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Anthony DiRenzoAssociate Professor |
"As to studies, they should be taught everything useful and everything ornamental. But art is long, time short. I propose, therefore, they learn those things that are the most useful and the most ornamental."
Benjamin Franklin, Proposal for the Pennsylvania Academy
"In his 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse anticipated the sort of world traditional humanists want---and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists, and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality---for his values are only fool's gold unless they have a relevance to the world."
~~ Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society
As a first-generation college student whose first language is not English (and whose thrifty immigrant parents refused to pay for his college education unless it served some practical end), I know how writing for the academy can be as painful and alienating as emigration. Like assimilation, literacy comes with an inevitable price; but as the Sicilian proverb says: "Take what you want, and pay for it." Accordingly, I treat academic writing as a self-conscious process of "naturalization," pledging citizenship to an often baffling community that does not necessarily have one's best interests at heart. Most college students, after all, pursue an education primarily to secure a career.
Given that fact and my own experience, I specialize in two particular academic writing classes:
Like other academic writing courses, these first-year seminars teach the writing and critical skills necessary to perform well across the college curriculum, but their content, theme, and approach meet the needs and interests of majors in the professions and the sciences. Class readings and assignments relate these disciplines to the liberal arts and draw parallels between academic writing and business and technical writing.
Such matters are more than “academic.” Nearly forty years ago, management guru Peter Drucker predicted our economy would be served primarily (and most effectively) by knowledge workers, “those who put to work what they have between their ears rather than the brawn of their muscles or the skill of their hands.” For a free market to serve a free society, he argued, young professionals must become informed, ethical, and articulate communicators.
Nevertheless, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions' impact on the academy has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, capitalism and technology created mass literacy and promoted the ideal of universal public education. On the other hand, from its very inception, our system’s relentless dedication to the bottom line has challenged, perhaps, threatened, the very concept of the liberal arts. As colleges are forced to become more practical, cost-effective, and consumer-centered, do they fulfill or betray their humanist mission?
These controversies predate current concerns about for-profit schools and long-distance learning and package deals. They can be found in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and Adam Smith, whose ideas laid the foundation of our world. As evident in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, in the curricular debates between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley, in the education of economist John Stuart Mill, the marketplace since the early 19th century has bred competing ideas about higher education, according to class, economic demand, and political ideology.
But what does a liberal arts education mean to 21st-century majors in the professions and the sciences? How can writing well in the academy teach aspiring young professionals to become better communicators in the workplace? Above all, how does education relate to personal and professional ethics and to traditional liberalism's vision of a free, just, and progressive society? To answer such questions, these first-year writing seminars examine the development, dynamics, and meaning of business and science through the lenses of different disciplines from the humanities: anthropology, history, politics, sociology, even literature.
As the Association of American Colleges and Universities concludes in its 2002 report Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College: "we urge an end to the traditional, artificial distinction between liberal and practical education. Liberal education in all fields will have the strongest impact when studies look beyond the classroom to the world's major questions, asking students to apply their developing analytical and communication skills and their ethical judgment to significant problems in the world around them."
