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IN 1989 I became founding director of Connecticut College's new Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA). At the heart of CISLA is the undergraduate International Studies Certificate Program. The goal of this program is to internationalize every major, from art to zoology. The guiding ideals for this program have been those of the liberal arts tradition. I want to discuss the value of this tradition today and how it can help us conceptualize international studies in the broadest possible terms.
Our institutions of higher learning have been and continue to be shaped by the different, and often competing, educational traditions of the liberal arts college, the state college and university, and the research university, and these three traditions have different goals. Every institution of higher education in America can be seen as having its own unique blend of these traditions, as can all the interdisciplinary programs, centers, institutes, and curricula being created today.
The tradition of the German research university began in the United States with the establishment of my graduate alma mater, the Johns Hopkins University, in 1876. Hopkins introduced the German PhD degree and graduate education to America. It was the first institution here that had as its primary goal the training of scientists and scholars. The model was so successful that the older schools quickly took it up. According to this tradition, the goal of education is “the advancement of knowledge” through research and scholarship. This model can be seen in graduate and undergraduate international and area studies programs that have as their primary aim the education of people who see themselves as “experts” in their fields and who identify themselves by the particular methodologies they use in their research.
The second tradition we inherit, the utilitarian tradition, dates from the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave the states federal lands to establish colleges that offered programs in agriculture, engineering, and home economics, along with the traditional liberal arts subjects. The Morrill Act stressed practical education, which was intended to prepare students in the skills, trades, and professions the country needed in order to industrialize. In this tradition the goal of education is to equip students for jobs in an industrialized society. The growing popularity of international studies within a business or preprofessional context is an example of this tradition's influence.
Our oldest educational tradition is the liberal arts tradition. The Pilgrims brought the English collegiate system with them to America. The English colleges can trace their lineage, in part, to the new humanist preuniversity schools of the Italian Renaissance and farther back to the artes liberales of ancient Rome. At its point of origin this tradition understands reality as an ordered whole and all the disciplines as complementary ways of understanding this whole. It sees the individual as part of the whole, whether it be the cosmos or the city-state. The highest goals of the liberal arts tradition are moral and political—the joy and tranquillity of soul that comes from general and lifelong learning and the civic virtue that comes from using this learning for the common good. In classical Rome as well as in colonial America the liberal arts tradition prepared members of the ruling classes to become statesmen, legislators, and good citizens. Connecticut College, with a coeducational student population of just under two thousand, enjoys the legacy of this tradition.
Our International Studies Certificate Program is an attempt to create synergy among these three traditions by using the liberal arts tradition to direct and give larger purpose to the other two. Students of all majors may apply to the program in the fall of the sophomore year. To be admitted they must pass an oral proficiency interview in a foreign language (we use the ACTFL proficiency guidelines) and write an application essay. In the essay they must propose a project for a two-month work-study internship abroad for the summer between the junior year and the senior year and a research topic for a senior integrative project, and they must describe a core of five related courses outside the major. They must also have attained and must maintain at least a 3.0 cumulative GPA. In addition to the core of five courses and the internship (for which each student receives a stipend of $3,000), students must take a noncredit research seminar in the fall of the senior year and do a special senior research project in which they integrate the major, the internship, the foreign language, and their knowledge of the modern world as a whole. In addition, to receive their international studies certificates when they graduate, students must demonstrate a level of oral proficiency higher than that at which they began the program, as measured by an interview given in the senior year by an ACTFL-certified tester from outside the college.
The senior integrative project brings the students into contact with the research tradition. Once admitted to the program, each student is paired with a librarian who will guide the student during the next two and a half years in using research resources. The library mentors also help the sophomores do annotated bibliographies on their research topics. In April of the junior year students submit revised research proposals to us, along with letters of approval from their major advisers. Students do the actual senior integrative projects either as an honors thesis or as an individual study in the major. The noncredit research seminar they take in the fall of the senior year forces them to begin writing their research projects sooner than many of them would otherwise.
Students don't need to be introduced to the utilitarian tradition: getting a job is already on their minds. We find that our graduates stand out in job interviews, because of the hands-on experience of working in a foreign country and the contacts often made there, combined with the high level of oral proficiency in a foreign language certified, on completing of the program, by ACTFL and the poise and maturity that the challenges of the program usually foster. Our program is only five years old, but many of our students have already found good jobs, have gone on to graduate school, or both.
Having said all this, I must admit that I agreed to become founding director of CISLA because I wanted something more. I believe in the liberal arts tradition. I feared that our International Studies Certificate Program could easily become just a language program or research-oriented social science program with exclusively preprofessional goals. Such a program would be too narrow. it would not meet all our students' human needs. Students have much to gain from learning how to do careful research. But they also need to be aware of the limitations of highly specialized research. How, we should ask, is it possible that the breakup of the Soviet Union took all the so-called experts in Soviet and Eastern European area studies so completely by surprise? George Weigel argues that academic social science was too narrow, too tied to disciplinary methodologies to see the spiritual realities at work in Eastern Europe in 1989.
When we educate undergraduates for a skill or a profession, we must avoid giving them overspecialized training. Some sociologists and economists are predicting that most people entering the workforce will hold four or five different kinds of jobs during their lives. Our goal should be to give students skills and experiences that will help them not only find jobs when they graduate but also find new jobs, perhaps even new professions, if they lose their first one! They need to become lifelong learners.
The liberal arts tradition can provide us with ideals and goals that put research and preprofessional training in a broader context. My summary of a liberal arts education as stemming from a tradition that views reality as an ordered whole and of all the disciplines as complementary ways of contemplating this whole comes from Cicero (see Proctor 14–20). In The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated John Henry Cardinal Newman expressed this ancient vision in modern terms:
The only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, or referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence. This is that form of Universal Knowledge … set up in the individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of its real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection. It makes every thing in some sort lead to every thing else….
Newman goes on to say that
men, whose minds are possessed with some one object, take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them.
(Newman 123)
We need to be able to put the specialized research and training in the major in the context of all the disciplines in order not to exaggerate the importance and explanatory power of any one discipline. True interdisciplinary studies, as articulated by the liberal arts tradition, bring us closer to reality. The ancients knew this truth, but Descartes and the scientific revolution made us forget it.
In our International Studies Certificate Program we have tried to put research in the major in a liberal arts context by challenging our students during their two and a half years in the program to struggle with three overarching questions that are simply too broad to be addressed by any single discipline:
These questions open students to something larger than themselves. They invite students to ponder the modern world as a whole, in part by stepping outside of it and looking at it from the perspective of the past. They challenge students to expand their horizons by taking in the viewpoints of other people and other cultures, including those of past ages. And they encourage students to think about the civic responsibilities of their education. Note too that every discipline, even the performing arts, can contribute a partial answer to these questions; but no single discipline can provide a satisfactory one.
Our students ponder these questions in three ways: in a special sophomore course; in the five core courses they agree to take as part of the program; and in their senior integrative projects. Let me begin with the last.
The student's senior integrative project is usually an honors thesis or an individual study in the major. To count as well toward the certificate, the project must put the research in the major into the broader context of the three questions, which is easier said than done. Some research topics, such as new religious movements in the former Soviet Union, fit easily into this broader context. Other subjects require the student to write a separate paper addressing the questions, as when a zoology major did an honors thesis on a specific microorganism in the Bay of Naples and in the Atlantic Ocean.
During the first two years of the International Studies Certificate Program we had a group of faculty members teach a special senior integrative seminar to help students thick about these three questions. It didn't work; the students complained that they were unprepared to consider such broad questions during their last semester in college. They urged us to turn the senior seminar into a sophomore course for students just admitted to the program.
We followed the students' advice and taught the new sophomore course, entitled Perspectives on Modern Global Society, for the first time last year. We also decided to require our students, including those studying abroad, to send us a five-page paper at the end of every core course taken through the junior year, explaining how the course addressed at least one and preferably all of the three questions. The goal is to keep the students thinking about these questions even if the course does not address them specifically.
Getting the students to generalize, to think about the big picture, to ponder the social responsibilities conferred by their privileged education is by far the biggest challenge we have encountered. This kind of moral and theoretical thinking goes against the grain of the specialized research and the intellectual fragmentation of the modern university. I have colleagues who tell me there is no big picture. Others dismiss the questions as too broad to be of any interest. But the students experience the joy of learning when they see connections among disciplines and, more important, between their lives and something bigger.
Stephen Covey's First Things First, a book for people trying to manage their time and achieve balance in their lives, distills the wisdom of the world's cultures into four basic human needs: to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy. Good health and economic security, rich and fulfilling interpersonal relationships, and lifelong intellectual growth are essential to the quality of one's life. But even more important than one's physical, social, and mental needs is the spiritual need of finding a meaning and purpose for one's life. What is my legacy? What will I leave after I die? The psychologist Abraham Maslow revised his famous theory of “self-actualization” later in life to argue that the highest human experience is not self-actualization but “self-transcendence” (Covey 49).
Understanding the need for self-transcendence is the key to understanding why the ancient liberal arts emphasize both rising above the human through the contemplation of the eternal and the divine and using the virtues one acquires thereby, especially prudence and justice, to serve one's fellow citizens. Mindful of this tradition, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued that the ultimate goal of education or culture, Bildung in German, is to rise above one's particularities to become part of an ever more widely defined community, both across space and across time. Through education, one learns how to expand one's horizons by meeting the horizons of other people and other cultures (Gadamer 9–19).
This type of growth should be the highest goal of undergraduate international studies. These studies can help our students find economic security and intellectual stimulation. If done within the fullness of the liberal arts tradition, international studies can also help students enter into larger human communities and work for the common good of people everywhere.
By challenging our students to fit the goals of the utilitarian and research traditions into those of the liberal arts, we can help them create synergy among the three. In so doing they can learn how to acquire the skills, the knowledge, and the wisdom they will need to live, love, learn, and leave a legacy in an increasingly global society.
The author is Professor of Italian and Provost at Connecticut College. This article is based on his presentation at the 1994 MLA convention in San Diego.
Covey, Stephen R. First Things First. New York: Simon, 1994.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. Ed. I. T. Ker. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Proctor, Robert E. Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, with a Curriculum for Today's Students. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.
Weigel, George. The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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