The Massachusetts Medievalist on Elites-Only LIberal Arts
As the Massachusetts Medievalist continues to stew about the broad faculty job elimination in process at Lesley, I revisited “Liberal Arts Majors: Gateways to Power,” the article I co-authored with a student in 2020 about the nationwide trend of cutting programs and majors in the traditional liberal arts. Spoiler: those cuts are happening only in non-selective institutions that serve the majority of U.S. college students - the liberal arts continue to flourish in highly selective, elite schools.
(Thompson Library at Vassar College, where the Massachusetts Medievalist spent many happy hours in the 1980s)
In the fall of 2023, that article hits painfully close to home: Lesley, a university ostensibly focused on social justice, follows the herd and cuts liberal arts majors, curriculum, and faculty as it becomes merely another professional training institute, offering its undergraduates only limited access to traditional modes and inquiry in critical thinking, reading, research, and writing.
In 2020, Asiya Shaikh and I stated that, “It’s ironic that the policy makers and ‘thought leaders’ who advocate for cutting traditional liberal arts majors largely went to highly selective schools that would never consider cutting the history major, and most of them majored in the traditional liberal arts.” Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, presidential candidate, and book-banning advocate, majored in history at Yale. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, majored in history at the University of Utah; WVU is just the most recent major institution to cut liberal arts programs and majors, largely in world languages and literatures.
Asiya and I closed our 2020 essay with a warning that seems even more urgent now: as the United States cuts liberal arts access at non-selective universities, “traditional liberal arts will remain entrenched at majority-white, majority-upper-income institutions; those liberal arts will continue to reinforce their own exclusivity and closed-mindedness; they will continue to seem less relevant to the majority of Americans. Liberal arts narratives will continue to be constructed by white, upper-middle-class scholars, mostly heterosexual males, and the world at large will be intellectually impoverished from that homogeneity.”
Janet Steinmayer, president of Lesley University, double majored in English and History at Bryn Mawr.