Liberal arts, Balkanized

The Age of Specialization:
Why scientists should study art, and vice versa

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

“Education is an appreciation of excellence, a sense of values. An educated person is one who is capable of distinguishing the excellent from the inferior, the more valuable from the less. The process of getting an education is the process of getting the judgment to discriminate.”
—Tenney L. Davis, quoting Arlo Bates, “Toward a Liberal Education,” The Technology Review, December 1936.

Tenney L. Davis, forgotten now by all by a handful of scholars in the history of science, was something of a Renaissance Man. An expert in the chemistry of explosives and pyrotechnics, he ventured as far afield as studies of Chinese Alchemy and (as the quote above suggests) to the occasional think piece regarding education, a topic dear to him in his role as a well-loved college professor.

Davis presents us with several mouthfuls in the above quote. To begin, it helps to know that Arlo Bates was a poet and professor of aesthetics. The very fact that a budding young chemist like Davis would bother to attend lectures on aesthetics says something about how far along the road of compartmentalizing knowledge we have traveled.

Education vs. ‘training’

It should come as no surprise that Davis was something of a “universalist” when it came to acquiring knowledge. Drawing a distinction between “training” (which he sees as simply preparing a person to perform a given task correctly) and “education,” he argues:

“The liberally educated man may find pleasure in everything that he does. Like the gods who know good and evil, he has access to genuine values. His education is an investment which will pay him dividends whenever he may wish to collect.”

Clearly Davis, writing at time before the push for universal college education among the middle class became the norm, saw education as a preparation for leadership— and, therefore, the prized possession of the few. Drawing from his World War I experiences, Davis suggests that the private is one who is trained to fight, whereas the general has been educated in such a way that he can plan a campaign. (A proposition that seems increasingly dicey in the light of our post-Vietnam experience and the politicization of the military hierarchy. But I digress.)

The decline of the Liberal Arts Canon

What interested me most about this article was the fact that Davis failed to foresee the erosion of the notion of a Liberal Arts Canon that all those who professed to be educated could relate to. Back in graduate school in the early 1970s, I always argued that courses in topics like women’s literature, Native American literature and African literature were desirable goals to pursue—but only after one had mastered the basic canon.

Why do I say this? Well, let’s assume that young Ph. D. Y, who is studying the court poets of the Congo, is greatly excited by a particular poet. Wishing to convey his enthusiasm to young Ph. D. X at the faculty cocktail party, he goes on and on about his man’s virtues. But all of this is lost on X, because African literature isn’t his field. He’s working on the definitive biography of the pulp novelist Jim Thompson. But if both, having started as lit majors, had studied the same canon, Y could say: “Imagine a Tenth Century Herrick!” Now, X at least has an inkling of what Y is talking about.

The sort of thing that Bates/Davis uphold as the goal of a liberal education depends upon a commonality of belief. If we don’t all agree that Shakespeare is great, then we can’t put Shakespeare forward as the “gold standard” of literary greatness. The Canon provided us all with a starting point, at least in literature.

A scientist’s tunnel vision of the German high command

In other fields, making that case is a bit more difficult. I once attended a fine lecture at which the speaker fervently averred that Germany lost World War I because its chemical industry couldn’t keep up with the level of wartime demand. For a historian of science, this was a perfectly reasonable argument to make. But my imp of the perverse kept goading me to question him as to whether he thought that the German high command’s failure to fully implement the von Schlieffen Plan during the first weeks of the war might not have had a little something to do with Germany’s ultimate defeat. Of course the von Schlieffen plan had nothing to do with science— that was politics and military strategy, and the Ph. D.’s field was the history of science, not geo-politics.

Perhaps Tenney Davis saw the writing on the wall. As far back as 1936 he recognized that there wouldn’t be time enough for an aspiring young chemist to learn all that, ideally, he or she should know about things like history, literature and philosophy. This was the theory behind the introductory college survey courses. In two semesters you could learn the basics of English literature, or American history, or Western philosophy from Aquinas to Russell.

The Nobelist who taught freshmen

But these survey courses were beginning to lose ground when I was in graduate school. The big guns of the various faculties rarely wanted to teach them, so they usually were assigned to newbies or adjunct faculty. (The Nobelist Alan MacDiarmid became something of a Penn legend for his willingness to teach introductory courses in organic chemistry even after he’d won his medal.)

It may be inevitable that, as the amount of available knowledge expands, our ability to meaningfully deal with it declines. So education— that holy of holies to Tenney Davis— becomes Balkanized.

There’s a famous line in the 1944 film Laura, in which the Vincent Price character avers that he doesn’t know a lot about anything, but he knows a little bit about everything. Today we seem to be producing educated men and women who profess to know a lot about a little and not much about anything else.



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