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.

Goucher Mendaciously Still Calls Itself a Liberal Arts College

Curmie started his college-level teaching career in 1979. This fall, he will pass the 200 mark in total number of sections of courses taught—not counting independent studies and practicums. He has seen literally dozens of ideas and strategies (not to mention jargon) come into favor and then fade from view when it was discovered that the flavor of the month was more often than not just a re-packaged bad idea from a decade ago.

This is not to say that all changes in curriculum or instruction over the last 40 years have been bad, but roughly 1/3 are just fancy new names for what has been done for years. (Call it “acting” in a theatre class and it’s to be scorned as not really academic; call it “role-playing” in business management or law, and it’s a brilliant new approach to pedagogy.) The overwhelming majority of what’s left are demeaning (to faculty and students alike), counter-productive, time-consuming, anti-intellectual exercises in meditative bean-counting because the average university administrator lacks the expertise, the intelligence, and/or the moral courage to tell corporations to train their own damned employees or provide a few options of where politicians can shove their quantification fetishes. Our job is to prepare students to be citizens of the world, not merely workplace drones, and certainly not ovine lackeys conditioned to vote against their own best interest because the talking head on the TV said to.

In other words, after nearly four decades in the classroom, Curmie has developed a rather discerning olfactory sense when it comes to the presence of bovine fecal matter in the pronouncements of the educationists, most of whom have little to no actual classroom experience. So it was that Curmie detected that familiar aroma when reading a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It doesn’t really matter which one; they’re depressingly interchangeable. In his own personal page, Curmie posted this:

Just read another of those all-too-ubiquitous articles about how universities need to adhere more closely to their “business models.” This one concentrated on increasing efficiency and reducing costs. I’ve got an idea: we could stop throwing pots of money at consultants who have no idea what they’re talking about and who offer only two flavors of advice: the intuitively obvious and the utterly inane.

A friend commented that Goucher College has just announced the elimination of a number of majors and courses of study. Curmie hadn’t read about that yet, so it was off to the Google machine.

José Bowen: smart, wrong, and deceitful.

It turns out that Goucher is indeed eliminating majors in math, physics, religion, studio art, music, theatre, Russian studies, elementary education, and special education. Minors in German studies, Judaic studies, and book studies are also disappearing. The college isn’t in financial trouble, quoth President José Bowen, but Goucher is committed to affordability, and blah blah blah. “Affordability,” by the way, translates into a quarter-million dollar pricetag for a four-year degree. Yes, that’s before scholarships and financial aid, but even after those are figured in, we’re almost certainly looking at something well into six figures, and that’s a healthy chunk of change in Curmie’s neighborhood. (And let’s not pretend that loans qualify in any legitimate definition of “aid.”)

Goucher, of course, is exactly the kind of small college that is going to be hit hardest by politically-driven cynicism about the value of higher education, declining support for student aid programs, and unprecedented demand for superior facilities and equipment: small enough that a change of only a few students can profoundly affect the bottom line, far more expensive than state universities but insufficiently selective to make a degree from there carry immediate gravitas.

Many of these schools are scrambling for whatever enrollment boost they can find. Sometimes this results in innovation (Goucher’s justly renowned study abroad program, for example). But often it’s more of a gimmick, (e.g., the elimination of transcripts in admissions decisions). Moreover, all too often, schools like Goucher show far too much willingness to sacrifice their stated mission to achieve a short-term financial boost. More disturbingly, they can be tempted into betraying their raison d’être even when their numbers are perfectly fine; this year’s freshman class, for example, is the third largest in the college’s history.

Thus, the elimination of these majors makes no sense, even as President Bowen intones that Goucher is somehow bucking the trend to move away from the liberal arts:

Despite many competitors shifting away from a traditional liberal arts model, Goucher remains almost uniquely committed to being a modern liberal arts college. We have long resisted the temptation to adopt more of the vocational programs currently in vogue with segments of the American public. Any new programs we offer will be interdisciplinary and in the liberal arts tradition. We have chosen this path carefully and strategically.

Curmie isn’t saying Bowen is lying, but the odor wafting from Bowen’s pronouncements is strikingly redolent of the cow pasture. Because, as Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty points out, these are “programs that are considered part of any liberal arts college’s mission.” Precisely. OK, specific area studies majors often thrive until a key faculty member retires or leaves, then wither. This may be the case with Russian studies, German studies, and Judaic studies at Goucher. A thriving Philosophy department could pretty much make up for the loss of a religion major. And so on. But you can’t call yourself a liberal arts college without majors in math, physics, and the fine arts. You. Just. Can’t.

Yeah, yeah, they’re not eliminating departments, just majors, and there will still be coursework available in all of those areas of study. But it isn’t the same, and Bowen knows it. How does Curmie know? Because Bowen isn’t an idiot, however much he may be acting like one at the moment. He may be behaving like a corporate minion with neither the intellect nor the interest in education to lead a college, but he’s no dummy. Bowen is Stanford-educated, with an undergrad degree in chemistry, Master’s in music composition and humanities, and a PhD in musicology and humanities. He has a distinguished career as an educator and administrator—a little too much of a TED Talk huckster for Curmie’s taste, but certainly not without relevant skills.

It is therefore particularly disappointing that Bowen, of all people, would spearhead an effort to strip his college of its legitimacy. Because let’s be totally honest here: every day Goucher continues to advertise itself as a liberal arts college is another day it lies to its students and to the public at large. This kind of abandonment of the core principles of the liberal arts is bad enough when it happens at a place like the University of Akron, which announced it is cutting some 80 (!) degree programs, including (as at Goucher) undergrad degrees in math and physics, plus humanities courses (French, art history…). But at least Akron is up front about its priorities: it wants to become a technology leader, and to foreground programs like polymer science, biosciences and cybersecurity. Curmie doesn’t know diddly about any of those areas, but he’s pretty sure two of the three have nothing to do with the liberal arts. Curmie thinks that’s misguided, but Akron apparently wants to be in the job-training rather than education business. So be it.

Goucher, however, wants to pretend to be something it no longer has a right to claim. The major advantage of a true liberal arts education is that students can readily find their way into disciplines they had no intention of studying when they were 18. Curmie changed majors in college. José Bowen did so nine times! But if we want to get purely pragmatic, it’s simply a statement of fact that programs without majors tend to have more difficulty attracting and retaining good faculty. I think I can speak for the majority of the profession when I say that we’d rather work with people who actually want to be in the room.

Not having those majors affects the quality of students, as well.  This is—or at least should be—especially significant in areas like the performing arts, which contribute directly to the quality of life for the entire campus and indeed the larger community. Whereas Curmie has worked with a number of non-majors who have done excellent work, a stroll by the laughably horrible skits presented by the students on the orientation staff a couple of weeks ago suggests that a credible theatre program depends on students who are in fact serious about the work. I suspect this is even more true in music, especially on the instrumental side.

Indeed, instrumental music may provide an apt metaphor for what is happening at Goucher. There may be more interest in violins and trumpets, but if there’s no bassoon or ‘cello, it’s not an orchestra. Similarly, students may be more interested in economics or political science, but it’s not a liberal arts college without full courses of study in (at least) physics, math, and all of the fine arts.

To assert otherwise is to perpetrate a fraud.