(No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
“What is College For? A Defense of the Liberal Arts”
William Deresiewicz is no stranger to Ivy League education. His undergraduate degree (biology and psychology), Master’s (journalism), and PhD (English) are all from Columbia University. He taught at Columbia as a graduate instructor for five years, and was then a professor of English at Yale for ten years, from 1998–2008. He left academia in 2008 to become a full-time writer.
As a teacher, Deresiewicz made a conscious effort to get to know his students, and he took delight in talking to them and learning from them. But over time, he became troubled by the fact that not only were many of his students unsure about what they wanted to do after graduation; they were also cynical about the value of education in general, and they lacked a sense of deeper meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives. He was left with the sense that the whole system of elite education too often “…manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose….”
In his Eugene lecture Deresiewicz will discuss the meaning and value of a liberal arts education, and its relevance in today’s world. He asks, “What does it mean to ‘learn how to think,’ and what are you supposed to think about and why?” In his Portland talk, he will look at how neoliberal ideas have reshaped our understanding about the value of education into purely practical terms. He will also examine the growing trend on college campuses to talk about “leadership” rather than “citizenship,” and compare what it means to grow up today with what it was fifty years ago.
