Ronna Burger, Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair and Professor, Philosophy

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

The question of liberal arts education, if framed as a debate between “content” and “aptitude” taken as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, is seriously misleading. In fact, the most meaningful way to develop intellectual aptitude, I would argue, requires engagement with a particular content: the classic works that have inspired thinkers, writers, and artists over centuries, traditionally called “the great books.” Grappling with these demanding texts fosters skills in articulating, expressing, and assessing ideas. Entering into dialogue with their authors, we rise to a level we were not even aware of before. Teaching classes devoted to the study of those works over many decades, I have often heard students remark, “This is what I thought a college course would be like.”

The exciting endeavor of interpreting a great book does not come about by simply opening up its pages. A beginner needs guidance in learning what it means to read carefully and thoughtfully, what questions to raise, how to proceed in a paradoxical spirit of moderation and courage. On the one hand, we must assume that these authors are wiser than we are and we have much to learn from them; on the other hand, we must boldly think for ourselves, asking what that wise author could have meant by a puzzling point, pondering how it might shed light on our own concerns. In returning to such a book a second time, or more, we discover new riches, in part by recognizing what we missed before. Since that is just as true for the one who provides this guidance, the teacher is always a student at the same time.

The classics are books that have shaped us and our study of them a journey to understanding who and what we are. Our tradition is rooted in two sources, “Jerusalem and Athens” in shorthand, or the Bible and Greek philosophy, and the nature of the relation between them is a dynamic force in determining our identity. Whatever their dispute answers, an open-minded exploration of these two sources brings to light fundamental questions about issues that continue to occupy us: humanity and divinity, reason and revelation, man and woman, nature and law, opinion and knowledge, individual and community, democracy and tyranny, justice, nobility and the good.

The “canon” of works in which such fundamental questions are addressed should not be approached as a repository of doctrines; on the contrary, one mark of a great book is the way it precludes dogmatism. This is exemplified by the philosopher Socrates, engaged in the activity of “examination of opinion.” Plato’s representation in his dialogues draws the reader into the inquiry, uncovering the partial character of the opinions expressed, and animating a pursuit of the truth. This is not just an intellectual exercise, but the core of a way of life.

The exciting endeavor of interpreting a great book does not come about by simply opening up its pages. A beginner needs guidance in learning what it means to read carefully and thoughtfully, what questions to raise, how to proceed in a paradoxical spirit of moderation and courage.

Plato illustrates the challenges to education in his inventive and profound image of the cave, perhaps especially applicable in our technological epoch. Every society is an enclosed world, we citizens are chained in seats able to see only shadows on a wall in front of us, produced by artifacts carried along behind us, projected by the light of a fire. But we are not fated to imprisonment: Every cave has an opening to the light outside, and it is always possible to be turned around, to discover the cause of the images previously taken for reality, and ultimately to consider whether and how those constructions reflect what is true by nature. Plato offers a subtle hint of the role of the philosopher in this process: A figure inside the cave is busy asking a newly released prisoner about the passing artifacts, “What is it?” This is the question addressed in each Platonic dialogue: What is justice, or courage or moderation or knowledge, love or friendship or pleasure, among other matters of the greatest importance to us.

Pursuing such questions through our study of the classics — reading, thinking, and conversing — frees us from an “unexamined life,” unlocking the valuable potential of a liberal arts education, for which college years should be a preparation.


 

Ronna Burger is a professor of Philosophy and holds the Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair in Judeo-Christian Studies. Her new book The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato's Euthyphro, is a revised and expanded edition that includes a new preface, “The Death of Socrates and the Post-Socratic Schools,” and an essay, “On Plato's Euthyphro.”

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

In the ongoing “Great Liberal Arts Debate,” the most compelling arguments often come from those who have lived its impact. We caught up with four distinguished School of Liberal Arts alumni, each with their own diverse career path. They shared how their Tulane education — be it rooted in core curriculum or more interdisciplinary in nature — profoundly shaped their career paths and continues to inform their success in an ever-evolving world.

Sophia Gutierrez (SLA ’21)

English, Classical Studies, SLAM Minor, Simon & Schuster Sales Associate

I approach this topic from a very unique perspective. My solution to this whole debate is that it is a trick question, though, because they both matter, so it works out.

Every single person I work with was an English major. So, while it is a very direct connection, I don’t think the specific things I learned while getting my English degree directly correlate to my day-to-day role. I’m a salesperson — I’m not editing. I’m not trying to tell someone how to make their book sound better. But I am using persuasive writing, critical thinking, and creative problem solving.

One of the favorite things I did at Tulane was take History of the Canon of American Literature, with Dr. Ed White. I learned why we included certain pieces in the canon. What caused changes? I would make the argument that what you’re reading and what you’re learning is almost irrelevant, as long as you’re developing certain skills. And I think the thing that’s most important to learn is general history. You know the classic line: if you don’t learn history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Which is, I think, very topical for our current political moment.

The aptitudes that I learned are far more relevant to whatever I choose to do for the rest of my life. I’m 25. My career could go many different ways. Currently, it’s publishing, and I love it, but I could do so many other things. When you choose a major at 18, you can’t know for a fact that it’s going to translate to your career. Yes, it’s useful to have read the classics and have that common knowledge. But I’d also argue that in a world where people are reading less and less, getting people to read anything is more important than getting them to read something specific, because there’s inherent value in just about anything you read.

John Strasburger (A&S ’86)

Political Science and International Relations, Litigation Trial Lawyer

What I do for a living requires a law degree. And so, from that standpoint, nothing that you know before the law degree is disqualifying in any way, but the attributes that are most important for being any kind of lawyer are the ability to read, write, and communicate clearly. It is also important to be able to tear an issue apart, dissect it, understand it, and analyze it.

When I was in school, the engineering students and the business students had so many requirements that they had to take. They did not have the time to dabble in many of the courses within the liberal arts. Within the liberal arts, you have a lot more flexibility to take Psychology classes that may discipline your mind in a different way than the study of Economics.

When I’m looking for young talent to hire, I don’t care if they studied Biology, Economics, Engineering, or played the oboe in the Rice University Symphony. I care that they learned how to analyze all the possibilities and effectively communicate them in written and oral form.

The worst possible outcome is to study something you’re not particularly interested in. Your career is a fool’s errand. If you’re the right kind of student, you can learn important skill sets in any discipline.

Jennifer Mills (SLA ’01)

Music Vocal Performance, Internal Medicine Doctor

As a doctor who also has a BFA in Musical Vocal Performance, I obviously needed to take a lot of science classes as an undergrad. But the truth of the matter is that all of the pre-med prerequisites are not of use to me in my current role. You learn to memorize and memorize efficiently, but the actual assimilation of information, restructuring, and making connections to health issues is entirely liberal arts thinking — not science. The actual creative thinking and problem solving, which I do every day as an internist, are not based on or reinforced by any Physics class or Calculus class that I took.

With science, something exists. There is a truth, and we have to find the truth and excavate it. With the arts, anything can be true, and we can create something new. I think the critical thinking of other disciplines, like Philosophy or English, is where you learn to think beyond memorization and regurgitation.

When communicating with patients, I often reference something from classical literature rather than using scientific vocabulary. I think people are more conversant in arts and disciplines, versus having to learn the mathematical thinking of Chemistry or Physics. I think I’m better at it because of my liberal arts background.

Maria Cordero (SLA ’25)

Philosophy and International Relations, Philosophy PhD Candidate

There is, in Philosophy, I think, the advantage that you can study anything under that label. There’s philosophy of art, philosophy of love, and philosophy of action. I read political philosophy in my Political Science classes. Reading allows you to choose what to believe in, but you still have to go through the content. You might sometimes say, “I took away nothing from that,” but other times you might say, “This is the most valuable thing I’ve ever learned.”

I do think a lot of literature overlaps with philosophy. So, I don’t think they’re self-exclusive in any way. And this is a popular opinion, but there is a certain curiosity that you need to have in order to appreciate literature. It’s a practice of empathy. It’s a practice of nurturing your mind, and being human is part of that. You might hate the book outlined on your class syllabus, but the practice of reading it is so much more valuable than avoiding it.

I think there are two sides to Philosophy being so popular. The main one is that it has become a means to an end. So, it’s not necessarily that Philosophy attracts people because they are in it for the love of knowledge. It’s more like, if I study Philosophy, then I can go to law school, and it looks good. Or if I study Philosophy, I can do X and Y, and I’ll be employable. But you sit in Philosophy classes, and there’s a lack of engagement. A lot of people do find it interesting, but you will find very few people who will continue with Philosophy after undergrad. That’s something that I’m grappling with, too, being in classes where people aren’t as engaged and are only there for a career. But is this what liberal arts is actually about? Just a career?

Douglas N. Harris, Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education, Chair and Professor, Economics

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

A few years ago, I started to get worried about where we are headed as a country. Misinformation, distrust, anger, and polarization were — and remain — pervasive. I wanted to do something. So, I started to ask, how are we really doing? Is the nation’s bad mood really justified? If so, how and why?

We could not have come up with a sensible notion of the state of the nation without the liberal arts to help us understand the full and complex range of the human experience.

Fan Zhang, Jessie J. Poesch Professorship in Art, assistant professor in Asian Art at the Newcomb Art Department, Tulane’s Asian Studies Program, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. 

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

Long before it became the focus of her fieldwork and current book project, Fan Zhang was drawn to ancient burial sites. Growing up in Chengdu, a city in Southwestern China, she remembers riding her bike to the royal tomb of a Ming dynasty prince and taking the bus to the Bronze-Age burial pits of Sanxingdui. “The most fun trips I remember were not to zoos or amusement parks,” she says, “but to burial sites and ancient remains.”

Today, Zhang is an assistant professor in Asian Art and holds the Jessie J. Poesch Professorship in Art at Tulane. As an art historian, she specializes in the material culture of early medieval China. Her book-in-progress, A Center on the Border: Migration, Identity, and Cosmopolitanism in Fifth-Century Chinese Art, explores the mortuary art of 300 burial sites in Pingcheng, a city in Northern China that served both as the capital of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) and as a border between nomadic steppes and China proper. Rather than focus on the distinction — and tension — between the Han Chinese and the nomads in Pingcheng, as traditional historiographies have done before, Zhang’s project reveals a more nuanced story of cultural pluralism, and of the creativity and innovation that emerged out of this transcultural exchange.

Zhang has come a long way from her childhood wanderings. Her research has earned support from prestigious institutions, including a 2025 Mellon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, a nearly $50,000 Award to Louisiana Artists & Scholars (ATLAS) grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and upcoming residencies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Fudan University. Though her process now includes archival research, months spent in the field, and collaboration with local scholars, she maintains a sense of wonder and excitement in her work.

One striking discovery was the tomb of Han Farong, a woman of a non-noble background who, despite the plain appearance of her tomb, was buried with an extraordinary set of jewelry, including a necklace of over 4,000 Indo-Pacific beads and an intricate pair of gold earrings designed with Indo-Bactrian motifs. The jewelry, Zhang explains, shows the cosmopolitan fashion at Pingcheng — that luxury goods and the foreign exotic were not restricted to royals or aristocrats, but were likely available to any city dwellers who could afford them.

She is also working on a 3D model of the tomb of Lady Poduoluo, a member of a non-Han ethnic group whose funerary portraits depict her seated equally with her husband — in distinct contrast to typically male-centered Han Chinese funerary art. The couple’s clothing blends Han and Xianbei styles, and Buddhist references appear in the mural composition. Dominating historical narratives assume the nomads simply assimilating into Han Chinese culture, but such findings prove the syncretism of cultures and give agency to the immigrants who played an important role in China’s artistic development and history.

When Zhang first left China to pursue her PhD at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University, she experienced a shift in identity — from a member of the dominate majority in China, as Han Chinese herself, to a minority group in the United States. “This led me to consider the relationship of ‘us’ and ‘other,’ and the shifting and multiple identities one could have,” she says. In New York City, she experienced “true cosmopolitanism,” and began understanding the mechanism of cities as a place “where people from diverse backgrounds share the urban space and create something extraordinary and impossible for a closed society.”

Zhang sees border cities — particularly those like Pingcheng — not as sites of division, but as “contact zones for cultural interaction.” She hopes that this book will highlight the unique position of all borders, and emphasize migration as key to artistic innovation. Rooted in her love of fieldwork is the desire to eschew simple definitions, embrace complexity, and question our definitions of “center” and “periphery.” “I focus on individuals who facilitated and embodied these interactions, rather than label them generally,” she explains. “By investigating individual burial remains, it reveals a more nuanced picture than the binary divisions.”

Michael P. Kuczynski, Pierce Butler Professor of English

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

When I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s at a small Jesuit college outside Philadelphia, earning your BA was like getting on the elevated train at the first stop and not disembarking until the last. Study was organized around a humanities “core”: two courses in prose composition (at Tulane, we call this First-Year Writing), three in History, three in Philosophy, three in Theology, and three in foreign languages. Because I was an English major, there were numerous additional requirements in literature, historically arranged, from Chaucer through modern poetry. I was already intrigued by the Middle Ages and interested in becoming a medievalist, so I chose Latin for my language. The rest of the core set me up wonderfully for graduate school.

When I got to grad school, I sometimes found myself ahead of my peers because of my undergraduate training. I didn’t have many graduate electives, but that didn’t bother me. After all, I had elected — as a graduate student now — to continue working the core. The microchoices of my education were laid out before me, like a chef’s tasting menu. None of them were bland.

Most colleges and universities no longer offer this kind of core curriculum to either undergraduates or graduate students. I think, however, that the concept of a humanities core and its availability at a place like Tulane makes sense. Tulane combines the appeal of a Research 1 institution with a liberal arts college. Working the core, for faculty and students alike, enhances both those missions.

Proponents of AI in higher education, beware!

For many excellent reasons, students want more choices, especially across the undergraduate curriculum — and the core appears to restrict choice. The original core was popular at Columbia University after World War I, as a way of ensuring that all students received a basic grounding in what were regarded as the “classics” of Western thought and writing. The names of core authors are inscribed around the outside of Butler Library, a site of student activism since the 1960s. The marble lineup is exclusively male and Eurocentric. I once heard someone refer to it cynically as a tombstone. I’d argue, however, that working the core for many years has in fact enlivened and strengthened it: Certain muscles that the corpus of American education never knew it had, have become manifest. During the 19th century, figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, whose educational programs were steeped in Latin and Greek, also advocated for the study of modern Western languages and literature — and for the editing, translation, analysis, and emulation of various Eastern texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita. That rebel Thoreau demonstrates, throughout Walden, how the discipline of studying classical languages is liberating rather than confining. In Columbia’s core today, Toni Morrison stands alongside Homer, Gandhi accompanies Plato, and Andy Warhol hangs with Raphael. What is required in the 2020s is more representative and various than in the early 1900s, in part because the original core stimulated the intelligence of those who submitted to it and encouraged a critical examination of the concept of “value.”

The other day, I was reflecting on how, in each of my core classes as an undergraduate, two figures were mentioned so regularly that they might have been enrolled as my fellow students: Freud and Marx. I am neither a Freudian nor a Marxist, but I learned an immense amount from hearing my professors — some Jesuits, others lay people — apply the ideas of these two monumental thinkers to the interpretation of literary texts. I never felt, in reading them, or Milton, or Thomas Aquinas, that I was being “indoctrinated.” I remember in particular reading a short book, Hamlet and Oedipus, first published in 1949 by a disciple of Freud, Ernst Jones. I’d obsessed over these core dramas before, but never thought of them together. Jones’s approach changed my imaginative engagement with Shakespeare and Sophocles for the better. I also remember reading Hard Times, Dickens’s novel about industrialized education, in the same class in which I read an abridged version of Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, and the full text of Darwin’s Origin of Species. At the end of the course, I was an avid student of fiction alongside nonfiction, and vice versa. My education in the core had helped me to escape the mechanical approach to life and learning that is encouraged at the corporate school in Hard Times — run by Mr. Gradgrind and supervised by his master teacher, Mr. M’Choakumchild. Proponents of AI in higher education, beware!

Some teachers and students of the core were undoubtedly more elitist and exclusivist than others. But for those of us who worked the core properly — in both a disciplined and enlightened way — its boundaries also became vistas. I am currently writing a book entitled White Jesus, about how one of the most influential figures in human history, an itinerant Middle Eastern preacher, became Europeanized during the medieval and early modern periods, in literature, theology, and the visual arts. I would not have been able to imagine such a book, let alone write it, without my training in the core. Working the classical core enabled me, as it has many others, to look imaginatively beyond it.

Nghana Lewis, Associate Chair and Professor, English and Africana Studies

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

In the iconic film The Matrix, Morpheus’ metaphorical offer to Neo — the red pill for unsettling truth and awareness, or the blue pill for comfortable ignorance — perfectly sets the tone for my courses. I convey to students that course content, discussions, and assignments engage uncomfortable truths, which may cause them to feel discomfort.

Among these truths is that the founding of the United States on the ideals of freedom, justice, and representative democracy, was a human choice and a human experiment; and both the choice and the experiment are consequential to humanity. I tell students that unpacking these truths requires embracing the reality of human fallibility and human possibility, and I use “Query XIV,” from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, to illustrate this point.

In this document, Jefferson reasons that Black people cannot be “incorporated” into the America experiment and American ideals cannot apply to this population because of white prejudice, black resentment, white superiority, and black inferiority. Jefferson also identifies “language” as “an instrument for the attainment of science.” Untangling, reconciling, and accepting incongruity in the racialized geopolitical philosophy and infinite possibilities of language that Jefferson sets forth is work that I tell my students they must be prepared to do.

As well, I encourage them to embrace courses that make considerable demands on their thinking and restrict their use of generative AI. In these respects, I assure them that taking the red pill translates to an investment of time, intellectual energy, and financial resources that will make them freer, bolder readers and independent generators of knowledge.

To me, the value of a liberal arts education lies in the power it gives students. Regardless of their majors or professional aspirations, a liberal arts education prepares students to reflect critically on their histories, tap into their creativities, and become agents of growth, change, and opportunity.

Brian T. Edwards, Herb Weil, PhD Professor of Humanities, and Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane.

Originally published in the 2025 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

Wherever you fall on the question, it’s clear we’re in the middle of another major battle in the culture wars. Over the past year, the challenges posed to liberal arts education have become particularly fierce. Government cuts have left thousands of scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and arts without funding to continue their research — federal grants abruptly revoked in midstream — and put many academics on the defensive to justify their work.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence promises to summarize complex arguments, to write faster, and to do higher-order thinking in a matter of seconds, pulling the carpet out from under the feet of educators and students alike. The hostilities have entered a new stage.

But if there is a public debate about higher education, inside universities there is another animated discussion about how or why the liberal arts matter. I call this the “Great Liberal Arts Debate.” Not everyone working in the humanities and social sciences is engaged actively in this conversation. Indeed, I am hoping to provoke a more open dialogue. I fear many of us have slipped into easy assumptions about the work we are doing. Too much is at stake not to reconsider the question with rigor.

And though much about higher education has become politicized, the fault lines here do not divide across traditional political lines.

Back to the Future?

That was not always the case. Readers who went to college in the 1980s or early 1990s might recall the culture wars

of that era, when books such as The Closing of the American Mind by Chicago classicist Allan Bloom and Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch were national best sellers. In those years, traditionalists recoiled from the expansion of the canon and the revision of the core curriculum at schools such as Columbia or Stanford, where the battles were fierce.

On the other side, those who fought for what philosopher Charles Taylor called “the politics of recognition” suggested that an acknowledgment of the multicultural basis of American society and a non-hierarchical appreciation for world cultures warranted profound changes in what students learned.

Both sides, nonetheless, believed that students needed to read specific content. Whether or not Samuel Taylor Coleridge got bumped from the English literary survey for Olaudah Equiano, or Saul Bellow from the American survey for Toni Morrison, there were common texts to be read. The sides just couldn’t agree on what they were.

As those debates rippled through liberal arts colleges and universities, including Tulane, the pressure on which texts to hold on to, if any, increased. In the last two decades, a perfect storm of forces — the economic crises of 2008 and 2020-21, the impact of the digital revolution and AI, and skyrocketing costs for undergraduate education — put pressure on educators to justify the value proposition of the liberal arts.

Over the last year, figures such as Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and Stephen Miller rose in influence. Their crusader-like critiques of higher education brought this pressure to an existential level. And that’s where the great debate takes a new turn.

What is to be done?

What, then, is the value of a liberal arts education? Let’s take a step back and employ liberal arts thinking to approach the problem itself.

First order of business is how we frame our arguments and the logics by which we defend our significance. Defenders of the liberal arts congregate around two poles. For the sake of shorthand, let’s call one a focus on content and the other an emphasis on aptitudes.

Do the disciplines and their core texts — if we could agree on them — matter in and of themselves? Or are our greatest attributes the critical thinking, communication skills, and creative problem solving that a liberal education seems uniquely suited to provide?

These debates are hardly new. They go back at least as far as Plato’s famous allegory of the cave and his delineation of the essential and foundational disciplines of an ideal education. The so-called trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric undergirded upper-level disciplines of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy (the quadrivium). And those, in turn, would form the basis for “practical” education in disciplines such as Medicine or Architecture — what we would today call professional education.

Two-and-a-half centuries after Plato’s death, Cicero gave us the term “liberal arts” in the service of an argument for what kind of education was good for the health of the Republic itself. For the Roman statesman and orator, free-thinking citizens were those who had been educated broadly in Philosophy, History, and Rhetoric, and these in turn would provide political and moral stability.

In the early republic of the United States, this thinking led several of the Founders to argue for the establishment of a national university — Washington left a bequest in his own will for this purpose. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and physician Benjamin Rush variously argued that a stable democracy relied on an educated citizenry. While there were differences in the details (in his prescriptions for education, Franklin included Commerce and the “Useful” alongside fields that focused on the “Ornamental,” whereas Jefferson placed greater emphasis on the classics), the general parameters resonate profoundly with the liberal arts approach we champion at Tulane today. So, what happened?

Choices, choices, choices

In my list of the classical disciplines, you might note that some are still with us, while others have receded in importance. Today’s Tulane student can still study Logic and Music, for example, but a major in Grammar would be untenable. Many of the core liberal arts disciplines of today emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries, when fields such as Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, and Communication were established and elaborated. (Political Science, Economics, and Communication are our three most popular majors.)

But it is more than the proliferation of disciplines that forces the great debate. While our departments focus necessarily on different content, they are better understood as differing approaches and methodologies for understanding the world, society, and human meaning-making.

How do professors decide what is important for their students to study? Every choice of what to put on a syllabus is underwritten by a belief that some content is more important than others.

And for the student, what major or discipline is the best pathway to success, however we define it? I frequently encourage students to follow their passions and proclivities and to feel confident that they are not mortgaging their futures by so doing.

This is the “great debate” in a nutshell. Does it matter what we teach and, more importantly, what students learn for the content, or for the patterns of thinking that the liberal arts cultivate, from Philosophy to Economics, from the reading of poetry to the study of algorithmic thinking (which is how I understand Computer Science as a liberal art), or from Music Theory and Harmonics (part of the original quadrivium!) to labor history?

At Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts, you will find a range of opinions across the faculty.

Should there be a common core, as literary scholar Michael Kuczynski argues in this issue, whether it is based around the Western canon or an expanded set of texts and authors? Or does a liberal education do its magic by focusing on aptitudes — including critical thinking, communication, civics, citizenship, and collaboration — that can be learned in a wide range of fields in the social sciences and humanities, as classicist Susann Lusnia argues? That would seem to be the basis of economist Doug Harris’s approach to thinking about the “state of the nation,” wherein he brought together experts from across the political spectrum to identify non-partisan measures by which to chart our country’s standing.

Philosopher Ronna Burger takes us in yet another direction and turns the question on its head. Burger argues that it is precisely a specific content — the great books that have occupied thinkers and students for centuries — that allows us to most efficiently and richly develop the aptitudes associated with liberal education. And historian Shennette Garrett-Scott argues that by defining the poles this way at all, we are limiting ourselves from a perspective that would put both in tension.

The Verdict

You might have guessed by now that I am not going to land on one or the other side of this debate. And that’s precisely because of my own commitment to the liberal arts. I admit that my frequently repeated proposition that a liberal arts education is the best training for the careers and challenges of the future has relied on and perpetuated the “aptitudes” pole. Yet our commitment to 32 different departments and programs would suggest a belief in “content”: that there really are specific things students need to know.

I do believe that there are certain texts and authors that every Tulane student should engage with and key ideas to discuss across a wide range of fields. I am also a champion of language learning and a global approach to the liberal arts, and we have expanded both the range of languages and the world areas that we teach across the school. And so, I resist the argument that we should require any specific curriculum, since every choice comes at the expense of another. Four years is after all a short time. I have had nearly four decades of wide reading and study since I entered college, and I still haven’t caught up.

There are many pathways to problem solving and critical thinking and many inescapable and unavoidable authors and thinkers to grapple with. That is too the joy of the liberal arts — its unpredictability and its inexhaustibility.


 

Brian T. Edwards serves as dean of the School of Liberal Arts, where, since 2018, he has led the largest of Tulane's nine schools, encompassing 32 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, area studies, and fine and performing arts.