On Liz Coleman on A Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education

I’ve had a routine of watching 2-3 TED Talks each week for several years now, but somehow I missed Liz Coleman’s excellent talk on Reinventing Liberal Arts Education from 2009. She was the President of Bennington College for over 25 years, and just retired this year.

The talk covers many important topics. You really should watch the whole thing yourself. Here are my three main take-aways:

Enhancing Public Good as the Goal

Explicitly calling out public good as the goal of education neatly aligns and clarifies the role of Universities (particularly Liberal Arts Colleges) with the rest of society.

By their nature, academic organizations are driven towards greater intellectual specialization to the point of obscurity, of experts knowing “more and more about less and less”.

Putting the present needs of public good above else creates a better balance of action vs. navel gazing.

Organizing Education around Issues

By primarily focusing on key global issues such as Equality, Education, Governance, and the Environment, the academic curriculum falls naturally into place within them across disciplines.

“An emphasis on action provides a special urgency to thinking.” -- Liz Coleman

This not only provides a compelling motivation for study, but a clear framework for diverse disciplines to come and work together.

“Hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods.” -- Liz Coleman

Less Reliance on “Experts"

“The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators.” -- Liz Coleman

The danger with the concept of “Experts" is that it reduces the rest of us to inaction. We are reluctant to try to make a change because no one anointed us, or because “the experts must already be working on it”.

Of course, this is simply never true. No one has all the answers, and democracy cannot function without a self-empowered public.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was, and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

Additional Thoughts

Almost all significant progress comes about from the application of knowledge, skills and other resources in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal. The key is the goal, not the knowledge itself.

The image of the brilliant scientist making random discoveries while simply pursuing knowledge is common, but an ultimately misguided caricature.

For example, people still refer to the discovery of penicillin as “an accident”, but that’s a mischaracterization. Alexander Fleming was a brilliant researcher actively searching for anti-bacterial agents.

More interestingly, penicillin didn't get much attention when Fleming first published his discovery in 1929. No one, including he, thought it would actually be practical, or could be made in sufficient quantities.

It was not until over 10 years later did another team of better funded researchers pick up Fleming's work and figured out how to mass produce penicillin, saving countless lives in the process.

You learn the darndest things on Wikipedia.

Having a clear and compelling goal, then pulling in necessary resources to meet that goal is the strategy of success. It follows that having a broad and diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and knowledge improves the ability to achieve that goal faster.

Related: TED, Society.