Value of Cla

Welcome to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. You've come to a great university at a pivotal time for our communities, our nation, and our world -- and my colleagues and I are really delighted that you are here. All of us who work in higher education, and especially in the College of Liberal Arts, are here for one reason: to help you clarify and achieve your educational goals. We know that it is a privilege to be able to work with tomorrow’s leaders today, — and we also recognize that our time with you is limited. So let’s get started. My name is Chris Kearns, and I’m the Assistant Dean for Student Services here in the College of Liberal Arts - which means that I get to work with students and student groups, with advisors and career counselors, and with some of the best faculty on the planet to help undergraduates make the strongest choices possible about what they will study and do, and what they will create and experience over the course of their four-year career. Today I want to talk for a few moments about the Liberal Arts — about what they are, and how they answer many of the questions some of you may still have about what you will study over the next four years, and what you will do with those lessons. I’d like to start with where we are in this college and on this campus. By now, you already know your way around the parts of the university that you interact with on a daily basis. So there is not much I can add to what you’ve already learned about your classes, quiet places to study, the most scenic walks, and spots where you can grab a quick bite when you are pressed for time. But did you know that we have a history reaching back more than a century and a half? The University of Minnesota was founded in 1851, before Minnesota was even a state. And our University is Minnesota’s only land-grant institution – meaning that it was designed from the very beginning to educate people from all sections of our community. The College of Liberal Arts is not quite as old as the larger university. We were established in 1869 to educate students in the areas of Science, Literature, and the Arts. And as long ago as 1940, we began to emphasize an education designed to help students transform their “social intelligence…into social leadership”. That tradition continues today, with the undergraduate enrollment in CLA numbering around 15,000 students, making us the largest college within the University of Minnesota. Additionally, we teach the broadest range of subjects. This is the setting for the work you will do as you complete your degree. But what about the learning community you are already part of? Who are the fellow students with whom you will be attending classes, campus events, and the occasional game or match? Well, as members of the College of Liberal Arts class of 2016, you represent roughly half of the incoming class at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. And you are an impressive group. We know from your high school records and from the work you’ve already begun this first semester, that you are one of the most talented, engaged, and academically prepared classes we have seen at this university. This means that we have never before seen a class as well prepared, as broadly diverse, and with as extensive a record of achievement as the class of 2016. So that’s a little context about where you are and who you are as a class. But what is it that all of you will be studying? And what is it that you will have in common both with your friends and even with those members of the class of 2016 you may never have the chance to meet? What, in short, is the Liberal Arts tradition that you are already in the act of joining? If we were trying to answer such questions in the context of a course in the history of higher education, we could trace the Liberal Arts back to 5th century Athens and even earlier. Plato argued that the liberal arts provide the best education possible for the cultivation of what he thought of as intellectual and moral excellence. What you study in CLA, in other words, has been designed from the very beginning of the Western tradition not only to equip you with knowledge and skills - with the ability to think, evaluate, communicate, and learn — but it is also designed to help you develop your character, the values that you believe in and the kind of difference you want to make in the wider world. One liberal arts professor has summed up what was taught in Plato’s time by saying: “Training in the liberal arts produced a free and thoughtful person who could read anything written, understand anything spoken, and say whatever (s)he wanted to say.” And though we’ve added a lot since Plato’s era, the same holds true today. When we look at the Liberal arts in the twenty-first century, we might say they are designed to educate ADAPTABILITY EXPERTS who can understand and make good use of all the different sources of information that are part of an increasingly interconnected, rapidly diversifying world where opportunity is defined by what we know or can learn, how powerfully we think, and how well we communicate. We train our graduates to THINK FOR A LIVING today, because that is where we believe they will find the opportunities of tomorrow. As you might expect, we work to keep track of where our Liberal Arts students go after graduation. Most of the students we hear from have gone on to work full-time or have continued on to graduate school. CLA graduates who attend graduate and professional school typically pursue master’s degrees in academic fields, law, or a medical degree. And when they move to the world of work, our graduates can be found in virtually every arena of the economy including education, business, non-profits, media and entertainment, health care, art and design, and much, much more. But you may wonder about particular individuals and what they did with their degrees. Sometimes it is easier to chart our own when we can see the trail left by those who went before us. If you wanted to know, for example, what you can do with a major in English, you might look at the career of Garrison Keillor. He is one of our graduates. Or if you wanted to know what you can do with an undergraduate major in Political Science, you might consider former Governor Tim Pawlenty. He is one of our graduates. Or if you wanted to know what you could do with a major in Philosophy, you might consider Mary Brainerd, the CEO of Health Partners, which is the country’s largest not-for-profit, consumer-managed health care organization. She is one of our graduates. Or if you wanted to know what it is possible to do with an undergraduate major in Economics, you might read about Curtis L. Carlson, who in the final years of his life was ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest person in Minnesota. and for whom the Carlson School of Management is named. He is one of our graduates. These are only a few examples. But I hope they make clear that our students take their liberal arts educations in every possible direction. Into the arts, into politics, into business, and into territories that haven’t even yet been invented. If you are like most students, though, you probably want to know HOW a degree in the liberal arts prepares you for a lifetime of learning and working and contributing. Your liberal arts degree has three features that it shares in common with all other liberal arts degrees, three facets that, when taken in combination, make the liberal arts degree both unique and uniquely powerful. These three features are 1. A Breadth Dimension 2. A Depth Dimension 3. A Suite of Critical Skills I’ll briefly talk about each. Because of the way our coursework requirements are structured, all students who complete their undergraduate degree in CLA will receive an introduction to knowledge in general. As part of this overview of knowledge, you will learn about the natural and mathematical sciences, where we study the operation of cause and effect. You will also learn about social and historical studies, where we investigate the interrelations of parts and wholes, whether we call this systems theory, ecological thinking, or one of the more familiar disciplines like sociology, psychology, or political science. And, finally, you will learn about the arts and humanities, where we consider how meaning is constructed, communicated, and interpreted. The point is not to make you an expert in everything but, rather, to give you a feel for the kinds of things educated people care about in these opening decades of the twenty-first century. In addition to the breadth dimension, you will study at least one academic area in considerable depth. Although many of you will gain expertise in multiple academic fields, all Liberal Arts students will learn a great deal about their majors. This means that as part of your degree you will develop a thorough understanding of an academic discipline -- and disciplinary thinking is a key kind of literacy that can be applied in multiple real-world contexts. Because we offer so many different disciplinary majors, and I don't want to single one out at the expense of others, I'll work with an invented major that particularly appeals to my interest in arcane forms of knowledge. But what I say about this invented major applies to all the actual majors we offer in CLA. If, for example, we offered a major in alchemy which, again, we do not you would learn about the history of the discipline, about where it started and the important alchemists of the past. You would also learn what sorts of problems alchemy typically addresses, about the various debates that shape the discipline, and how it distinguishes between a good argument and one the falls short of being persuasive. As an alchemy major, you would likewise learn what students go on to do with their degrees when they have completed their studies. This doesn't mean that you would be an alchemist by the time you earned your Bachelor of Arts – transforming lead into gold. But it does mean that if such work interested you, you would know what additional steps you needed to take in order to reach that goal. The same general pattern described for the invented major of alchemy applies to all of our actual majors, whether we are talking about Journalism, or Art, or Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, or any of the more than 50 other majors we offer. The third and final thing that all of our liberal arts majors have in common with each other is a suite of three skills that we believe are tremendously important to life in the twenty-first century. The first of these are critical and analytic skills -- the ability to give and take reasons for the beliefs we hold and the values we want to advance. It is the role of an educated person not only to know what they think but also to know why. This ability to reason and analyze is an important skill whether we are talking about private life, our participation as citizens in a democratic society, or the world of work. Of course it is not enough for an educated person simply to know what they think and why; they also need to be able to make their ideas felt by putting them into common. And in order for your ideas to make a difference, you need the second in the suite of skills studied by all liberal arts students: the ability to communicate effectively and persuasively. Over the course of the next four years you will continue to sharpen the communication skills you began developing in high school -- skills like critical and analytic writing. But you will also learn new skills, such as how to communicate in technologically mediated ways both as an individual and through work in groups. Some of you will work with video, others may create social media, and still others will craft and present critical or creative projects through conferences, panels, exhibits, or apps. The third and last in the suite of skills you will learn is, I think, the most important of all. You will learn to learn. You will learn to identify those areas where you lack a skill or an experience or a connection, and you will learn how to take the steps necessary to get what you need. Sometimes you may need more formal schooling, an additional degree or certificate or even just a class. Sometimes what you will need is an internship or a mentorship. And at other times, you may simply need to go on line or to pick up an old-fashioned book and teach yourself. None of us at the university can tell you exactly what the next forty years will look like. But we can say with confidence that the pace of change in all areas of our life will keep accelerating and the scope of economic and technological transformation will continue to broaden. Such trends will almost certainly keep driving changes in the ways we connect, communicate, and work. In fact, our experts believe that most students beginning their undergraduate careers today will, over the course of their working lives, have not just two or three jobs, but as many as four or more careers. And many of those jobs and careers don't have names yet, because you are the people who are going to invent them. So, in a world that has never been so interconnected, where the problem is not to find information but to navigate it without being overwhelmed, and when almost anywhere on the planet can be accessed more quickly than you can get a cup of your favorite coffee, the kind of education you need is one designed to teach you to think, to communicate, and to continue to learn. We believe in the College of Liberal Arts that the future belongs to those who have been trained to think for a living, and as a CLA graduate, that is what you will be prepared to do. Speaking for myself and my colleagues, we can’t wait to see where your dreams and your liberal arts education will take you.