A recent comment on my post about rhetoric and the liberal arts has me returning to that subject here. Jon Benda raised the point about rhetoricians who might work in departments more oriented toward the social sciences. If they are connected to Speech departments, then they are possibily more closely related to the classical definition of rhetoric within the trivium of liberal arts. But this got me thinking in a different direction.

I would say that the term "liberal arts" is broader than "humanities." I would think, in contemporary usage,liberal arts refers to all the disciplines that might be involved in general education.

That would include math, the pure sciences, and  social sciences. It would mostly exclude applied sciences (engineering) and technology, business, and departments/schools that were strictly professionalizing  (e.g. law school). It used to be that professionalizing was for graduate school (law degrees, MBAs and so on). Obviously that’s no longer the case.

Nowadays at a college like mine, the economics department might offer a business degree. It may be that such a degree would not be considered part of liberal arts by the faculty teaching it. However that does not mean that Economics itself is not part of the liberal arts or that the department doesn’t also offer a liberal arts curriculum or that the faculty don’t see themselves as part of the liberal arts.

The more difficult one is Education. In many respects Education is a professionalizing discipline, leading to a certification. And yet, since much of what public school teachers teach are the liberal arts, much of the content of such an education comes from liberal arts material. For example, half of the curriculum of a student certifying as a high school English teacher is literary studies courses. Is the undergraduate receiving certification to be a high school English teacher receiving a liberal arts degree? a liberal arts education?

I would say yes, but perhaps others would disagree.

Ultimately, the more interesting question for me is not where we draw this line, but why we draw it. What advantages are there to being inside or outside the liberal arts? What is to be gained from excluding someone or on the other hand insisting that they bear such an identification? Does such an identification form the basis of an "us/them"  mentality or is it a difference that is subsumed within a larger more significant commonality?

In an English department, the large majority of  faculty fall easily into the liberal arts. Rhetoricians could easily fall within that category. The mission of liberal arts could be a good foundation, a common starting point for creating a departmental identity that balanced the intra-disciplinary differences that mark English Studies. This is particularly true at a comprehensive college such as mine where general education and service courses are such a significant part of our job.

Other possibilities could exist. That is, I could see situations where writing instruction was heavily invested in engineering or business programs and not particularly part of liberal arts or where rhetoric faculty  might be working mostly at the graduate level. In such places, liberal arts education might not be a significant foundation for department identity.

In short, identifying ourselves within liberal arts is hardly a panacea for intra-disciplinary differences, but it might be effective within certain locales.

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