Opinion Piece- The Asheville Citizen-Times
Community and technical colleges are becoming more and more numerous, and the quality of their facilities, teachers and students is increasing. They provide the kind of education and skill training that enables younger and older women and men to apply for a great variety of practical and much needed jobs.
A liberal arts education, on undergraduate and graduate levels, enables students to secure jobs in all fields, from engineering, computer science and medicine to creative writing, drama and the various other arts. Leaders in all fields favor employing people who have had a liberal arts education at some level.
Recent funding cuts, proposed cuts and negative comments from legislative and other elected leaders affecting the liberal arts move me to make a few observations.
Although community and technical colleges provide more and more liberal arts courses, their primary mission remains practical. In liberal arts colleges and universities, far more courses, in a larger cultural context, place the primary emphasis upon cultivating the ability to think and to bring creative imagination to bear as individuals in the professions, as well as in corporations and industries. Those qualities have resulted in many of the great inventions of recent times and in the creation of innovative businesses. The liberal arts also cultivate compassion, with its many effects in all areas of culture and society.
The effect on liberal arts of the great success of community and technical colleges has been significant change, with many greater changes to come. Higher education will try to compete with community colleges, with some positive results, but most probably the liberal arts will suffer, as they have already suffered in public primary and secondary schools.
To avoid further negative results, cooperation is now very much needed among government (local, state and federal) and community colleges and liberal arts colleges and universities. The goal should be: little loss but great gain.
Even now, the common conception of liberal arts institutions as esoteric and elitist ivory towers no longer applies. Practical service is now a major component of those institutions and their alumni groups.
Greater government public and private support should go, therefore, with equal vigor and dedication to both community and liberal arts institutions.
Novelist David Madden is a member of a group of Yale alumni volunteers working in support of the mission of Hall-Fletcher Elementary School in West Asheville.