Prospects for Higher Education

2005 Lowell Lecture

by James O. Freedman

James O. Freedman photographer unknown

James O. Freedman, president emeritus of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was former president of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa.

I speak about the prospects for higher education from the perspective of one who attended two universities as a student, taught at three others as a professor and dean, and served at two more—one public and one private—as president; in all, 41 years as a member of an academic community. Yet for all this cumulative experience, I daresay that my angle of vision in each of those capacities—student, professor, dean, and president—was often, and at best, limited. It is with a recognition of such limitation that I now set out.

It has been widely accepted, at least for the last several decades, that the United States leads the world in the quality of its institutions of higher education. Only a few other countries can plausibly assert that their colleges and universities approach ours in terms of the learning of their faculties, the importance of their scientific and technological achievements, the richness of their libraries, or the wealth of their contribution to society. The United States has reason, in short, to be proud of its system of higher education.

When Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, he sought to move beyond the concept of the university with the term “multiversity.” The nineteenth-century university “was a village with its priests,” he said, and the early-twentieth-century university was “a town—a one-industry town—with its intellectual oligarchy.”

But the new multiversity was “a city of infinite variety . . . a whole series of communities and activities held together by a common name and . . . related purposes . . . neither entirely of the world nor entirely separate from it.” This was a “period of euphoria,” Kerr wrote, a dynamic era marked by universal access to higher education, the postwar decision to support scientific research within universities, and the newfound availability of resources, especially from the federal government.

To Kerr, the university had matured into “a prime instrument of national purpose” essential to the “knowledge industry” on which government, business, and science had come to rely. “Knowledge has certainly never in history been so central to the conduct of an entire society,” he wrote.

What the railroads did for the second half of the last [nineteenth] century and the automobile for the first half of this [twentieth] century may be done for the second half of this [twentieth] century by the knowledge industry; that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process.

Kerr’s confidence seemed brimming.

Yet when the free speech movement erupted on the Berkeley campus a year later, in 1964, many students disdained the changes that Kerr celebrated. They drew savagely upon his Harvard text to denounce the multiversity as a soulless “knowledge factory” in thrall to the power of industry and government.

If the quality of higher education in the United States has never been greater than it is today, public interest in higher education has rarely been more intense. Yet to many members of the public, some of the changes that have occurred in higher education during recent decades—including the emergence of the multiversity—have been disconcerting, especially to those who view their own college years from the nostalgic distance of a generation or more. The colleges and universities that these persons see today are often strikingly different from the ones they attended several decades ago.

These institutions teach subjects that did not exist in an earlier day: behavioral economics, nanoscience, neuroscience, bioinformatics, epigenetics, systems biology. I once remarked to an alumnus attending his fiftieth reunion, “There have been a lot of changes since your day.” “Yes,” he replied, “all for the worse.” The likelihood of even greater changes in the future can only increase the public’s sense of bewildering unease.

The imperative of change is, of course, a part of the paradox of universities. To preserve its best qualities in a period of technological revolution and rapid globalization, a university must find new ways of expressing its mission—ways that embrace the newest developments in the universe of knowledge but also preserve the essence of its institutional character.

Public Concerns About Higher Education

The pace of change during recent decades has generated many public concerns that have been growing faster than the ability or the willingness of universities to respond. Over the long haul, the public will not nurse its concerns passively. It will demand change in those practices it does not understand or of which it does not approve. The issue is whether change will come voluntarily or involuntarily. If universities do not address today’s dissatisfactions honestly, clearly, and persuasively, they may face the possibility that public anxiety and skepticism will result in the imposition of uncongenial consequences.

What, then, are these concerns? I do not suggest that they are held by every member of the public, or even by a majority. They do not need to be so widely held as to constitute a political threat to the health of universities. They need be held only by an influential minority of dedicated and distressed citizens capable of making their views known through the political process.

Many of the discontents that the public holds against higher education are the nation’s discontents, transferred to colleges and universities from the surrounding political, economic, cultural, and social spheres. Many of these discontents reflect a general disconnect between elites, who tend to embrace higher education enthusiastically, and the broader American public, which at once envies some aspects of higher education and resents others. This is hardly the worst of times for higher education. But in certain unhappy senses, colleges and universities stand in increasing isolation from segments of the American public.

More than one student of American life has observed that virtually every political question in this country tends eventually to become a judicial question. Perhaps it is also the case that many questions of cultural significance eventually become questions directed at higher education. Perhaps it is the nature of large institutions to be misunderstood. Perhaps it is in the nature of society to resent institutions that occupy such powerful positions in American life.

Public concerns about higher education are many. The first concern is the total cost of higher education, now reaching—counting tuition, room, board, and books—$45,000 a year at many private institutions, and between $15,000 and $20,000 a year at many public universities. The rate of tuition increases in the last two decades has been dizzying. How did it happen that in a land of democratic opportunity the cost of higher education went beyond the capacity of many middle-class families?

The absolute numbers are intimidatingly high, in significant part because the costs of maintaining modern laboratories and libraries, complying with federal regulations, and employing so many skilled professionals is also high. Yet many students at private colleges pay less than the so-called “sticker price” because of the provision of financial aid. Moreover, even at the more expensive institutions, tuition for “full-pay” students covers only 50 to 60 percent of the actual cost of educating a student. These explanations, however, have not proven entirely persuasive.

A second source of dissatisfaction comes from those who charge higher education with political correctness by pointing to what they believe is the overwhelming liberal bias of faculty members. Is the allegation true? To many observers of higher education, the liberal leaning of the nation’s faculties seems intuitively accurate. A 1999 study conducted at 183 colleges and universities found that 87 percent of faculty members identified themselves as liberal; only 13 percent identified themselves as conservative.

What explains this apparent discrepancy in ideological balance? It cannot be that conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake or crave entrepreneurial salaries more intensely than liberals. Perhaps there is a degree of self-selection among candidates for faculty positions. As men and women advance further up the educational ladder, the explanation would have it, the more liberal they become. Perhaps, too, conservatives shy away from seeking faculty positions for fear of confronting an ideological bias against them. Or perhaps liberal faculties, in selecting new colleagues, display an unconscious bias in favor of persons much like themselves.

The existence of a pronounced statistical imbalance between liberal and conservative professors would be disturbing if it convincingly proved discrimination. But it does not. Such an imbalance presumably would have little or no effect in the natural and engineering sciences. Presumably it could have an effect in the humanities and the social sciences, especially if faculty members were to push transparently political agendas. My own experience is that students are too sophisticated to tolerate such clumsy efforts.

Intellectual diversity among the many members of a faculty is surely desirable in institutions committed to free inquiry. Despite the clarion assertions of some critics, there is, in my view, simply not enough evidence to convict higher education of a one-sided liberal orientation toward controversial topics in the classroom.

A third source of concern relates to money: the way in which colleges and universities have responded to financial constraints by becoming increasingly preoccupied with sources of income. They have made decisions to become more entrepreneurial by forming marketplace alliances with private industry. They routinely call attention to their wealth, boasting of the size of their endowments, the power of their “brand,” the luxuriousness of their residence halls, the elegance of their “amenities,” and the reach of their fundraising. Often the result has been a lamentable retreat from academe’s most distinctive values.

Given the post-cold-war contraction of government support for defense-related research; the exploding cost of fringe benefits for students, faculty, and staff; and the rising costs of engaging in scientific research, universities have never felt more financially vulnerable than they do today.

However understandable, the adoption of commercial values by those who reside in the groves of academe has been criticized by many leading commentators, including Derek Bok, Ronald Ehrenberg, James Engell, and Anthony Dangerfield, each of whom has expressed dismay at the extent to which entrepreneurial ambition, in response to competitive pressures, has threatened to displace the lonely pursuit of scholarship as the distinguishing mark of the academic enterprise.

In criticizing higher education’s turn to the values of the marketplace, David L. Kirp has vividly noted that “embedded in the very idea of the university . . . are values that the market does not honor: the belief in a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers; in the idea of openness and not ownership; in the professor as a pursuer of truth and not an entrepreneur; in the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisfied.”

A fourth concern that disturbs many members of the public is affirmative action—one of the most important issues of public policy in American life. Much of the antipathy toward affirmative action derives from the dubious assumption that racial diversity is the enemy of academic merit. Considerable evidence points to public disenchantment with any system of student admissions that is not color-blind.

Affirmative action has been an essential response to the nation’s historical legacy of official discrimination. It expresses the value of exposing all students to differing perspectives and experiences, enriching the age-old associative process by which students educate other students. Colleges and universities have put their faith in a proposition that Ralph Waldo Emerson once recorded in his journal: “I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son.”

When Kingman Brewster was criticized by many alumni in the 1960s for moving Yale toward a more meritocratic and diverse institution, he replied, “An excessively homogeneous class will not learn anywhere near as much from each other as a class whose backgrounds and interests and values have something new to contribute to the common experience.” Familiarity with variety and diversity was a necessary qualification, Brewster argued, for those who would be called upon to exercise leadership in “mold[ing] disparate interests and ambitions into group effort.” His views anticipated Justice Lewis F. Powell’s assertion in the Bakke decision that “people do not learn very much when they are surrounded only by the likes of themselves.”

Two leading students of affirmative action, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, conclude in their book, The Shape of the River (1998), that “racially sensitive” admissions policies at the selective institutions they studied have conferred benefits on all students, members of majority and minority groups alike, and have enabled minority students to make successful contributions to their professions and communities. Affirmative action, the authors conclude, has had “many of the attributes of long-term investment decisions involving the creation of human and social capital.”

Colleges and universities need to allay public concerns about affirmative action by emphasizing the democratic goals it seeks to foster and the success it has achieved in building America’s minority middle and professional classes.

Fifth, few sources of public concern about higher education are more troubling than intercollegiate athletics. Even though the United States is a nation of sports fans, a majority of those questioned in public opinion polls regularly indicate their belief that intercollegiate athletics have become commercialized and out of control, past any point of likely reform or redemption in their present form.

As long ago as 1929, the Carnegie Foundation Report on Collegiate Athletics stated: “Commercialism motivates the recruiting and subsidizing of players, and the commercial attitude has enabled many young men to acquire college educations at the cost of honesty and sincerity. More than any other force, it has tended to distort the values of college life and to increase its emphasis upon the material and the monetary.” This is especially so when millions of television dollars and bowl game receipts ride on whether a sophomore converts a last-second field goal or free throw. (When a Notre Dame placekicker missed an extra point in a football game against the University of Southern California in 1996, Notre Dame lost a bowl-game opportunity worth $8 million.)

With the stakes that high, the traditional celebration of the “amateur ideal” has too often become an exercise in camouflage and hypocrisy. Commercialism has come to infuse every aspect of many intercollegiate sports. As Andrew Zimbalist writes in his book, Unpaid Professionals (1999): “With big bucks dangling before their eyes, many [National Collegiate Athletic Association] NCAA schools find the temptations of success too alluring to worry about the rules. Schools cheat. They cheat by arranging to help their prospective athletes pass standardized tests. They cheat by providing illegal payments to their recruits. They cheat by setting up special rinky-dink curricula so their athletes can stay qualified. And when one school cheats, others feel compelled to do the same.”

Even at selective private colleges, athletes in the major sports are rarely representative of the student body as a whole. (I, of course, must confess to having been complicit in such admissions results.) Imagine the tittering that broke out when the president of one of the nation’s leading universities proposed, at a meeting of his Ivy League colleagues, that football coaches be prohibited from sending in plays to the quarterbacks!

With each passing year, the moral and financial costs of intercollegiate athletics grow greater. The 2003 contract between the NCAA and CBS for television rights to the national college basketball tournaments, played each March, provides payments in the staggering amount of $6 billion over 11 years. Universities routinely admit athletes who would be inadmissible on the basis of their academic records; allow them to become isolated from the rest of campus life by the intense demands of practice, travel, and competition; encourage them to bunch together in relatively undemanding “jock” majors; and then tolerate their low graduation rates. They also allocate scarce resources to athletics that could otherwise be directed to the classroom.

Colleges that belong to major athletic conferences typically pay their football coaches many times what they pay their presidents, to whom the coaches nominally report; salaries and other arranged sources of income totaling above $1 million a year are not uncommon. Bob Blackman, who coached football at Dartmouth for 16 seasons, once said, “I like the Ivy League—the only conference where the coaches are paid more than the players.”

However much one might have admired the Ivy League for the standards to which it was believed its members held student athletes, two recent studies by William G. Bowen and associates came as a disturbing shock. Those studies found evidence of a widening “academic-athletic divide” separating students who are recruited as athletes from their classmates—a divide reflected in systematic academic underperformance by recruited athletes.

In early 2005, the NCAA voted to expand the Division I football season from 11 games to 12. The decision has nothing to do with achieving any form of academic benefit. It was taken in order to enlarge the opportunity for participating colleges to raise additional revenue—revenue designed to support athletic programs other than football. Can an economic decision of this kind—one that ignores the cost of lost academic time and physical wear-and-tear upon so-called student athletes—be squared with any sound principle of amateur athletics?

All of the pressures—from coaches, alumni, boosters, the public, and the media—are in the direction of expansion, longer seasons, greater expenditures, higher salaries, extended postseason competition, and enlarged schedules for off-season practice. The result of the multiplicity of pressures is a masquerade that compromises educational standards as well as the interests of so-called student athletes. Colleges and universities will earn back public respect on this score only when they begin to resist these pressures.

To these sources of public concern may be added many others: the mammoth fundraising campaigns in which universities seem to be perpetually engaged; the limited extent to which even the wealthiest universities are prepared to spend endowment income; the refusal of universities, particularly private ones, to be more transparent in revealing information about their finances; the failure of universities to introduce corporate-style management techniques in order to achieve greater productivity; the excessive reliance on standardized tests, especially the SATs, for admissions; and the provision of tenure to faculty members, thereby rewarding talented professors and entrenching “deadwood” professors alike. This list could doubtless be enlarged.

Proposed Responses for Higher Education

Let me now turn to what colleges and universities might do to respond to concerns such as those I have discussed. Some of these concerns are mistaken and require forthright responses. Others are painfully accurate and can be answered only by confessions of error and pledges of reform. In the end, Americans need convincing reasons to value higher education—reasons beyond the (often financially valuable) credential that it confers.

What is particularly worrisome about these concerns is that they suggest that colleges and universities may be confused in defining their identities and therefore in understanding the contributions they are capable of making to the nation. Research universities, having long glorified in their success in attracting research funding and producing highly regarded doctoral recipients, now seek also to become residential colleges emphasizing the value of an undergraduate liberal education. And residential colleges, having long eschewed on principle the diverting lure of graduate education, now seek to achieve greater prestige by becoming research universities. These concerns suggest that colleges and universities need to summon more coherent visions of their essential educational aims, “to reinvent,” as Diane Ravitch has written, “the academic commons—to reinvigorate the culture of the academy, to find persuasive ways of explaining to a new generation the enduring values of a liberal education.”

Placing a renewed emphasis on liberal education would be a good first step in reinvigorating higher education and fortifying its prospects for public support. Although the proportion of high school graduates who now go on to some kind of postsecondary education has increased dramatically in recent decades, the percentage of those students who pursue a liberal education has actually diminished, from 50 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 1995, according to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Seen another way, during the explosive years between 1970 and 1995, higher education as a whole grew by 50 percent. Yet virtually every discipline in the liberal arts, with the exceptions of economics and the sciences, declined in enrollment and financial support. Liberal arts colleges, which dominated higher education at the start of the twentieth century, educated fewer than 4 percent of all undergraduates at the beginning of the twenty-first.

In fact, the greatest number of today’s undergraduates major in programs other than liberal arts. They study resolutely practical subjects like marketing and accounting, finance and real estate, journalism and social work, pharmacy and nursing—and the list could go on.

Subjects like these have, of course, always been a part of the mission of public universities, but that part has been growing at the expense of the liberal arts. When higher education is taken as a whole, more than half of the course offerings and the largest number of bachelor’s degrees are earned in some aspect of business. Moreover, many private institutions that formerly devoted themselves wholly to the liberal arts have now adulterated their curricula with vocational offerings in a reactive effort to attract and retain greater numbers of tuition-paying students.

Vocational and preprofessional subjects undeniably have their value, especially for those students for whom they are the alternative to full-time employment directly after high school. In those circumstances, they are a concession to economic reality, a melancholy measure of the economic—and increasingly social—pressures of premature vocationalism. It was against these pressures that Robert Maynard Hutchins railed when he declared that education “is the single-minded pursuit of the intellectual virtue.” Vocational education, he said, leads to “triviality and isolation.”

Many families have come to view a liberal education as a luxury appropriate primarily for the affluent few, an entitlement for the fortunate minority who can afford to delay the necessity of preparing to earn a living. If this view were to become widely accepted, it would stand as a terrible indictment of our failure to achieve the noble aspirations of Jeffersonian democracy.

For myself, no step that higher education could take would be more important in reinventing its identity than reviewing its commitment to liberal education. Someone once asked Woodrow Wilson, when he was president of Princeton, what the function of a liberal education ought to be. Wilson replied, “To make a person as unlike one’s father as possible.”

What he meant, I think, was that liberal education ought to make a person independent of mind, skeptical of authority and received views, prepared to forge an identity for himself or herself, and capable of becoming an individual not bent upon copying other persons, even persons as persuasive as one’s father.

The kind of liberal education to which Wilson referred is more necessary today than ever before because the qualities it nurtures are more imperiled than ever before. We are immersed in a dot-com digital culture—a social environment of constant and hyperkinetic stimulation, significantly influenced by the mass media and other unrelenting prescribers of opinion and feelings.

But it is not the media alone that are to blame for the accelerated tenor of our daily lives. Telephones, television, VCRs, compact discs, digital music players, fax machines, computers, the Internet, e-mail, cellular phones, pagers, and other forms of instant communication too often create a distracting barrage of noise and frenetic movement. It is almost as if we have surrounded ourselves with such technology in order to avoid suspended moments of silence and contemplation.

If we are to succeed in preserving our individuality against such technological tyranny, we need to slow the tempo of our lives and extend the span of our attention. We need to emphasize a form of humane education that helps students establish a rich interior life and an enduring openness of mind. We need to enable students to maintain a sturdy private self where moral self-examination can occur, so that they can find sustenance in what Hawthorne called “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.”

Why a Liberal Education

Liberal education urges upon us a reflectiveness, a tentativeness, a hospitality to other points of view, an openness to correction and new insight, that can mitigate these tendencies toward polarity, rigidity, and intolerance.

There are few more powerful examples on this point than Abraham Lincoln. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln observed that both parties to the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we not be judged. . . . The Almighty has His own purpose.”

It is remarkable that even after four years of military bloodshed, Lincoln could still speak about the withering war effort with such a profound moral diffidence. Despite his heart-and-soul commitment to the Union’s cause, he could not discern, nor claim he knew, the Almighty’s purposes. Surely we ought to be able to emulate Lincoln’s example by entertaining the possibility of doubt in our own political and cultural lives.

That is why a liberal education seeks to impress upon students that one of the most important words in the English language is “perhaps,” and that we would all do better if we prefaced our most emphatic statements with that modest qualifier.

Liberal education teaches the importance of tempering profound convictions with a measure of tolerance and a judicious sense of humility. That is what Socrates, in searching for the eternal truth and decrying the unexamined life, illustrated by his utter lack of dogmatism. That is what Oliver Cromwell intended when he declared, “I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.” That is what the great judge Learned Hand meant when he said that the spirit of liberty is “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” That is what Oliver Wendell Holmes underscored when he declined to elevate personal beliefs to the level of universal truths. “Certitude is not certainty,” he said. “We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.” In an essay published in 1915, Holmes wrote:

When I say that a thing is true, I mean that I cannot help believing it. I am stating an experience as to which there is no choice. But as there are many things that I cannot help doing that the universe can, I don’t venture to assume that my inabilities in the way of thought are inabilities of the universe. I therefore define the truth as the system of my limitations, and leave absolute truth for those who are better equipped.

As the examples of these thinkers indicate, the notion of tentativeness—of skepticism about certainty and conventional wisdom, or recognition that truth is often fragile and elusive—is an important characteristic of a refined mind and of a good citizen.

When the ground seems to shake and shift beneath us, when life seems to be poignantly painful and perversely unfair, liberal education provides perspective, enabling us, as Matthew Arnold counseled, to see life steadily and see it whole. By providing us with perspective, it nourishes courage and inner strength. It helps in the most human of desires—that yearning to make sense out of the painful perplexities and confusing ironies of experience. It responds to what Saul Bellow’s character Abe Ravelstein calls “the purpose of our existence: say, the correct ordering of the human soul.”

Liberal education urges us to be not only tentative in our opinions, but also skeptical of the dominant modes of thought. My own undergraduate years at Harvard (1953–57) were dominated intellectually by a number of doctrines: Marxism, Freudianism, Keynesianism, existentialism. The courses we took in the humanities and the social sciences routinely celebrated the explanatory power of Marx and Freud and Keynes and Sartre. Indeed, the fact that the work of these thinkers appeared on the reading lists of more than one course served to emphasize to undergraduates their intellectual significance.

None of us today would accept so uncritically the broad-gauged, all-encompassing explanations that my professors in the 1950s attributed to these intellectual icons. We know too much now about the shortcomings of their theories. Marx’s prophecy that “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation” proved decisively wrong, and now is a dead letter. In an age of psychotherapeutic drugs, Freud’s conviction that psychoanalysis could discover buried motives and exorcise one’s inner demons carries more literary appeal than scientific authority. Even Keynes’s unorthodox view that government deficits could be powerful tools of fiscal management seems less relevant in an era that holds free markets in excessive esteem.

Looking back, I cannot help but believe that even at that time, my professors and my classmates should have been more skeptical. Something has gone wrong with liberal education when it does not rigorously question the prevailing paradigms of the moment. And that experience from my undergraduate days makes me wonder: What are the prevailing paradigms today? Are professors and students questioning them sufficiently? Are we saying “perhaps” even as we necessarily rely upon convenient paradigms to order our intellectual universe?

As an undergraduate at Harvard 50 years ago, I studied under many powerful exemplars of liberal education, including Walter Jackson Bate, Northrop Frye, Albert J. Guerard, and John V. Kelleher. I want to write briefly about still another one of my exemplary professors, Douglas Bush.

Professor Bush was a Miltonist who had made his reputation with a magisterial book, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (1952). He went on to display his critical virtuosity in more than a dozen other books, including studies of Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, and John Keats. Nothing better illustrated his catholicity of taste than his unsuccessful efforts in nominating Edmund Wilson and Robert Frost for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Professor Bush’s method of teaching Milton was to read his poetry to the class, quietly, patiently, line by line, pausing every several lines to comment on their meaning, historical allusions, classical references or echoes, and events in Milton’s life. Often it appeared that he was reciting the lines from memory rather than reading them. Once when the classroom lights suddenly went out, he immediately recited a passage from Paradise Lost: “More safe I sing with mortal voice . . . /In darkness, and with dangers compass’d round. . . .”

Under the tutelage of Professor Bush, I came to admire the power and beauty of Milton. I reveled in the lyrical reach of his metered lines. I loved “Lycidas” (“Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil”) and the sonnets, especially “On His Blindness,” with its canonical line, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” which John Berryman called “the greatest sonnet in the language.” I also admired Milton’s prose, especially “Areopagitica,” his argument against censorship, with its stirring rhetorical assertion: “Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

When T. S. Eliot spoke in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on May 29, 1955—at the end of my sophomore year—he paid special homage to Professor Bush. In a number of early essays, Eliot had downgraded Milton’s stature as an English poet. “While it must be admitted that Milton is a very great poet indeed,” he wrote in 1936, “it is something of a puzzle to decide in what his greatness consists. On analysis, the marks against him appear both more numerous and more significant than the marks to his credit.” In his celebrated rejection of Paradise Lost, Eliot wrote, “So far as I perceive anything, it is a glimpse of theology that I find in large part repellent, expressed through a mythology that would have been better left in the Book of Genesis, upon which Milton has not improved.”

Now, Eliot announced in Sanders Theatre, Professor Bush had since persuaded him that Milton must indeed be ranked among the great English poets. I was stunned by the significance of that statement. It was, of course, a tribute to Professor Bush. But even more important, it was a confession by a humane man of a critical mistake. Eliot’s confession of error was an epiphany; it brought the audience into the intimacy of a writer secure and generous enough to admit his fallibility.

Professor Bush was an indomitable proponent of the humanities. He thought them more essential to a liberal education than the social or natural sciences; they were, he said, “the most basic of the three great bodies of knowledge and thought.”

With firm conviction as well as a fearful pessimism, Bush once wrote,

We may indeed reach a point in our new Dark Age—at moments one may wonder if we have not reached it already—where the literary creations of saner and nobler ages can no longer be assimilated or even dimly apprehended, where man has fulfilled his destiny as a mindless, heartless, will-less node. Meanwhile, no scientific problem is anywhere near so urgent as the preservation of individual man and his humane faculties and heritage.

I have always cherished the passion of his conviction. Professor Bush’s humane commitment to liberal education has been with me ever since.

And so, although liberal education is not perfect, it does have the redemptive potential to heighten the glories and exhilarations of life, as well as to prepare us for its trials and anxieties. It has the capacity to enable us, as President Jeremiah Day of Yale declared in 1828, to acquire the proper “discipline and furniture of the mind,” to see the world clearly and steadily, to be conscious of the desirability of qualifying what we say with the word “perhaps,” and to be whole and humane human beings.

I hope that those who have experienced the emancipating joy of a liberal education will want to become its advocates. In the end, the cause of liberal education—the cause of well-educated men and women—is one of America’s best hopes for responding to the critics of higher education and establishing a more humane democracy.

James O. Freedman died on March 21, 2006 after a long and debilitating struggle with cancer. Ill health prevented him from delivering his Lowell Lecture in person, but he was able to produce this written version, and we print it here so that it will reach the widest possible readership. It is probably the last long article that he wrote, and it is “vintage” Jim Freedman.

Freedman was a 1957 honors graduate in English literature from Harvard College and a 1962 graduate of Yale Law School. He clerked for Justice Marshall Thurgood of the Supreme Court before embarking on his legal and academic career. During his distinguished academic career, he served as dean and professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, president of the University of Iowa, president of Dartmouth College, and president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include Crisis and Legitimacy: The Administrative Process and American Government (1978), and Idealism and Liberal Education (1996). A lifelong champion of the ideals of liberal education, Freedman’s Lowell Lecture is a fitting memorial to his career.