Williams prides itself on being a liberal arts college. But what is the purpose of a liberal arts education? Common answers that may come to mind include cultivating intellectual curiosity, engaging with diverse perspectives, and grounding an interdisciplinary, well-rounded approach to understanding the world. While these are all incredibly important and valuable, Williams seems to lack a key, principal objective in a liberal arts education: the cultivation of virtue among its students.
Virtues include character qualities — such as integrity, self-restraint, and compassion — which are required for ethical and moral character and contribute to individual and collective well-being. As the nation’s preeminent liberal arts institution, Williams is educating the leaders of the future in a breadth of fields such as finance, industry, government, science, and the arts. However, the Williams education as it stands seems to largely ignore questions of the good life, how to build a virtuous society, and what obligations leaders bear to their broader communities. The Western humanistic tradition, among others, has been imparted to students and future leaders for generations in the instruction of virtue, but in our current age, navigating questions of the good life and our moral responsibilities have fallen to the wayside as the expressed purpose of the liberal arts.
In a liberal arts education, the humanities have historically provided the basis for the exploration of fundamental questions on what it means to be human, drawing upon an intellectual tradition that inculcated generations of learners within established models of virtue, dignified leadership, and honorable civic engagement. From Aristotle and Augustine to Dante and Kant, this Western humanistic tradition has expounded profound intellectual interrogations and insight into the human experience, such as the proper construction of the political or navigating the paradox of human suffering and our unabated will to live. However, unlike many of its peer institutions like Yale, Princeton, and UChicago, Williams lacks a dedicated program or course sequence for the Western humanistic tradition. Many students like myself will never have the opportunity to read foundational works of Western culture such as Homer’s The Odyssey before the end of their educational career. Although students may encounter parts of this humanistic tradition in various Williams courses, this tradition is disaggregated between different departments such as philosophy or classics. Western humanities course sequences at peer institutions allow students to both understand the dissemination of ideas between thinkers over time across disciplines as well as encounter works they may not seek out due to lack of exposure and knowledge of the Western canon. To establish the instruction of virtue as a primary goal of its liberal arts education, Williams should institute an optional Western humanities sequence that covers the Western tradition of literature, philosophy, and political thought, mirroring similarly designed programs at peer universities.
The modern college and university face several forces that undermine the elevation of a virtuous ideal for the human person and their community. The first is pervasive postmodernist relativism which permeates contemporary educational approaches at Williams and in American academia. Expounded by influential 20th-century philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, postmodern relativism rejects the idea of foundational, absolute knowledge that serves as a stable and unchanging basis for understanding the world, negating the possibility of objective virtue, truth, and goodness that we as individuals and society should strive toward. Postmodernism chastises social expectations, norms, and ideals as mere arbitrary constructions that perpetuate harmful power relations. Instead, individuals must embrace their unbounded selves, untethered to tradition or moral aspirations. By espousing an unrelenting relativism, a postmodernist education renders conceptions of virtue non-existent and irrelevant, rejecting the possibility of ideals inherent to the human condition to which we are compelled to commit ourselves.
The second forceful impulse against virtue in contemporary liberal arts is unquestioned empiricism. Modern social science seems to contend that the only questions worth answering are those that are testable within a scientific methodology. Although undoubtedly important to the sciences, purely empirical methods in disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology may limit academic exploration to solely causal inference and the optimization of effectiveness, neglecting normative judgments on how political, economic, and social systems should be structured. By elevating scientism as the sole approach to the discovery of knowledge in the social sciences, empirical approaches ignore normative questions of the good and virtuous because of their perceived subjectivity. While judgments on what constitutes objective moral ideals and a properly ordered society cannot be evaluated through a regression model, this critical and meaningful form of academic inquiry captures the essence of the human condition and our proper role in the societies that we inhabit.
The last formidable threat to an education in virtue is increasing careerism which prioritizes economizable skills for the labor market as the sole purpose of education. While Williams may resist this trend by explicitly prohibiting finance or accounting programs and courses, other colleges and universities around the nation such as the University of North Carolina and West Virginia University have diminished institutional support for the humanities by limiting distinguished professorships to only STEM fields and enacting significant directed budget cuts, respectively. But even at Williams, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of students enrolling in Division I courses over the past 25 years. A liberal arts education cannot reduce itself only to the labor demands of the market as it holds an important responsibility in cultural preservation as well as the formation of character, meaning, and a moral ethic within its students, long after graduation.
Although Williams students greatly value the breadth of courses with a global perspective from various cultures, as the leading liberal arts college in the United States, Williams bears a stewardship responsibility of the Western humanistic tradition. Williams and its educational tradition are situated in a particular cultural and historical context, and there is profound value in understanding the ideas that shaped the development of our culture, political system, and moral values. While a liberal arts college or university must engage with a wide array of perspectives and cultural traditions, Western academia retains a distinct obligation to pass on its intellectual heritage to future generations. Of course, this cannot be at the exclusion of other global cultures, but educational institutions are linked to the place and culture in which they reside. Imparting that literary, philosophical, and political tradition strengthens our understanding of the intellectual lineage that shapes our society today. Many have critiqued the so-called Western canon as perpetuating “whiteness” and the “patriarchy” by privileging white and male perspectives. Although a Western humanistic sequence must be constructed to include a diverse set of important authors such as Frederick Douglass and Mary Wollstonecraft, critics unfairly reduce these historically influential and thought-provoking intellectual works to the mere identities of their writers. This shallow form of criticism neglects the universality of these explorations of the human condition regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, and the pervasiveness of their impact throughout history and modern society. We should look to the Western humanistic tradition for intergenerational wisdom that not only provides cultural insight but also important knowledge for how to live as virtuous leaders after we finish our time here at Williams.
If I were to ask my fellow graduating seniors what they hope to achieve in life after Williams, I expect that I would hear a lot about personal success, wealth, and self-fulfillment. However, I hope that a humanities education premised on the cultivation of virtue would challenge students to think about themes such as honor, duty, dignity, and humility. Every day, as we shuttle through campus to class, we pass the gargantuan lettering of the intellectual greats of the Western humanistic tradition written into the facade of Stetson Hall. Shakespeare and maybe Aristotle may seem familiar to many, but we would be hard pressed to find a significant number of students today at Williams knowledgeable about Aquinas, Cervantes, or Virgil. While Williams may still make structural changes for humanistic revival, I hope that these etched names do not become vestigial remnants of a bygone tradition detached from the future of Williams’s liberal arts education.
Niko Malhotra ’24 is a political science major from Falmouth, Maine.
