Connecting Thought and Action The Challenge for Liberal Arts Presidents ELIZABETH COLEMAN To redress this imbalance is no simple matter. As the These are times of great stress and urgency for urgency of a subject intensifies, so does the potential for our nation and the world—the importance of an confusing ideas with ideology and of turning inquiry into educated citizenry is ever more compelling. Our advocacy. Achieving a continuum between thought and failures in this regard hardly need more document- action has never been easy—on the academic side is the fear of diluting intellectual rigor matched on the practical ing. What is encouraging is that complacency is side by the fear of paralysis. If anything, the increasing increasingly being replaced by a sense that we need specialization and narrowing of academic disciplines to move beyond business as usual. This is particularly over the past decades has deepened the divide. The fail- relevant to the future of the liberal arts, which have ure to accommodate a reciprocal relationship between thinking and doing carries a high price. Academic rigor always had a radical edge, a restlessness, a stub- is increasingly reduced to technical competence, narrow- born refusal to relinquish sky-high expectations. ness of focus and perpetuation of the status quo, while In this climate, an overwhelming challenge for presi- action is equated with mindless activity. dents of liberal arts colleges is to discover those ideas This dichotomizing is especially evident and especially that have both the power to transform curriculum by costly in our attempts to address questions relating to getting people to think freshly and the capacity to gener- civic education. ate the financial and human resources necessary for Despite a huge expenditure of effort and resources their implementation. Then there is the equally chal- in recent decades, attempts to bolster civic values in col- lenging task of design—how to go about translating leges and universities through scores of community ser- ideas into action. Underlying all this is the ethos of the vice programs have failed to influence curriculum. This institution itself: is there is a culture of innovation or of is no small thing because the curriculum is where the protecting the status quo? The president does not create most profound values of an education reside, creating a this culture, but he or she can certainly influence it. dangerous disconnect between what we say (proclaiming Developing and sustaining the habits of debate, the great value of civic virtue) and what we do (wariness openness and self-criticism while engaging substance of about exploring these values where it really counts). profound importance is the perpetual challenge facing Work within the classroom remains “uncontaminated” liberal education. A liberal arts curriculum must make by any serious engagement with efforts connected with these two aspects inseparable—the depth, flexibility civic responsibility, which in turn, tends to be limited to and openness of our thinking and the importance of activities that are self-evidently virtuous. what we are thinking about. Decades of professionaliz- This focus on activities whose value seems beyond ing the disciplines, of emphasizing expertise as the sole question diminishes the need for students to wrestle form of intellectual prowess, of treating technical com- intellectually with these choices, to deepen and enlarge petence as the exclusive intellectual virtue have enabled their understanding of civic responsibility, or to address us to avoid this challenge. Methodological sophistica- the huge challenge of connecting a commitment to tion—often referred to as critical thinking skills—is activities associated with public virtue to the values treated as if it is an end in itself, disconnected from the and ambitions that shape the rest of their lives. Civic urgencies, passions and values associated with matters values are aggressively promoted, but in a context of substance. Where once the task of liberal education detached from those educational experiences most was thought to be the disciplining of our passions, it is closely connected with one’s future intellectual and now more akin to eliminating or neutralizing them. professional identity. In effect, we have institutionalized CONNECTION FALL2004 19 the divide between intellectual and professional devel- ordinary range of intellectual traditions—historical, opment on the one hand and civic responsibility on the philosophical, cultural, psychological, political and eco- other, between one’s own interests and the interests of nomic. It similarly engages the dialectical oppositions others, between youthful energy and idealism and adult that have informed human efforts to comprehend responsibilities and realism. human society—freedom and order; rich and poor; old and new; individual and society; familiar and strange; Democracy Project thought and action. The very inexhaustibility of the sub- The Democracy Project at Bennington College ject, daunting as it is, constitutes a strength in the con- addresses fundamental questions about the organiza- text of an educational setting. There is ample room at tion of curriculum and the stranglehold of the academic the table for faculty and students with a wide diversity disciplines while it takes on issues related to the contin- of interests, temperaments, proficiencies and objectives. uum between thought and action. For these reasons, In addition to providing a unity of focus while accom- not despite them, it is a project that is very likely to modating a virtually limitless diversity of interests, the enhance the institution’s access to resources, both study of democracy provides a context for bringing human and financial. thought and action into fruitful interaction. We are witnessing a nearly universal interest in the There are two additional concerns that this focus possibilities of democracy accompanied by a great deal on democracy raises when the object is to fulfill the of debate and honest difference as to the means for ambitions of a genuinely liberal education. One is achieving them. These differences have to do with pro- parochialism and the other is complacency. With the found variations in history, traditions, religions, social recent expansion of democracy globally, a whole array compacts and natural, human and financial resources. of assumptions born of the American and the European Understanding these differences is crucial, both in experience about pre-conditions for democracy have addressing the intolerable inequities that persist in lost their authority, to be replaced by more flexible and established democratic societies like our own and in more dynamic analyses and a more global frame of ref- fostering the conditions that new democracies require erence. This transformation in our understanding of to thrive. Moreover, the surge in efforts to realize in democracy precludes chauvinism, without diminishing practice the ideals of democracy in remarkably diver- the importance of the history and traditions of Europe gent settings around the world is likely to define the and the United States. On the contrary, their role in history of the coming decades. effecting this global phenomenon adds yet another The Democracy Project makes democracy the dimension to their value. animating principle of an area of concentration (or a Finally, whatever values and accomplishments we major) with traditional academic disciplines entering attribute to democracy at any given moment, an informed insofar as they illuminate this subject rather than as view of its history makes the complacencies of the ideo- ends in themselves. While no teaching strategy is logue unthinkable. As Bronsilaw Gieremek, former foreign foolproof, focusing the curriculum on democracy is minister of Poland, reminds us: “[Democracy] is by no especially compatible with the need to generate fusion means a process that goes from triumph to triumph nor among thought, passion and action. There is an indis- is it exempt from creating the very conditions that under- putable urgency to this subject and it most certainly mine it. On the contrary, the history of democracy is also engages our passions. At the same time, conflict and a history of moral compromises, downfalls, economic dissent are its life-blood, making it particularly averse crises and ‘flights from democracy’ in places it seemed to to the doctrinaire and the flight from thinking. have sunk lasting roots. Democracies have had slaves and Democracy’s emphasis on mediating conflict gives colonies, voted for Hitler and refused to die for Gdansk.” it a quintessentially open-ended and intellectual cast. The last several decades have made one thing clear: Plus, it has the remarkable characteristic of providing It will take fresh ways of addressing curriculum if the a rationale for seeing its own limitations no less than big questions are to resume a privileged position its strengths. Like the liberal arts at their best, a mix throughout the course of the undergraduate experience, of restlessness, self-criticism and visionary possibilities not only in the broad introductory courses, and if we replaces the hope of achieving fixed structures and the are to embed within the totality of our academic experi- quest for ultimate truths. ence the urgencies and values of civic life. To confront The enormity of these issues is reason enough for this challenge does not make the job of a liberal arts democracy to assume a prominent position in a liberal college president easy; it is most certainly what makes arts college. Moreover, this great intellectual invention it a very special privilege. in its prior, current and potential configurations has the breadth and depth that can profitably engage an extra- Elizabeth Colemanis president of Bennington College. 20 NEW ENGLAND BOARD OF HIGHER EDUCATION