The Liberal Arts Paradox in Higher Education

The liberal arts approach to higher education is a growing trend globally. We are told that the mental dexterity and independent, questioning spirit cultivated by such interdisciplinary degrees are the best preparation for the as-yet-unknown executive jobs of tomorrow. For critics of the marketisation of higher education or those that denounce its retrenchment to elitist values, such a move may well be taken as symptomatic of the broader mess in which we find ourselves. But does such a critique capture the complexity of educational initiatives like this? This study of the significant recent growth of liberal arts degrees in England argues otherwise. Each chapter of the book takes one key issue for higher education today (innovation, interdisciplinarity, specialisation, employability, student identities and elitism) and uses talk about the liberal arts (taken from institutions’ promotional websites and interviews with students and academics) as a case study to bring to the fore the complex, plural values that animate educational endeavours. Rather than argue that one of these principles (for instance, meritocracy, egalitarianism, competition or elitism) is the fundamental truth of the situation, it instead attends to the ways that students and staff themselves try to disentangle this mess of values and seek to question which value is appropriate to which context. The sociology of higher education should, then, pay attention to these attempts to grapple with complexity, especially as they come from students, to get to a full account of what is happening in higher education today.