Supporting the six pillars of the liberal arts (#1339)

Topics/tags: Rants, Grinnell, postscripted

About a quarter century ago, some folks at Grinnell put together a statement on the liberal arts that includes six areas of study in the current curriculum that are important elements of a liberal education, areas that we often call the six pillars of the liberal arts [1]. I have included them them at the end of this musing for your edification (and because they’ll almost certainly move from where I have them linked).

I don’t love the six pillars statement. In part, it’s because many people treat it like a checklist [2]. You should take two from pillar 1 and one from pillar 2 and …. It’s not intended to be a checklist; it’s intended to be the start of a conversation. Treating it like a checklist often ends the conversation. Of course, it’s a better checklist than the one we use for early graduation [3]. Still, I’d rather we ask students to develop a deeper sense of what a liberal education can be and how it frees them from so many things.

I also don’t like the six pillars because the pillar that most clearly includes my discipline is called quantitative reasoning when it really represents three different, but related, kinds of reasoning: the reasoning with quantities that statisticians and some social scientists do (usually called quantitative reasoning), the formal reasoning that mathematicians do (this seems to sit somewhere between mathematical modeling and broader notions of proof; I don’t know that it is customarily called, but it doesn’t usually have to do with quantities), and the computational thinking that forms the basis of computer science [4]. It makes me even less happy that a recent summary of the quantitative reasoning pillar chopped off computational thinking.

But those concerns aren’t supposed to be the focus of this musing [5]. Rather, it’s how Grinnell supports—or, more precisely, fails to support—the pillars.

You see, creative expression is one of those core pillars. From my perspective, that pillar has two parts [6]: We have the creative expression itself, which comes from creating works, and the analysis of those creative works. For the former, one might create in studio art, music (performance, composition, or even conducting), dance, theatre (acting, directing, stagecraft, and more), creative writing, filmmaking, and other kinds of performance. I’ve almost certainly left some things out. Personally, I find both proof and programming to be forms of creative expression. But I wouldn’t want proof and programming to be the only forms of creative expression one engages in [7].

You’ll note that I include theatre, dance, and performance as central areas of creative activity. I am not alone in that classification. At Grinnell, those areas are smushed together into a single department that we call Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies [8,10]. As you might expect, that wide range of disciplines calls on a wide range of faculty expertise. We need folks who understand dance, acting and directing, technical design, dramatic literature, performance, and more.

I have a significant concern about how we treat this part of the creative expression pillar. We used to have a tenure-track position in performance studies. When our prior Professor of Performance Studies retired, TDPS lost the tenure-line position. Someone in a term position now fulfills that role. They are amazing, but they deserve more. Relying on a term position seems to be the wrong approach for a core component of a pillar that supports liberal education. If we weaken that pillar, don’t we put the whole structure at risk of collapse?

When the College makes decisions on new and replacement tenure-line positions this spring, I hope they remember that Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies should have tenure-line positions in all three areas. And I hope that folks realize we already have an excellent person at Grinnell who could fill that position.

Postscript: My muse made me meander. Really, all I wanted to say was that (a) we should have a tenure-line position in Performance Studies and (b) our current PS visitor in that position could fill such a position

Postscript: Looking at enrollments (a very different issue), I note that we also need another faculty member in Economics and one in Statistics to satisfy demand [11]. How should we balance support for the core liberal arts and support for meeting student interest? Wasn’t that what the expansion positions were supposed to do? I wonder where they went.

Postscript: Yes, this is one of the promised rants. You should see another one tomorrow, at least if I have time. I even have another rant in the queue for after that. Or maybe the newly queued one will come first. It’s an odd sort of queue.

Postscript: I don’t know whether I should be happy or sad that Grammarly has many suggestions for (a) Jeannette Wing’s text on computational thinking and (b) the College’s statement on the pillars of liberal education.

[1] At least I think we do. I get confused sometimes.

[2] The politically incorrect term for people of my generation is Chinese Menu rather than checklist.

[3] At least three from this division, at least three from that division, at least three from the other division. I believe I’m not alone in believing that the Science Division contains at least two kinds of thinking and the Humanities Division includes at least three.

[4] There are many papers on Computational Thinking. I believe the original paper paper by Jeannette Wing summarizes computational thinking in terms of decomposition, abstraction (both functional abstraction and data abstraction), and pattern recognition. Wing also states things a bit more broadly (and a bit more eloquently).

Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation.

Computational thinking is thinking recursively. It is parallel processing. It is interpreting code as data and data as code. It is type checking as the generalization of dimensional analysis. It is recognizing both the virtues and the dangers of aliasing, or giving someone or something more than one name. It is recognizing both the cost and power of indirect addressing and procedure call. It is judging a program not just for correctness and efficiency but for aesthetics, and a system’s design for simplicity and elegance.

Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system. It is separation of concerns. It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem or modeling the relevant aspects of a problem to make it tractable. It is using invariants to describe a system’s behavior succinctly and declaratively. It is having the confidence we can safely use, modify, and influence a large complex system without understanding its every detail. It is modularizing something in anticipation of multiple users or prefetching and caching in anticipation of future use.

Computational thinking is thinking in terms of prevention, protection, and recovery from worst-case scenarios through redundancy, damage containment, and error correction. It is calling gridlock deadlock and contracts interfaces. It is learning to avoid race conditions when synchronizing meetings with one another.

Computational thinking is using heuristic reasoning to discover a solution. It is planning, learning, and scheduling in the presence of uncertainty. It is search, search, and more search, resulting in a list of Web pages, a strategy for winning a game, or a counterexample. Computational thinking is using massive amounts of data to speed up computation. It is making trade-offs between time and space and between processing power and storage capacity.

[5] Too often, I digress.

[6] Yes, I know, pillars have more than two parts. Minimally, they have a base, a shaft, and a capital.

[7] Or the only form of creative expression in which one engages.

[8] I find the name ambiguous. One could parse it as (Theatre), (Dance), and (Performance Studies) or as (Theatre, Dance, and Performance) Studies. The latter seems more like an analyze creative work discipline than a create discipline. Perhaps Theatre, Dance, and Studies of Performance. Or Performance Studies, Theatre, and Dance. Or even Theatre, Dance, and Performance. Do we really need to add Studies to names? It’s like the use of Science. Economic Science is just Economics. Computer Science is just Informatics. Biological Science is just Biology. At least that’s what I think [9].

[9] Of course it’s what I think. I wrote it.

[10] You might think the College’s abbreviation for Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies would be TDP. You’d be wrong. It’s THD, which I always think of as Theatrical Design.

[11] CS should finally be fine now if we’ve really moved to ten tenure-line positions, including the expansion position added this year and the new Noyce Professorship [12]. I’m not sure my departmental colleagues would agree, but I’d even sacrifice one of those ten lines for a tenure-line position in Performance Studies, Statistics, or Economics.

[12] Unfortunately, things are less certain than they should be.

Grinnell’s six pillars of the liberal arts

1. Nothing enhances the expression of knowledge better than engaging, clear, and accurate language. Reading closely, thinking clearly, and writing effectively form a web of connected skills, whether practiced in the First-Year Tutorial, in the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center in designated writing courses, or in courses ranging from the introductory to the advanced level in almost every discipline. Students planning their academic programs should strive for the ability to convey their ideas with power and grace, to analyze and formulate arguments, and to adapt each piece of writing to its context and audience.

2. Study of a language other than one’s own opens the mind to new ways of thinking. Language placement tests are offered during New Student Orientation, and students are asked to determine their appropriate level at that time. Many Grinnell College faculty members urge their advisees to study a nonnative language and its literature, not only for the exposure to a rich alternative world of cultural meanings, but also to gain a valuable perspective (unavailable to the monolingual person) on the workings of language itself. For careful planning, students should note that many off-campus study opportunities, the Alternative Language Study Option, certain academic majors, and many types of postgraduate study require specific levels of demonstrated ability in foreign languages.

3. An education in the natural sciences—biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology— introduces techniques of observation and experimentation, the relation of data to hypotheses, and the practice of scientific reasoning. This work trains the mind to relate concrete empirical information to abstract models, stimulating multidimensional and creative habits of thought. Sustained experience in the laboratory and a grasp of basic scientific principles lead to a better understanding of commonly observed phenomena. Non-specialists who are scientifically literate bring valuable understanding to public discourse and to an increasing number of professional settings.

4. Quantitative reasoning, with emphasis on mathematical models and methods above the secondary-school level, aids in the expression of hypotheses, processes, and theoretical relations. A course in statistics can be helpful for all students, and particularly for those who might work in the social and behavioral sciences. Studies in computer science offer valuable exposure to principles of logic and problem-solving paradigms.

5. The study of human behavior and society leads students to investigate their own identities and to gain insight into social categories and relations. Faculty advisers often urge students to take a sustained look at the history of a specific society, and also to examine a contemporary society (or a segment of it) that is unfamiliar. In light of these encounters, students learn to make and evaluate their own political and ethical choices. Whether a student explores anthropology, economics, education, history, philosophy, political science, religious studies, sociology, or interdisciplinary studies, this question will lie near the heart of the inquiry: in what ways have people lived together, and how should they live together?

6. Students enlarge their understanding of the liberal arts through the study of creative expression. In the analysis of creative works, whether through historical survey of forms, aesthetic theory, or interpretive practice, the arts occupy the foreground, though knowledge of history and society may inform the analysis. In this way, courses in literature, music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts complement studies in anthropology, history, philosophy, religious studies, and other fields. Students also benefit from learning, through direct instruction in artistic or literary technique, the intense discipline of art and its interplay between conscious intent and unconscious design.

Version 1.0 of 2025-02-25.