Purdue program works to revive liberal arts as key part of the college experience

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Well, call it the death of the humanities. That’s been a leading story about colleges over the last decade or so, and numbers bear it out. Majors in English and history are down by a third. humanities enrollment overall is down by almost a fifth.

But there’s also another story to be told.

Jeffrey Brown traveled to Purdue University to take a look for our higher education series Rethinking College.

Brian Kogelmann, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University: Most people would lie to you if given the opportunity so there is nothing wrong with you lying to them first.

Jeffrey Brown: Welcome to the Machiavelli School of Management. Today’s prompt, passages from “The Prince,” published in 1532.

Brian Kogelmann: “Because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.”

Jeffrey Brown: A classic text, small discussion groups, back-and-forth debate about ethics in today’s world.

Brian Kogelmann: Does it work? Good argument, bad argument?

Man: I think it’s a bad argument.

Brian Kogelmann: Why?

Man: Because it’s basically saying that you have to expect that you’re going to be the sucker.

Jeffrey Brown: A philosophy professor, Brian Kogelmann, working with freshman business and marketing majors like 18-year-old Savannah Espinola.

Savannah Espinola, College Student: He really pushes us. He says, OK, why? Why do you believe that? And he makes us come up with clear arguments and defend our reasoning. And he makes sure we’re clear about it.

Jeffrey Brown: The course is part of Cornerstone, a general education program that injects the liberal arts into all realms of the freshman academic experience.

Melinda Zook, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University: It’s about understanding your humanity, cultivating your inner life, and understanding the world and having empathy for other people.

Jeffrey Brown: History Professor Melinda Zook runs Cornerstone.

Melinda Zook: I define it as giving students that are not liberal arts majors a more holistic education that includes courses that will have them reading classic texts, have them experience the arts.

Jeffrey Brown: Purdue is one of the country’s leading universities for engineering and other STEM fields, proud to showcase its more than two dozen astronaut graduates, including Neil Armstrong.

It was also experiencing its version of a national trend that saw the number of humanities graduates fall by nearly a third in the decade before the pandemic.

David Reingold, College of Liberal Arts Dean, Purdue University: Between 2010, 2011 and 2015, this college of liberal arts had lost about 20 percent of its credit hours, 40 percent of its majors. I mean, it felt like a ball rolling off a table.

Jeffrey Brown: David Reingold took over as dean of Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts in 2015.

David Reingold: I could show you some projections which would show, by 2024, there would be no students left in this college.

Jeffrey Brown: The reasons why are complex and debated, the shock of the 2008 financial crisis, the higher costs of college, a shift away from social sciences to technology, seen as better for job prospects, and a devaluing of the very idea of a canon of great books.

For Reingold, it added up to a reality that struck at the very heart of what colleges are for.

David Reingold: Once you get to a point where some of the domains which gave rise to the modern research university are either withered or nonexistent, I think we have sort of lost what it means to actually have a university.

Woman: I was trying to demonstrate, yes.

Melinda Zook: OK, good.

Jeffrey Brown: The answer here, Cornerstone, which begins with a two semester slate of classes that replaced written and oral communication requirements for freshmen. The strategy, to integrate the liberal arts into the overall curriculum, rather than standing or falling apart.

Melinda Zook: If you think you’re just going to build a program and they will come, you’re wrong. You have to take over requirements, and that’s what we did. And we do it through great books, which we call transformative texts.

Jeffrey Brown: Homer, Huxley, and Shakespeare, but also Rumi, N. Scott Momaday, and August Wilson.

Melinda Zook: Here’s Octavia Butler.

Jeffrey Brown: Zook and the more than 100 liberal arts professors teaching these courses choose from an ever-evolving list of more than 200 authors, spanning the ancient world to modern day, across continents, genders and races.

Students attend theater and music performances and take classes with actors, and also act out some of their own work, based on texts they’re reading.

Woman: I call this court to order.

Jeffrey Brown: Including a trial of Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s novel, a fine way into debating A.I. and other monsters of today.

In 2017, the pilot program comprised 100 students. Now there are more than 5,000 taking Cornerstone classes.

Nathaniel Dixon Jr. , College Student: It’s so different from what I thought it was going to be.

Jeffrey Brown: Students like freshman Nathaniel Dixon Jr. , who’s studying neurobiology, but finds here something different in terms of class size and approach.

Nathaniel Dixon Jr. : I was really worried at first, being a STEM major, but being here now, it is so great. We have been doing a lot of Plato readings, Kant, Burke. And it’s one of the first times that I found a lot of joy in my reading.

Jeffrey Brown: Really? I mean, in what way, joy in what sense?

Nathaniel Dixon Jr. : My professor, she really pushes the idea that what we’re reading can be applied to us. And the point of the class isn’t to find the correct answer, but find how what’s in the reading can be applied to you in the grand scheme of the thing.

Jeffrey Brown: Other schools are paying attention, and Cornerstone-based programs have spread to more than 70 colleges across the country with help from foundation and other funding.

That includes community colleges, home to more than 40 percent of all undergraduates.

Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., Austin Community College: Historically, there’s not been a lot of thought about what that experience in general education at community colleges should really be.

Jeffrey Brown: And so government and humanities Professor Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. set out to change that at Austin Community College in Texas with a seminar called The Great Questions, a general education requirement-level class. And he sees a benefit that goes beyond the individual students.

Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. : You have people from all different places in life. You have got younger people, you have got older people, people that want nothing to do with politics and people that won’t shut up about it, and they’re in the same classroom and you’re asking them to talk about Homer.

And it’s the only time they’re ever going to get that experience. And if they don’t get that experience at community colleges, they’re increasingly not going to get it at other places.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re making an implicit argument that they need that or that does benefit them.

Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. : I think it not only benefits them. I think it benefits us, representative democracy, which is — has at its core the requirement that we’re able to talk to each other across differences that actually matter.

Jeffrey Brown: But all this raises a further question. While Cornerstone might be good for the stem students, does it ultimately foster and preserve the liberal arts disciplines themselves?

At Purdue, the hope is that students exposed to transformative texts as a requirement will want more. And the university now offers a Cornerstone certificate, a kind of minor. And the success of Cornerstone has already allowed Purdue to hire more than 100 new liberal arts faculty, bucking trends elsewhere, though these new hires are required to teach at least half their courses in the Cornerstone program.

David Reingold: In fact, now we have more philosophers than we had 10 years ago. Now, there’s conflict in that, because, obviously, the Philosophy Department does not want to sort of see the teaching commitments of their faculty pulled away from their core discipline.

But we’re trying to find a middle ground, where we can have a robust philosophy department who’s engaged in serious philosophical scholarship, as well as working to serve the broader student population here.

Jeffrey Brown: And what does serving students mean to Melinda Zook?

Melinda Zook: I’m not trying to get students away from engineering or business degrees. I’m trying to give them just a much more complete education while they’re here at Purdue.

I often look at my students and I think, your life is going to be filled with crucial choices. Will you make the right ones? And if you don’t know anything, right, if you don’t know anything about the world or yourself or others, how can you?

Jeffrey Brown: As the famous ancient Greek inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi put it, gnothi sauton, know thyself.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.