Answering the perennial question of what university education should be requires a return to first principles. Speak to many Duke students and you get the idea that the university is failing to shore up the idea of liberal education which we have come to expect from, and in many ways associate with, university life. We should first consider what that idea is.
One need not cast about too much for signs of dissatisfaction with the current state of things to be seen. Venture around campus and one might encounter students bemoaning the drudgery of calculus and linear algebra, required courses for most; we hear from friends that there are other classes they wish to be taking instead of major requirements; and too often, we ourselves feel confined by a lack of options for intellectual exploration, despite the ostensible freedom to choose and the variety of classes available. The solution, we tend to think, is greater effort on the part of the university to create a more comprehensive education by introducing new classes or promoting wide-ranging academic exploration.
It is perhaps a testament to the sterile careerist pragmatism of modern higher education that many of us see broadening the curriculum as a cure. We imagine ourselves thinkers and entrepreneurs and poets, ranging with equal ease over the serried plains of disparate disciplines, and see in the curriculum an implicit encouragement for specialization when it is our multifarious interests that we want to explore. But to oppose the status quo by calling for breadth over depth is to take a mistaken view of liberal learning, and this amounts to an abnegation of the same kind.
Popular demand for classes that broaden students’ knowledge has led to the creation of classes specifically designed to be interesting, often with descriptions featuring words like “life” and “human” and as parts of an increasingly bewildering array of subject categories that surpass even the dizzying nomenclature of algebraic structures. Students who take them typically engage with the material for a few lectures before lapsing back into apathy and wondering why the course’s content lives up to none of its claims of force. In the end, consoling themselves that the class is anyhow unrelated to their intended professions, they turn to large language models and other AI-based tools to compose their assignments, an act that is the very repudiation of the motivation with which they were supposed to have begun. Such cases are, unfortunately, all too typical.
The trouble is that an education concerned foremost with breadth of study is unable to capture what makes each subject profound and absorbing. What we really want is penetration into an idea, an understanding and attunement to all its facets and connections; as such, it is no wonder that whistle-stop readings, explanations and critiques as typically found in introductory and interdisciplinary classes leave us dissatisfied. We end up wondering why such figures as Homer and Aristotle and Machiavelli are seen to be so important when their views can seemingly be summarized and exploded in a single lecture’s span.
It is only with sufficient depth of study that a subject yields those mysteries and connections which are hidden from the untutored mind. We appeal to the ideal of liberal education of generations past but forget that theirs was also an education of depth and rigor that is altogether foreign to the dilettantism of our time. Our modern view is one that sees subjects as quarries—places to extract shallow wisdom from before moving on. In heeding this false idea of eclecticism we forget the words of John Henry Newman, a great proponent of liberal education, that the way to learn is “not to swallow knowledge but . . . to masticate and digest it.”
The truth is this: Diversity of studies alone has no value. Its benefit, if any, derives entirely from what is studied and how well. Far better than to “cover all bases” is to achieve real proficiency and understanding in a meager few. And to truly understand we must, as Paul Samuelson put it, “go back for the second lesson.”
It is common to think that depth of study necessarily precludes breadth; but in any field, no matter how rarefied, the threads of wider intellectual connections are always present, and all it takes to discover them is a curiosity to learn. For those who thus intend, there is an easy method: Trace an idea, equation or invention to its originator and understand their background, influences, and beliefs. Understand the world they lived in; notice names, events, concepts, categories. Proceeding by this thread, one encounters the vast interconnectedness of diverse human endeavors and begins to weave together the tapestry of human intellectual history in one’s own way.
William Butler Yeats had a saying that one begins to understand the world by studying the cobweb in one’s own corner. Through intense rumination on a single subject, we gain not only knowledge into that subject but an internal awareness of both how it is practiced and how it is conceived of by its practitioners. Concentrated study confers upon on us the ability to imagine the ins and outs of a discipline — we come to have an tacit idea of its history, its methodology, and how it might develop — an understanding which provides the foundation for wider intellectual exploration by imbuing the tabula rasa of our minds with perspective and the faculty for synthesis.
It is perhaps clear at this point that we mostly do not see learning in this way. We rely too much on the institutional framework, and it is the deeper failing of our current misconception of liberal education that we are unable to even think about intellectual exploration outside of the context of classes. Paradoxically, it would be a sign of Duke’s success if our intellectual discussions begin to consist less of “I took a class on . . .” or “I learned in a class about ...” and more of “I found an article on ...” or “I thought of this idea . . .” It would mean that we have recovered the agency in our learning that was the original objective of liberal education.
Of course, taking classes that interest us and expand our horizons is important; but by themselves they are insufficient for the cultivation of a broad-ranging mind. We see a pertinent illustration of this in the case of reading: In subjects such as philosophy and literature, gleaning all the meaning from a text often takes revisiting it at a later date; but I would say that most of us do not do this. Ask someone to explain to you what they learned in a class last semester and they will likely be unable to formulate a coherent answer. We forget, because we tend to see our liberal arts classes rather like movies: entertainment to be enjoyed for a semester, but not something tethered to our own lives and intellectual development — even though the very success of a liberal education depends on the cultivation of one’s own intellectual framework. And this means reading, discussing, and thinking in one’s own time.
Only when we begin to see Duke not as the source of our learning but a contributor to it do we open ourselves up to receive a transformative humanistic education. A true liberal education is not to be assessed by such crude notions as breadth and depth but only by the quality of the learning that takes place, a fact which is often lost when we speak in these abstractions. Depth can morph into breadth in learning just as readily as breadth leads on to depth; all it takes is the will and interest of the individual. After all, an education confined to the university setting is no liberation: Only self-motivated intellectualism can make us free.
Marc Wang is a Trinity sophomore.
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