Liberal-arts emphasis takes center stage at two-year college

While many colleges and universities are marching to the deafening drumbeat of ever-more specialized, vocational training, Bellevue Community College has stepped out of the marching column and is emphasizing the liberal arts.

In February, the college formed the Center for the Liberal Arts, plucked Diane Douglas from the Bellevue Art Museum to head up the effort and committed $200,000 in seed money. When the fall quarter starts next month, the center will begin to make its intellectual presence known.

Tibetan scholar Nawang Dorjee will arrive to serve as the center's scholar-in-residence for the year.

The center will sponsor a campuswide book reading of Dava Sobel's "Longitude" in an effort to create an intellectual dialogue across disciplines.

And, Douglas will fan out across the community to involve students in the community's civic and service life.

Broadly defined, the liberal arts include literature, history, philosophy, art and the natural sciences. Its proponents tend to agree that higher institutions of learning have unwisely left the liberal arts behind like an outdated computer.

A small contingent of colleges and universities agree and is shifting resources back to the liberal arts. Ohio's Bowling Green State University's Center for the Liberal Arts and Indiana's Wabash College's Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts are two examples.

Still, the outlook for the liberal arts is bleak, educators say. While the number of students majoring in business administration doubled, health sciences tripled and computer science increased five-fold between 1979 and 1994, the number majoring in history, philosophy, English and foreign languages all declined, according to a 1998 report in Harvard magazine.

"Why am I swimming upstream?" BCC President Jean Floten asked rhetorically. "I think the time is absolutely right for a renaissance in the liberal arts."

The rationale for that renaissance is two-fold, Floten, Douglas and faculty members say.

"People need to be adept with new technology, which is constantly changing, but they also need to know how to adapt quickly and keep on learning. People who are too specialized don't have the breadth required to integrate all that is coming at them," Floten said.

In other words, employers want specific technical skills, but also the nimble and yet disciplined mind that comes from studying Plato or doing a basic chemistry experiment.

Onyx Software vice president Jill McGuire-Ward agrees. "Our employees and customers come from everywhere. A software developer who has a perspective on the world economy and the history of cultures, I think that helps with shaping products" for customers in far-flung locales, she said. The Bellevue-based company creates customer-service software.

Paul Weatherly, director of the college's Alcohol Drug Studies Program, a vocational course of study that trains drug-and-alcohol counselors, says the same arguments apply to preparing counselors.

"Alcohol and drug addiction does not have any respect for class, gender, race. It's such a wide group of people that the better (counselors) understand themselves in the context of the world, the better counselors they'll be," he added.

The second rationale for the center is more idealistic, speaking to a deeper yearning for meaning than just building and selling more widgets or creating better software.

"People are hungering for more and looking for more than the immediate hit of getting rich. They're looking for the meaning and values that ought to underpin everything," Douglas said.

The liberal education, the theory goes, enriches one's experience of living.

"What is more exhilarating than continuing to be inspired by the works of a great thinker, or the words of a gifted orator, or the courageous acts of an adventurer or finding some exquisite new meaning in the book you just read?" Floten asked.

A liberal education gives students the ability to make up their own minds, said Graham Haslam, a history professor who chairs the new center's faculty committee. "We need to train them to make their own judgments," he said.

"Students try on ideas the way some people try on clothes, as it should be, but they need to know their actions matter to themselves and to the world."

J. Patrick Coolican can be reached at 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com.