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Will a polytechnic university move away from liberal arts?
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: June 5, 2015
In the two weeks since University of Akron President Scott Scarborough’s speech to the City Club of Cleveland, people have been dissecting, commenting on and, in many cases, pushing back against his vision for the university. Or maybe just his vision for marketing the university.
In his speech Scarborough outlined a plan to market The University of Akron as “Ohio’s polytechnic university.” Aside from the presidents of other area state universities who objected to the “we shall triumph and they are doomed” part of his speech, the majority of attention has been focused on the “polytechnic” part of the speech.
Now is the time for some full disclosure. I am currently a student in a consortial graduate based mostly at Akron. Before that I thought at Akron part time. My wife recently retired from there; my brother still works there. In short, I have a vested interest in the place.
But for that matter, so does everyone else. Much of the success of the city of Akron in surviving the transition away from heavy manufacturing can be traced to The University of Akron. In particular, local tech industries in areas such as materials science have arisen here to monetize research performed at the university.
Scarborough’s speech generated considerable controversy, not least because in the present environment, “polytechnic” sounds like it will lead to an emphasis on STEM disciplines at the expense of everything else. A local newspaper story following up on the speech quoted Scarborough as acknowledging that most people do not know what polytechnic means, which raises obvious questions about the wisdom of a marketing campaign that constantly needs to define the term it is built around.
Scarborough took pains to reassure people that it does not. For instance, he noted that one of the three new centers whose formation he announced that day is the National Center for Choreography – a partnership between the university dance department and DANCECleveland.
New pages on the university’s website define polytechnic as follows: “Polytechnic universities combine active classroom learning with in-the-field experiences and current technologies that better develop student competencies. They unite the arts and humanities with science and technology in ways that provide students with skills employers value.” In accompanying videos, various university personages emphasize the training future employees and above all, practical learning.
That about “practical” learning and value to employers makes me a little nervous. It is not that those are bad things per se, but if not implemented properly they can lead to a stultified version of college. In particular, “practical learning” can stand in for a rejection of the values of liberal arts education.
Liberal arts education in modern education parlance means learning both broadly and deeply. It looks like education simply for it’s own sake; hopelessly idealistic and stubbornly impractical. It looks, in short, like the opposite of Akron’s definition of “polytechnic.”
But the essential philosophy of liberal arts as it was communicated to me when I attended a liberal arts college is that what looks like education for the sake of education is in fact ultimately practical. That kind of learning provides students with both the tools for lifelong learning and a framework for taking in and processing new knowledge. The liberal arts philosophy says that the importance of education lies not in acquiring a body of facts, but in developing the skills for seeking, acquiring and employing new knowledge.
Today that sort of ability is more important than any particular body of knowledge. Practical knowledge has a woefully short shelf life in the modern workplace. A person trained for a job five years ago is now four and a half years out of date if he has not continually retrained himself. Both students and employers need to understand that the most successful employees going forward will not be those who know the most about their jobs, but those who know how to learn about how their jobs are changing.
It may be that the university can do both. Liberal arts education can include components for translating the knowledge into practical applications. But while Scarborough has gone to pains to reassure people that a “polytechnic” university will have room for arts and humanities, he has done little to assure those concerned that the liberal arts learning currently happening in the College of Arts and Sciences will continue.
Indeed, the post-speech communications from the administration has included little talk about how much the new marketing will change education philosophy at the university. An argument can be made for shifting emphasis away from liberal arts learning, but that argument should be raised explicitly, rather than as an implication of the university’s new brand.