Principles of the College

All human experience is education in some sense, and a liberal arts education does not exclude the sorts of learning that derive directly from the process of living itself. A liberal education differs from other varieties of education, however, because it places at its center the content of humane learning and the spirit of systematic, disinterested inquiry.

The ultimate subject of the liberal arts is humanity: the worlds, the works, the acts of human beings. It is therefore, first, an education in what we are and have been, and in the worlds we inhabit and have created: the worlds of thought and art, the social and physical worlds. It is, further, an education in the means of exploring those worlds and of creating new ones. Beyond this, it is an education that is evaluative, not merely factual and descriptive: it emphasizes the necessity of critical judgment of respect for the finest in human achievement, together with the belief that a sense of the finest carries with it a capacity and even an imperative to live and act according to its demands.

The liberal arts college is therefore based on and defends certain central convictions and assumptions. It maintains that the search for knowledge and compassionate understanding is a central and not a peripheral human activity. The college assumes a continuity in human endeavor, and therefore the necessity of learning in the present about and from the past. Such an institution maintains that in a diverse and increasingly divided world there is urgent need for a common language of educated awareness and rational discourse, and that the perspective gained from knowledge of the nature, scope, and quality of our various worlds is not to be mistaken for disengagement from the world as it is or might become. The liberal arts college defends the right of all to seek knowledge for its own sake, without immediate regard to its utility and affirms also that the world would suffer without the leaven of those who engage in this pursuit. Finally, Mount Holyoke College believes that the tools of thought and attitudes of mind acquired in a liberal arts college can be translated into the acts by which, without violence things that do violence to the world are changed.

The college is ideally a society of students and faculty collectively and consciously committed to these convictions: to discovering, exploring, and upholding them. It is a collegium, a fellowship, with a proud but not prideful sense of its common purpose and of the values that govern its daily life, bringing together those who are serious but not solemn about learning, and humble but not hopeless before the complexity of knowledge: those who want to know what is to be known. The college is a fellowship whose members are gentle of spirit and tolerant of human failing, but maintain unrelenting hostility toward any destruction of human dignity.

Such a college tries to encourage in all its members and in all their modes of endeavor not only a respect but a zest for truth and excellence. It encourages the capacity to admire and pursue excellence with intensity but without arrogance, and with some compassion for all who encounter the obstinacy of truth, fostering an ability to accept and even welcome the necessity of strenuous and sustained effort in any area of endeavor. The college specifically provides the tools of mental inquiry and tries to reveal their variety, their inner logic and their relatedness, encouraging some daring in the use of these tools: the impulse to ask questions beyond found or accepted answers, the will and the disciplined ability to move flow the foundation of the known toward that which is still to be known and done, It seeks to develop individuals committed to humane values, capable of rejecting oversimplification of ideology or method, and liberated from narrow definitions of themselves, of others, and of human problems in general.

These are utopian ideals, and rightly so, but the world of a college that seeks to live by them is nevertheless a real and a rigorous world. The liberal arts college is not a place of preparation for living, but a world where a life of a particular sort is intensely lived: a life of the mind above all, and of individual and joint endeavor.

This world has, however, its special characteristics, it is a world that recognizes human differences but refuses to allow and seeks to eliminate all discriminations based on wealth, race, and sex. It imposes no limitations upon freedom of thought and speed, beyond the obligations to respect the evidence of facts, and to honor the freedom and listen to the reasoned thought of others. This world provides the time, the freedom, and indeed the obligation to engage in reflection, in undistracted intellectual inquiry, in systematic and unhurried exploration of the world of knowledge, and of the self in relation to that world.

To this world the liberal arts college invites those who genuinely seek what it has to offer. It is not, however, a college designed or equipped to perform all possible roles in education and will not redefine its nature to meet the expectations of those who may, legitimately, seek an education in something other than the liberal arts. It is hoped that after leaving college students can use what they have learned, but more importantly it is hoped they can be what they have learned. They are expected to continue to learn, whether in formal academic situations, in any of the professions, or independently, but the liberal arts college does not prepare students professionally for what comes after any more than it perpetuates that which came before.

Mount Holyoke is, specifically, a liberal arts college, concerned in a special way with the three ideas those three words bring together: freedom, learning, community of purpose. As a society of those who have come together for the sake of learning, the faculty and students profess and study those special arts of mind and spirit that they believe can free people-at least from ignorance, and perhaps from other poverties. The liberal arts are the arts of thought, perception, and judgment; the arts that foster humanity and civility of spirit; and it is these arts that Mount Holyoke College places at the center of its life.

From a report prepared by the Faculty Study Committee on the Principles of the College, 27 September 1971.