and the Liberal Arts” was fascinating and really got me thinking about the parallels between the contemporary assault on the liberal arts and what was happening in Hutchins’ time. (I had trouble sleeping that night because my mind was all abuzz with ideas.) In what follows I will be quoting extensively from Hunnicutt’s book.

The book traces the history of labor demands for shorter working hours given technological progress and the rise of the machine. It starts with a quote from John Maynard Keynes about the dilemma and challenge of how “Man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely, agreeably and well.” How should one live wisely, agreeably and well? That is a question undergirding a liberal arts education (or certainly should, I hope). Clearly now in 2014 we have seen technological leaps in labor-saving devices, but it seems we are now obsessed and trapped by a culture of work.

Hutchins, like Keynes, believed that “modern nations were now capable of producing more than enough of the basic necessities for all their peoples, [and that] modern economies have shifted from scarcity to abundance.” As president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago through the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar period, Hutchins had seen the focus of education on “preparing students to for making a living and developing industrial power”. He was determined to revive the vision of education for leisure going back to the Greeks, i.e., that “the liberal arts were by definition, the arts (and skills) of freedom”. In The Great Conversation, Hutchins writes that the “substitution of machines for slaves gives us an opportunity to build a civilization as glorious as that of the Greeks, and far more lasting because far more just.” Furthermore “that mechanization which tends to reduce a man to a robot also supplies the economic base and the leisure that will enable him to get a liberal education and to become truly a man.”

Hunnicutt draws a parallel between Hutchins’ ideas (in the University of Utopia) and his role as a reformer of liberal arts education, and its primary role to “educate for freedom”. Hutchins was deeply against the distribution system where students chose their “core liberal arts” classes from a buffet, a practice most widespread in American colleges and universities. There was also the proliferation of departments and majors in every conceivable field to train for very specialized jobs. Faculty no longer understood what any of their colleagues outside of their narrow fields were doing. This sounds very familiar to what we see today. Hunnicutt describes the university as “reflecting its surrounding culture: keenly competitive, selfish, quarrelsome, petulant, and confused.”

Since “the object of education is to prepare for more education”, Hutchins reformed the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago into a two-year well-defined liberal arts core curriculum, as opposed to the buffet of options. The vestiges of his effort still exist today although the U of C (my spouse is an alumna) is no longer all that different from other institutions. In focusing on adult education through libraries and the Great Books of the Western World project, Hutchins had a vision of communities engaging in more education and learning “how to live well” in their newfound leisure time as technology marches ever forward.

It is interesting to compare the “education for work” rather than “education for freedom” arguments and counter-arguments then and now. For those who read higher education news, the assault on the liberal arts is one of the crises facing colleges and universities today. Should higher education be primarily for vocational training? (That’s the big worry of students, parents and politicians in the current U.S. economy.) Defenders of the liberal arts claim that “critical thinking” is a hallmark of a liberal arts curriculum. Employers supposedly want it. Do our universities actually teach it? (I’m not sure if politicians want it. Much easier to sway the masses with political posturing otherwise.) Defenders of the liberal arts claim that specific vocational training is too narrow given how fast things are changing, and that the liberal arts prepares one to adapt for the jobs of many tomorrows rather than the jobs of today which will quickly go obsolete.

The last 20 years have also seen large-scale changes in the globalization of higher education. While the U.S. has been arguing about needing more job-preparedness and moving away from traditional liberal arts curricula, other countries are looking for models that might replicate Silicon Valley, the supposed epitome of creativity and innovation. Liberal arts American-style curricula are being imported by the rest of the world in the hope that this will bring their countries and economies to the next level. Education and innovation hubs are being set up. Governments and private foundations are putting in large amounts of funding and infrastructure to attract partners as they tout an education that will give you the creative cutting edge to thrive in a global economy. There is even a new liberal arts college located in Singapore, Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore, that features a well-defined liberal arts common curriculum in the first two years, akin to what Hutchins conceived, but featuring a more global view.

At the end of his book, Hunnicutt describes himself as “not content with the role of an objective observer”. In his research, he hopes “to reveal the implicit assumptions” of those who “assume that perpetual economic growth and the expansion of government to produce new jobs [is] normative – representing the essential values of our culture for which there are no reasonable, moral, or historical alternatives.” Reading this book made me think about this entire system many of us feel caught in. Is it even possible to get out of the cycle? Not just as individuals who may simply choose to work less for less renumeration if one can afford it. As a proponent of a liberal arts education (I had better be since I make my living as a liberal arts college professor), how can I do my part not just in talking about education for freedom, but actually living it if indeed this is an ideal I should aspire to? That will be the subject of a future post.

In the meantime, I recommend you read Hunnicutt's book if this is a topic you find interesting!