Cornell College Turns Its Back on the Liberal Arts. This One Is Personal.

Armstrong Hall, where Curmie used to work.
(Theatre has now been moved to a new, adjoining, building.)

Over the years, Curmie has written a handful of posts about colleges that have abandoned their liberal arts orientations while claiming not to have done so.  There was Goucher College back in 2018, St. Mary’s University in 2022, and Marymount University in 2023, plus a couple of passing comments elsewhere.  He even wrote that the St. Mary’s case was “personal” because of a friend who used to work there and a link to the same British conservatory as Curmie’s university has.

But this one is really personal.  This time, it’s Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Curmie himself taught for seven years, that has sought the easy but no doubt ineffectual fix even if it means betraying what Curmie had always believed was a genuine passion for the liberal arts model of higher education.  They’re slashing the entire Religion department (this in a school still nominally associated with the United Methodist Church), Classics, foreign languages (only a Spanish minor will remain), and music.  A total of eight positions in the Humanities are being cut.  Curmie learned about this act of hubristic incompetence from a Facebook post from Dr. David Weddle, Professor emeritus of Religion, who was one of the most universally respected professors Curmie has ever known. 

It’s clear, as is virtually always the case, that there was little if any input from faculty, just the whimsicality of an administration and the Trustees.  Dr. Truman Jordan, Professor emeritus of Chemistry, was a major player in faculty governance back in the days that actually meant something, and still lives in Mount Vernon.  He wrote on his FB page, “The Cornell press release has a phrase in it: ‘ . . . after consultation with the Faculty Council . . .’ This is rather disingenuous because as near as I have been able to determine, the administration paid no attention to anything the Faculty Council suggested.”  The chances that Dr. Jordan is accurately describing the situation: approaching ontological certitude.  Curmie can say this because he knows how college administrations operate… and he knows (OK, knew) Truman Jordan.

None of this surprises Curmie, who has seen the notion of shared governance dwindle from a reality to a slogan to a myth at colleges and universities across the country (certainly including the one from which he retired) over the past couple of decades.  What does catch Curmie’s attention is this: that having “60 years of [his] life invested in Cornell College as a liberal arts institution,” Jordan could write, “If the college continues on its current path, I would never, ever, consider coming to Cornell to teach. It saddens me greatly to have to say that.”  It saddens Curmie, too.

The comments from former students on both Weddle’s and Jordan’s pages (and on Curmie’s personal page) suggest that alumni, whether or not they majored in one of the disciplines about to be slashed, are pretty upset with both the decision and the process. 

The first show Curmie worked on at Cornell was as the director/coordinator of the New Student Variety Show (it’s been a while; that may not have been the official title).  The choral version of Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” just blew me away.  Wow, I thought, I’m going to enjoy working with the faculty member who arranged and directed that… except it was an upper-class student, not a faculty member.  That same Music major played a featured role in The Rivals, the first theatre production I directed there, too.  Here’s (part of) his comment on Curmie’s FB page: “The smoking, hulking, disfigured remains after this botched academic Eugenics experiment bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Liberal Arts which first drew me to the Hilltop 42 years ago.” 

Yeah, what he said.

Curmie should note that Cornell is precisely the kind of college that is most likely to struggle financially in this politico-economic environment: rather expensive (a sticker price of about $50K per year, before financial aid), selective but not elite, rural, small enough that you might (ever so hypothetically) be taking courses in stage carpentry and lighting from a theatre historian/director.  So the desire to streamline, to cut programs that don’t attract a lot of students, is understandable.  But you simply cannot call yourself a liberal arts college without those disciplines.  Sure, you might be able to merge some Religion courses into the Philosophy Department or make similar arrangements with some other programs, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

What is listed above as a potential disadvantage—Cornell’s small size (about 1100 students) was also, of course, an advantage: everybody did everything, saw everything.  Students and faculty alike came to plays, concerts, athletic events and whatever else was happening.  You actually knew people on the football team and the newspaper staff, in the choir, and so on.  And that contributed to a lot of new horizons opening up for students, regardless of their field of study.

Curmie, of course, changed majors in college, and is convinced that one of the things that makes undergraduate education in the US superior (in general) to that elsewhere is precisely that capability.  In Curmie’s time there, Cornell got a half dozen or so new Theatre majors every year, and we’d graduate about the same number four years later; sometimes one or two were even the same people.  That’s what happens when students are encouraged to engage with the liberal arts: political scientists become “theatre kids,” and vice versa.  That’s a good thing.

Of course, there were far too few Theatre majors to do anything approaching full-scale productions without a lot of other folks contributing to the process.  So our “theatre kids” weren’t necessarily majors, and although some went on to careers in theatre, most ended up elsewhere: one is an oncologist, another a radio producer, another an HR manager, and so on.  That’s OK, too.  What better training for that HR position than casting a show or handling all the minor glitches in the process?

Curmie confesses that not all his memories of Cornell are happy, but he did get to teach some good courses, direct and/or design (or technical direct, or advise, or…) some good shows, and work with great colleagues and students, both inside and outside the department.  He has about 70 FB friends from his time there; considering that he left Cornell over a decade before FB even existed, that’s a fair number of folks sharing a connection with someone they haven’t seen in person in many years.

Cornell was, back in the day, a very good place to get an education.  There wasn’t a weak department on campus; Music, foreign languages, and Religion were, of course, among the strongest programs in a pretty distinguished field.  Cornell’s novel “Block Plan” (students take one course at a time in an academic year comprised of nine three-and-a-half week “blocks”) doesn’t work terribly well for all courses (Curmie could never figure out how to teach Directing on the Block Plan, for example), but you know what works particularly well on that schedule?  Foreign language instruction.  Ironic, huh?

The Cornell administration will no doubt claim that, despite appearances, they’re upholding liberal arts values.  They aren’t.  Whether they’re consciously lying or just too stupid to know any better is open to interpretation.