Opinion: This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education by [[Jennifer Frey]] 2025-07-17 in New York Times

Frey argues that it's college administrators who are killing off the idea of a liberal arts education. In her experience, students are thrilled to be in these programs and participate in them.

Me: Some of the pressure, also indicated here, is from toxic capitalism which is pressuring students to be only career-focused in their educational journeys. This pressure leaves much less space for the humanities.

Read: Fri 2025-07-18 7:13 PM Updated: 2025-07-19

for - article - Emory University Arts on the Brain - Sensory Illusions: The Brain and Misperception - Jorge Naveira, 2020, May 7

https://portal.cca.edu/people/jorge/

Snyder, Christopher A. “A Liberal Education in Name Only.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), October 23, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/23/liberal-education-name-only-opinion.

read Mon 10/23/2023 7:37 PM

reply to Our Journey, Day 84 by Dan Allosso at https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-84

There's already a movement afoot calling for schools who are dramatically cutting their humanities departments to quit calling what they're offering a liberal education. This popped up on Monday and has a long list of cuts: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/23/liberal-education-name-only-opinion I was surprised that Bemidji wasn't listed, but then again there may be several dozens which have made announcements, but which aren't widely known yet. The problem may be much larger and broader than anyone is acknowledging.

Cutting down dozens of faculties into either "schools" or even into some sort of catch all called "Humanities" may be even more marginalizing to the enterprise.

Apparently, the Morlocks seem to think that the Eloi will be easier to manage if there isn't any critical thinking?

Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

Our institutions are colonial systems, the ivory towers render the people leading and running them to become disconnected from the very public they are supposed to be representing, ending up only serving themselves. “Do we have to burn it down and start again? Do we have to completely recalibrate it from the inside?

This quote really highlights the warmthness the arts bring in accordance with the kinds of truths the mathematical and physical sciences bring. Our world thrives off of the marriage between the two. A simple example would be a garden sheer. We need the sheer to trim hedges and plants. The handles would have to be long enough to create enough torque to cut foliage. However, a focus on art and design further advances the tool by including finger grooves in the handles for better grip. Art and design also determine how pointy the sheers are. Sloped triangular tips cut more aerodynamically than just two crude rectangles. With this, we see how intertwined the mathematical and physical sciences are with the arts, working in unison to create ease and comfort in life. Fully realized, the garden sheer makes cutting easy for us.