Expanding Your Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education. Trumpeted in the College’s brochures and website, and reinforced by professors and students alike, these few words form the basis of Middlebury’s identity as an institution of higher learning. Increasingly, opportunities like those offered by the Project on Creativity and Innovation (PCI) are prominent features of one’s academic journey. According to a PCI fact sheet, the initiative aims to make “intellectual risk-taking and creative problem solving second nature to Middlebury students and part of a portfolio of critical skills that will serve them throughout their lives.” We have great faith that the value of expanding learning outside the classroom lies in producing more capable, strategic thinkers. After all, is a student who is an economics major worse off for having applied his business idea in the real world before graduation? We think not. However, for the frequency at which the phrase “liberal arts education” is used to describe life on campus and to promote the College abroad, its true meaning remains somewhat unclear.

To define the term more precisely, we can start with what a liberal arts education at Middlebury is not. It is not an academic free-for-all, an unstructured four years of traipsing through the Vermont mountains, dabbling in a few different disciplines without gaining any skills that will be of use in the real world. Nor is it a set journey in which students remain laser-focused on a single subject area in predetermined boundaries, but have little room to explore and experiment within new disciplines.

Rather, a Middlebury liberal arts education is a balance between these two extremes. First and foremost, it is an academic experience, and a rigorous one at that. Middlebury has over 45 departments and programs — from neuroscience to philosophy to global health to Russian — that challenge students to expand their horizons, make connections between various disciplines and, perhaps most importantly, learn a subject area intimately, gaining in-depth knowledge in a field of one’s choosing. Yet a liberal arts education, as Middlebury students know, is also about linking academic pursuits to activities outside the classroom in a meaningful way. It is about having the opportunity to test ideas and hypotheses in the real world that have been thoroughly developed in class. For Middlebury students, the real world may be no further than Addison County, but using the “Middlebury bubble” as a space for thoughtful experimentation does not detract from one’s academic experience or make it any less significant or rigorous. In addition, the expansive definition of liberal arts in the past decades is seen in numerous dimensions — from increased funding allocated to recruit varsity athletes to the expansion of Middlebury academics into a graduate school at Monterey Institute that offers world-class international studies programs.

With so many options, commitments abound, and many may find themselves putting academics on the backburner for various periods of time. Are we truly forced to neglect some of our readings on a hectic Tuesday night? No. We are busy largely because of what activities we choose to take on outside of class. The Middlebury student body is active in every sense of the word, as our energy translates into a bustling world of commons councils, athletic teams, student government committees, political organizations, outdoor interest groups and more. Prioritizing these commitments is a challenge that all students confront throughout their four years here; finding this balance is difficult, to say the least. We must be aware that these decisions have implications on the community as a whole. If, for example, a student is off campus attending a lecture promoted by one of the College’s environmental groups and does not complete the required reading for a class, the quality of the discussion section the next day may indeed suffer without full participation from all students. However, we believe the overall benefit of a liberal arts institution, which includes having the opportunity to engage in an extensive range of activities, far outweighs the cost of one unread article. In this light, we can see that a liberal arts experience is a deeply personal experience, a journey whose path is dictated by the decisions each student chooses to make for him or herself.

We must also consider what tangible skills these extracurricular endeavors bring. Again, we find that taking advantage of certain opportunities does in fact better position students for the real world; certainly, the English major who spends time honing her skills writing for the Campus or submitting work to other Middlebury publications is better off than the English major who only writes the essays assigned to her in class.

Stepping back, it is vitally important to note how we frame these issues. Academics and extracurricular activities must compliment, not compete against, one another. Applying one’s knowledge from the classroom to the community, the state of Vermont or even at the Proctor dinner table is crucial in order to maximize the value of a Middlebury education and prepare for life after college. Drawing lines around an academic sphere will only isolate it from other aspects of students’ lives and downplay the connections that are present among varied interests. While “learning outside of the classroom” may sound like a cliché, it is precisely this opportunity that has the potential to strengthen the liberal arts as a whole and the student that emerges four years later.