Andrew dixon | Collegian
Hillsdale graduates have a problem. While the liberal arts might prepare them to contemplate the good, it doesn’t give them any sort of hands-on career experience.
That’s the argument Margaret Handel, a 2017 Hillsdale graduate who now works as a third mate with the U.S. Merchant Marines, made during a talk called “How the Liberal Arts at Hillsdale Has Failed” on Thursday, March 25. Handel and Charles Steele, assistant professor of economics, hosted the discussion in Lane to better prepare students to find a career after graduation.
Shortly before graduating with a degree in economics from Hillsdale, Handel had a chance conversation with a friend, which led her to apply and enroll at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy.
“I Googled the starting salary of a third officer in the merchant marines and saw the number. I was like, ‘that’s a signal,’” Handel said. “I personally do not like the traditional 40-hour-a-week structure that many Americans pursue, and this was definitely not 40 hours.”
Handel, who passed her Great Lakes pilotage examinations last fall, now sails freighters on the Great Lakes with the Interlake Steamship Company.
“Pretty much, I move rocks from point A to point B in a slightly more dramatic fashion than the average bear,” Handel said.
Her experience obtaining her second degree and pilot’s license has led Handel to believe that Hillsdale is lacking an element of the real world in its curriculum.
“There is a failure,” Handel said. “It is that we implicitly believe in how we do things here and in graduating from here. We believe that the liberal arts will be enough.”
While she believes that the liberal arts need a supplement, however, Handel did not argue that they should be supplanted.
“You will also hear nothing against the liberal arts from me,” she said. “I do not think that Hillsdale has failed at teaching the liberal arts. It is the best place in the world to learn the liberal arts. That’s why I came here, and I loved it, and I don’t regret it and I don’t think any of you should either.”
Steele agreed, suggesting that a curriculum should work toward an ideal of a mixture of studying the good and learning practical skills.
“Free people can take care of themselves,” he said. “They don’t just contemplate. They can do, and they can create.”
Steele and Handel suggested that the real problem between the two worlds of academia and hands-on work is hubris that frequently exists on both sides.
“My point really is not that you should do this and then do that,” Steele said. “It’s crucial to study this stuff, but if that makes you superior, or if you don’t understand the importance of work, it’s the attitude that concerns me.”
Junior Thomas Bricher, who attended the talk, said he frequently comes across students who are surprised when he tells them that he is planning to paint houses this summer rather than do an internship.
“I think a lot of students come with ambition, and they want to change the world, and because they come in like that they think the person who paints houses isn’t going to change the world,” Bricher said.
The problem, he theorizes, is that students are too attached to the big picture to recognize the importance of the everyday.
“We look at it on too much of a macro level; we don’t look at how a good individual can change other individuals in the situation he has control over,” Bricher said.
Steele said he believes that this is a failure of educators and teachers in explaining the relationship of the liberal arts and hard labor.
“The liberal arts are really important, but there’s other important stuff too, and we make the mistake of ignoring that sometimes,” Steele said. “I’ve read somewhere that it would be better to tie a millstone around your neck and go jump in a lake than to mislead the people who you’re supposed to be teaching.”
What needs to change is the liberal arts student’s outlook on hard labor, concluded Steele and Handel. Students should begin to see it as important and life-changing. Handel suggested that what many students need is to find a job working with their hands over the summer rather than working at an internship.
“You will work harder than you have ever worked in your life and make good money doing it. It won’t kill you and it’ll be fun,” Handel said. “And you’ll come back at the end with money —what a concept, because I’ve never yet had a paid internship — and something real that you can bring with you to the classroom.”