When I arrived at Macalester nearly three decades ago, I had just finished my Ph.D. in Canada and was crossing the border to take up a job in political science. I thought I knew what universities were for. What I didn’t understand — at all, really — was what an American liberal arts college was supposed to be, or what people meant by the liberal arts.
The phrase ‘liberal arts’ didn’t mean much to me. It sounded vague, a bit ornamental, like the sort of thing that circulates in mission statements without doing much actual work. My own training was more specialized: you learned your field and contributed to it if you could, and that model was clear enough.
When I got to Macalester, I didn’t think I was entering a different kind of intellectual world. I thought I had taken a job in a different country and would carry on, more or less, as before.
That didn’t last.
At some point, and I genuinely don’t remember when, I came across the older meaning of the liberal arts — the idea that they were the arts of freedom. Not freedom as in doing whatever you want (that’s license), but something narrower and more demanding: the freedom to reflect deeply on the big ethical and political questions and then do what’s right (that’s liberty). Such freedom involves the ability to think, weigh and make judgments without leaning too quickly on ready-made answers. That capacity for critical reflection, I concluded, was also a product of the liberating arts. But even that didn’t quite capture the full benefit of liberal arts education.
What we were doing — what I slowly realized I had stepped into — was not just learning how to think; we were being drawn into arguments that have been going on for a very long time. Arguments about how one ought to live and how we ought to live together.
These are the questions that sit at the heart of the liberal arts, even if they’re not always addressed so directly: How should I lead my life? And how should we lead our lives together?
You run into them in different forms: in ancient texts that still feel uncomfortably direct, in early modern arguments about authority and obligation and in more recent debates that sound like policy disputes until you realize they rest on deeper disagreements about justice and human nature. At some point it becomes hard to avoid the fact that you are not just studying these arguments, you are being positioned in relation to them.
That part is easy to miss.
It’s possible to treat these texts as objects — summarize them, analyze them, keep them at arm’s length. I was trained to do exactly that. But what Macalester has pushed me toward, often indirectly and sometimes against my own instincts, is something less comfortable.
You have to investigate the question of where you stand.
It is not just about choosing a side and defending it. These arguments — about the good life, about justice, about obligation — didn’t stay contained in the syllabus. They follow you out of the classroom.
That is where the idea of the liberal arts as the arts of freedom starts to take on a more concrete meaning. It’s not simply as a set of skills, not a vague commitment to “critical thinking,” but a way of learning to live with those questions without shutting them down too quickly.
Macalester complicates that further.
We engage these questions in the presence of others who have been shaped by different traditions, histories and assumptions. This means that the question “how should I live?” remains inextricably linked to the question “how should we live together?”
I came to this from the outside, and in some ways I never entirely stopped feeling like an outsider to the American version of this tradition. That turned out to be useful. The liberal arts make it harder to take the traditional academic framework for granted. It forces me to see that these questions had been asked, and answered, in different ways across different civilizations.
So, the conversation widens, but not in a tidy way. You are no longer simply asking what makes sense within one inherited framework. You are asking how different frameworks speak to one another, or fall short. That doesn’t make things easier. It probably makes them harder.
From where I now stand, at the front of the classroom, I see students encountering these questions in uneven ways. Sometimes tentative, sometimes forceful, occasionally confused and occasionally very clear.
Some try to resolve the questions quickly. That’s understandable. Others sit with them longer. And some only recognize, later on, that they were part of a conversation they didn’t fully understand at the time.
I was probably in that last group. I didn’t come to Macalester looking for the liberal arts. I didn’t have a definition of them when I arrived, and I’m still not sure I’d try to give one now.
But I can say this; I found myself drawn into a set of enduring questions — about how to live and how to live together — that could not be answered once and for all, but also could not be ignored.
That, as far as I can tell, is what this place is trying to do.
