As Hillsdale welcomes the new freshman class to campus, one of the most common questions we’ll hear over the next few weeks is “What do you plan on majoring in?”
There was a time, however, when this question would have made no sense to the students of Hillsdale College, or any other serious liberal arts school.
Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from those days.
Prior to the establishment of the academic major, students largely studied the same courses, all aimed at giving the students a broad liberal education. The curriculum at American colleges was built around an understanding of liberal education as comprehensive and all-encompassing.
Then, after the Civil War, American universities began embracing a system of “free electives,” granting the students more academic freedom to pursue their curiosities.
However, this new birth of academic freedom brought with it a decline in rigor. Instead of pursuing truth with intensity, many students used their freedom to take easy classes to avoid the struggles associated with the more traditional path of the liberal arts.
To solve this problem, faculties across the nation developed what we now call majors—particular fields of concentration students would master in order to graduate. Under strict guidelines about class hours and course content, each field’s faculty regulated and closely shepherded students to a rigorous education.
However, there were downsides the academic majors brought with them.
Since their advent, majors have caused the fracturing of the academic world into fields and disciplines that compete with one another. The existence of majors tends to promote a certain kind of academic tribalism, with partisans of different fields taking up their pens to spill ink for their ilk.
Take, for instance, the recent disputes between the humanities and the sciences in the wider American academic context.
Because of differing methodologies and purposes, thinkers in each field tend to have differing worldviews. This tribalism of majors tends to enhance a certain narcissism of small differences, in which minor points spark major conflicts.
In an even broader sense, specialization takes precedent over comprehensive knowledge and learning from multiple viewpoints, and the idea of liberal education suffers for it. Students today are trained to think almost exclusively within the boundaries of their fields, and that is a problem.
A liberal education is meant to liberate men’s minds, whereas this slavish devotion to one particular field limits perspective and free thought.
Here at Hillsdale, these problems are not so readily apparent. Our core curriculum, in which we rightly take pride, is reminiscent of the rigor and breadth of old-school liberal education. Our focus on classic works and great books furthers our shared goal, as well.
True commitment to the liberal arts, though, cannot be limited to the core classes taken freshman and sophomore year. Rather, we ought to let the comprehensive pursuit of truth shape our entire academic careers.
The outright abolition of majors is both extreme and unlikely. Although certain liberal arts colleges, such as St. John’s in Maryland, have gone back to their roots and done away with majors successfully, such a plan would likely be impractical at an institution like Hillsdale.
Having said that, Hillsdale already has a model for concentration without pigeonholing: interdisciplinary studies.
Although they are frequently scoffed at by the partisans of different majors, interdisciplinary studies such as political economy, American studies, or Christian studies are much more similar to the origins of American liberal education than a more limited concentration in exclusively politics or history or religion.
When students take interdisciplinary studies seriously and their faculty overseers ensure a certain level of rigor, these programs can inculcate the freedom of the mind that is becoming more and more lacking in academia as of late.
Our administration should abolish the majors, and then promote different interdisciplinary “fields of concentration,” based on the model of the currently existing programs.
Allan Bloom once wrote that “[t]he liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
Hillsdale’s system of majors tends to inhibit that important aspect of liberal education, and therefore ought to be redesigned or outright abolished.
