Liberal Arts Education

At UW-Waukesha, we offer the first two years of what is known as a “liberal arts” education. This kind of education is one of the oldest in the world. It dates back through the founding of the university in medieval times to the days of the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. It is designed to be both broad and deep, to embrace the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

The place of a liberal arts education in today’s world has been called into question. Critics have focused on the supposed greater utility of just-in-time job training or tightly targeted professional instruction for occupations such as doctor, lawyer, or engineer. While such instructional avenues are necessary, they are not sufficient. They are, at best, secondary. They rest on a foundation that’s best supplied by a liberal arts education.

We live in a time of great, continual, and often disorienting change. In 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote a book about this with a title that says it all: Future Shock. Perhaps the simplest definition of this that Toffler gave was, “too much change in too short a period of time.” 

One of the results of this condition of continual change is that the job that we prepare for today may not exist in the near future. Even existing jobs will change radically in their demands in the next few years. This has been the wave of change that we've been experiencing since after World War Two. There’s no sign that it will let up soon, or at all. “Just-in-time” training and professional instruction have a limited shelf-life in a rapidly-changing world.

What good does a liberal arts education do you in this time of change? The answer is strikingly simple: in the thousand years of the history of the university, educators have found no better way to prepare their students to meet the challenges of their lives than a liberal arts education. The foundation that the liberal arts creates is a foundation in reasoning, critical thinking, and communication, as well as the basics of history, culture, and science. As generations could attest, this foundation gives us a stable place to stand in a world of continual change. A liberal arts education empowers us to adapt to a changing world.

Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that a liberal arts education is transformative. What separates us from the beasts, as the 15th-century humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola said, is our free will: we can choose to be whatever we wish to be. The key to exercising that choice is our reason. 

We embrace reason through education—a word that in itself means “to lead out,” as if our reason leads us out of a dark cave up a steep and rocky ascent to the light. And the best kind of education to do that, as the early humanists knew, is a liberal arts education. A liberal arts education allows us to ascend from the cave of shadows up into the light. It not only empowers us; it transforms us. What more can one ask from any education?

My favorite definition of a liberal arts education that, I think, sums up the whole case comes from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary: it is an “education that enlarges and disciplines the mind and makes it master of its own powers.”

The faculty, staff, and administration of UW-Waukesha is proud to reaffirm to you the faith of our intellectual forbearers—the belief, founded in equal parts of reason and experience, that what we do in these walls is not trivial, not unimportant, not without meaning in the modern world, but instead represents the most important work in the human world, the learning and relearning that every generation must do of those things which are most valuable in our heritage and those things which are most uniquely useful.

We stand together, with our students, with reason as our guide, and enlightenment as our goal. From here we go forward, together, into a future that we cannot know before it arrives, but which we proudly assert is indeed knowable. From here, together, we go forward to shape the things to come.

Patrick Schmitt, Campus Dean