COASTLINE JOURNAL

Christopher Aceto, Wesleyan University

download this essay: the long road home – aceto

What are the limits of values?  Would an “environmentalist” stick his head in the sand of rejection and the status quo so long that the environment suffered because of it?  Would a “market capitalist” scream the word “free” so long that she passed out while the economy fell down in shambles?  The answer to both is “maybe.”  It is very likely that those on the two poles, the extremes of environmental policy will reject anything that infringes on their idealistic representations of the world that the rest of us have to actually live in.  It is therefore essential that policy be developed by and for the vast majority of people: the groups, corporations, and nations that comprise the expanse inside these margins.  The tensions between these absolutist margins have painted a clear picture, one that shows that following a single path alone will not work.  Willingness at all levels to accept and adopt change must be matched by incentives to achieve reform and build quality environments from the local to the global.

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by Carol Tulpar

On June 19, approaching the summer solstice, Graduate Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University held an evening dinner to celebrate the values and achievements of liberal studies in general and the GLS program in particular. An alumni initiative, the event drew from a pool of students, faculty and staff reaching back to the program’s inception in 1991. Participants were seated according to their cohort and each year was well represented, with many impromptu reunions taking place before and after the speeches.

Evan Alderson, the Founding Director of GLS and a former Dean of Arts at SFU, was the first featured speaker of the evening. A visionary who imagined the university offering a MALS degree, Alderson nurtured the program into being and watched over its early years. The GLS program, Alderson reminded us, is built around the great tensions that anchor the liberal thought of the Western tradition: passion and reason; self and society; and tradition and modernity.

Yet there is another powerful tension that has not been specifically built into the program, that between reflection and action. There is a necessary flow, he said, from the inner being to the outer, between thinking and doing. A liberal education helps to develop a personal path of empathy by examining the historical and philosophical thought that forms the basis of civilization. Alderson emphasized that Liberal Studies, though it has sometimes been accused of being so,  is “not a consumptive good.” Instead, it is a path of transformation; it changes the way we see ourselves in relation to the world, and thus the way we act. The road to world peace, said Alderson, must travel through personal peace.

The next speaker to address the group was former GLS director Donna Zapf, who now directs the Liberal Studies program at Duke University in North Carolina. She began with a fish story, a  reminder of how difficult it is to see the medium in which one is swimming. She  gave a brief history of the Liberal Studies degree, which was first created at Wesleyan University in 1952, in  response to the needs of working teachers to acquire graduate level education on a part-time basis. Traditionally, the typical Liberal Studies student has been a working professional in mid-career. However, Zapf added, the interdisciplinary program has always appealed to the wider community, and this appeal is growing. At Duke now, more younger students are applying to MALS programs, often immediately after completing their initial degrees, and international students are applying from Europe, Asia and South America. The program, while adapting to the interests of new students, thrives due to its ability to continually refresh the content. In contrast to traditional institutional structures,  Liberal Studies’s innovativeness allows it  to be the “portal through which some of the best and brightest enter the university.” Such an education calls us to attention and enables us to make choices by exercising conscious control over what we think. Learning for the sake of learning and learning how to think remain the most valuable features of a liberal education.

Simon Fraser’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lesley Cormack, reminded us that the concept of the liberal arts goes back to ancient Rome, where the liberal arts were the subjects of study appropriate for free citizens. They stood in contrast to the illiberal arts, or technologies, the vocations which were taught to slaves. Cormack said that “a good citizen speaks well and thinks deeply,” and that in order to be informed citizens in these “perilous times,” we need to read the great texts of the past. Cormack said she values Liberal Studies because it produces creative citizens who can imagine the world in new ways, rather than remaining enslaved by the habits of the past.

The evening was rounded off by alumna Margaret Easton, on behalf of the strategic planning committee devoted to ensuring a strong future for SFU’s GLS program. Easton cited several recent news stories that emphasized the value of a liberal education. One example was a recent speech given at the University of Alberta by the Aga Khan, who said universities can respond to the decline in ethics by creating ethically literate people. This is a current and a practical notion indeed, when considered alongside  the recent economic downturn and the failures of thoughtful and ethical behaviour that gave rise to it.

The large turnout and enthusiastic response of the attendees suggests that Graduate Liberal Studies continues to thrive at Simon Fraser. Amazingly, 18 years after its inception with the charter class of 1991, the GLS program remains the only one of its kind in Canada. The UK also has one Liberal Studies graduate program, as does Holland at the University of Maastricht. In the U.S., there are many; indeed Georgetown University in Washington, DC offers a doctorate in Liberal Studies.

Anyone who has had a paper published on Coastline is encouraged to email the editor a brief (100 words) biography, written in the third person. Please indicate if you want your email address, blog or URL  included.

Christopher Aceto, Wesleyan University

download this essay: what did Chesterton really see

“the only nation in the world founded on a creed”

“America is a nation guided by faith.  Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’  Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them” (George W. Bush, Tsinghua speech).  To peel back the layers of the onion which compose a culture, it sometimes takes a foreigner to travel and experience that land first hand.  Likewise sometimes a man must travel to a foreign land to be at liberty to speak of his own homeland in a way that he would not otherwise.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, the 20th century’s Alexander de Tocqueville, was that foreigner looking to peel that onion while President Bush was the hombre that did not feel free enough to let it all out here, in “the home of the brave.”  President Bush’s only speech that quotes Chesterton’s “soul of a church” assertion (according to a search of the White House’s website) is the one he made to Tsinghua University in China during February of 2002.  In that speech, he referred to Chesterton as “someone” and not by name when he quoted him.  Could it be that people in the United States do not want to see or hear that “soul of a church” rhetoric?  Chesterton’s assertion is still fitting today but not for the reasons I originally thought.

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Sandy Penn, Simon Fraser University

Download this essay: Sandy Penn_nature culture

“The Earth’s declining health is our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy earth,” states Lovelock (2006) in his book, Revenge of Gaia.  Brian Handwerk[1] used the same metaphor in his article “The Earth’s Health in Sharp Decline, Massive Study Finds,”  in which he highlights a “UN-backed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report [which] revealed that nearly two-thirds of Earth’s life-supporting ecosystems, including clean water, pure air, and stable climate, are being degraded by unsustainable use.”

The notion that the environmental crisis has led the earth to suffer from potentially terminally illness is a metaphor that relies upon our familiarity with illness.  It places global environmental concerns within a tangible anthropocentric framework. Illness, an affliction or pathology of the individual body that causes suffering, is universal in nature, but personal in its effect.  It has been with us since the beginning of human time. Our understanding, reactions, responses, management and approaches to human illness have evolved with us. In contrast our perceptions of earth, as a complex, intricate, fragile, discrete object is a recent phenomenon. Our responses to global environmental concerns are fresh, untried and unproven.  We are faced with rethinking our position and  our impact as earthly inhabitants. The illness metaphor framework allows us to empathize with the environmental crisis and explore how the variety of approaches to illness may be relevant when attributed to the global environmental setting.  This essay will take advantage of this paradigm shift in our understanding of the earth to explore the environmental crisis through the various lenses we usually confine to health and illness.
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Pity the educated generalist, who must explain, over and over, why it is she would rather study a broad range of disciplines, learning a little about a lot as it were, choosing a classical education over the technological or specialized academic disciplines so prevalent across North American universities. Not only must she attempt to explain–should she choose to offer any explanation–why a liberal arts degree, undergrad or graduate, matters; she must also, post-academia, convince an employer of the benefits of her choice.

As Michael Roth wrote in the Huffington Post, “a successful liberal arts education develops the capacity for innovation and for judgment….The habits of mind developed in a liberal arts context often result in combinations of focus and flexibility that make for intelligent, and sometimes courageous risk taking for critical assessment of those risks.”

What makes liberal arts a career advantage is its flexibility, but this comes at a cost–the average wage of a liberal arts graduate can be lower than that of someone holding a specialized degree, according to Fox Business reports.

Competition in the marketplace often leads us to question the value of studies that don’t offer a direct track to employment. But a broad-based liberal arts education does more than prepare you for a job. It lays the foundation for a future career while also preparing you to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

–The College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bennington president Liz Coleman is a passionate advocate for the liberal arts. “Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist,” Liz said in a recent TED talk, where “…subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure.”

Liz Coleman quotes Thomas Jefferson:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was, and never will be.

Democracy depends on the “educated generalist,” someone who can contextualize current events within an historical and philosophical framework, who can see connections between disciplines, while specialists often (but not always) have a narrower field of view, restricted by the scope of their education.

In the coming months I intend to take Coastline Journal to a broader readership, but the journal’s purpose and mandate remains the same: to publish interdisciplinary essays, in their entirety, written by students and alumni of the many graduate liberal studies programs around the world, for anyone who values intellectual freedom.