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Austin Sarat ScheerPost
In late January, Professor Ian Bogost published a very flattering account of four premier liberal arts colleges: Amherst (where I teach), Davidson, Smith, and Vassar. As he wrote, “After spending several weeks on my tour of wealthy, liberal-arts colleges, I grew to think that the pitch they’re making to prospective students and their parents for the fall of 2026 was convincing. All things considered, when the time comes, I might rather see my own preteen daughter attend a school like Amherst or Davidson, Smith, or Vassar, than a research university such as my own.”
Bogost, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, argued that while unlike universities that get caught up in a rat race of research productivity and grant-getting, the faculty at liberal arts colleges know that “The conditions that produce landmark discoveries are not necessarily the same ones that produce a serious education.”
Bogost notes that these schools have not been the targets of the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education. As a result, academic freedom on their campuses is under less stress than it is at Columbia, Harvard or other places that have found themselves in the administration’s sight line.
The liberal arts colleges Bogost describes retain their “broad and flexible approach to education.” In the age of artificial intelligence, they advertise themselves as places where students can prepare for what is to come because, as one liberal arts professor puts it, they value “people who know lots of stuff about lots of different areas and have open minds.”
Liberal arts colleges used to emphasize the value of knowing “lots of stuff about lots of different areas” when they hired faculty. No more.
Even as they retain their academic freedom and institutional autonomy, they may be losing their distinctiveness as they drift toward becoming small universities. That drift is signaled by their proud embrace of the label “research college.”
Ours is not the first era to experience this tendency, though it has become a particularly pressing problem for those who teach in elite liberal arts colleges today.
Faculty and administrators at those places have to acknowledge the dangers that come with that drift if they are to preserve the virtues that have made them so special and adapt them to face new challenges.
One of those dangers stems from the growing pressure on the faculty they hire and promote to tenure to increase research productivity. Young faculty at such places, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, know that if they are to have any chance of getting tenure, they have to finish a book, have it under contract to a first-rate university press, publish a number of articles in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals, and have begun a second major research project.
No book, no tenure. For scientists, securing external grants and publishing peer-reviewed research findings play an equivalent role.
When it is time for departments to review the work of a tenure candidate, they are encouraged to send it to specialists in the candidate’s disciplinary subfield at leading research universities. As a result, liberal arts colleges end up looking to research universities to certify the value of a faculty member’s research.
Seems odd for places that ought to be signaling their distinctiveness to follow that path.
Knowing that their work will be judged by such people leads young scholars at liberal arts colleges to narrow their vision and avoid taking risks in their scholarship. Instead of pursuing work beyond the conventional boundaries of their fields, it is safer to conduct highly specialized research that fills a recognizable gap in the existing literature.
No one tells faculty how to do their research or what they can say. In that sense, they retain academic freedom. But the messages are clear.
You can get a sense of this university-like emphasis from reading the tenure criteria at the liberal arts colleges Bogost discusses. They emphasize “productivity,” “national impact” or “professional recognition.” None of them say that the scholarship they value addresses big questions in risky ways or advances the central goals of a liberal arts college.
To retain their distinctiveness, liberal arts colleges should ask their faculty to do more than satisfy the norms of their disciplines. They give special support to scholarship and artistic creation that frame disciplinary questions in ways that illuminate enduring questions of major significance and connect directly to what happens in the classroom.
The academic freedom that fuels their scholarship should inform how they exercise it in their teaching.
Beyond what they ask of faculty, liberal arts colleges need to recalibrate their value proposition for students. For the last decade or so, they have tried to compete in the arms race of career preparation, investing resources in retooling their career services offices and emphasizing the importance of internships to career success.
As Scott Carlson and Ned Laff write in The Chronicle of Higher Education, liberal arts colleges are responding to “Popular media accounts…rife with stories about the poor job prospects for ’useless’ majors in French and philosophy…” Those accounts entice liberal arts colleges to make great efforts to show that their graduates can get jobs, but along the way, “the value of the liberal arts seems to be getting lost in translation.”
That is because places of the kind Bogost visited focus too much on helping students figure out what they want to do after college and too little on who they want to be.
Wake Forest Professor Michael Lamb puts it this way: higher education institutions should be more intentional about “helping students… to contest, dialogue, and think critically about how to live….” Let me be clear. I am not saying that Amherst, Davidson, Smith, or Vassar should try to inculcate a particular set of personal values.
Academic freedom on their campuses should foster an environment where students can confront and explore big questions about what it means to live a good life.
The two things I’ve noted, namely the growing tendency of liberal arts colleges to model themselves after research universities and their emphasis on what their students will do rather than who they will be, go together. Faculty who become disciplinary specialists may, outside of Philosophy or Religion, feel equipped to offer courses that invite that kind of reflection.
If schools like Amherst, Davidson, Smith, and Vassar, with their prestige and position, do not take the lead in showing how the academic freedom that is alive there can transcend specialization and careerism, no one is likely to be able to do so. That would be a serious loss to the higher education landscape.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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