October
3 ,
2003
Louis
Menand to Discuss Future of Liberal Arts on October 15
| 
Photo:
Joseph Tabacca
Louis
Menand |
What is the future
of the liberal arts as we move into a new century and millennium?
The Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and
the Liberal Arts will take on the question Wednesday, October
15, when liberal arts expert and Pulitzer Prize winner Louis
Menand examines the topic. Menand's lecture, "After
the Liberal Arts," is the first in the Weissman Center's
new series, Cultivating the Liberal Arts in the Twenty-first
Century: Provocations. The talk, cosponsored by the president's
office, takes place in Gamble Auditorium at 4 pm and is open
to the MHC community and the public.
Professor of English and Weissman Center codirector Christopher Benfey said Menand,
who is a professor of English at Harvard University, was a natural choice to
kick off the liberal arts series. "There's nobody around who knows
the intellectual terrain of the liberal arts better than Menand," Benfey
said. "He takes a deep historical view of the growth of liberal arts education,
going back to the 1890s when the idea of the European-
style university made its way over
to America."
Menand is regarded as one of the leading commentators on the state of the liberal
arts in U.S. post-secondary education. He was the editor of The Future of Academic
Freedom, an anthology of several scholars' views of campus speech codes,
the limits of academic freedom, and the ethics of academics. Menand's The
Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, a study of the origin of the
pragmatist movement in America, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis
Parkman Prize in 2002. Menand is also a frequent contributor to the New York
Review of Book and the New Yorker.
In a groundbreaking 2001 essay in the New York Review of Books, "College:
The End of the Golden Age," Menand advanced the thesis that the onset of
the Cold War and fears over the "technology gap" after the Soviet
launch of Sputnik led to a change in liberal arts education; at that point, he
argued, the emphasis shifted from a more philosophical bent to one modeled on
the scientific method, leading to an overall shrinking of the liberal arts sector
and students' interest in it.
Benfey expects that Menand will address some of those issues
in his talk. "He
is asking the tough questions about the university that nobody else is asking," Benfey
said. "Are students getting the education they need? Where are the liberal
arts heading in a time of shrinking resources?"
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