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anyone who's been paying attention to the rhetoric of politicians lately knows that the liberal arts are under attack Marco Rubio has said we don't need philosophy majors Matt Bevin the governor of Kentucky has said we don't need french majors pat mccrory the governor of North Carolina no Gender Studies majors even Barack Obama has suggested that we don't need art history majors I want to explain why this attitude is so very very mistaken why we need not fewer people to major in the liberal arts but many many more but first I need to explain what the liberal arts are in the first place because there's a lot of confusion about this they have nothing to do with liberalism in the political sense they don't have anything to do with learning to become an artist like a painter or a musician the liberal arts are also not defined as all the things your parents wish you wouldn't study they include the humanities but not just the humanities so here's what they are the liberal arts are those fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake not for any utilitarian purpose so that includes the humanities like literature and philosophy and history but it also includes the sciences Sciences our liberal arts physics chemistry biology astronomy so are the social sciences like psychology or sociology or economics economics is also a liberal art what aren't liberal arts our fields are vocational fields were you prepared to do a specific thing like business or communications or nursing where you learn to apply knowledge there's nothing wrong with those fields they're just different when you study the liberal arts you don't just learn to apply knowledge you don't just acquire information you learn how knowledge is created which means you learn to create it yourself and the way that knowledge is created is by making arguments when you study the liberal arts you learn to gather evidence way competing interpretations come to your own conclusions and communicate the results with clarity and force this by the way is why liberal arts majors are so highly valued in the work force despite what everybody seems to think because businesses are looking for the kinds of skills that a liberal arts education instills like problem solving and creative thinking and cultural knowledge and communication after all arguments aren't just something that are made on college campuses business plans are arguments so we're investment strategies so our medical diagnosis legal briefs are arguments by definition when you study the liberal arts you learn to think well to write well and to speak well but you also learn to do something more getting a liberal education isn't just about preparing yourself for professional success it's also about learning to become a more reflective human being learning to confront the questions life imposes on you questions about your world about the world and your place in the world questions not a fact but a value in the words of Tolstoy what should we do and how should we live and this is why the humanities are central to a liberal education and do have a unique role in a liberal education because literature and philosophy and religious studies are the record of the ways that human beings have come to terms with being human they help us address those fundamental existential questions of meaning and value and purpose and freedom and justice now I know what some of you are probably thinking or probably thinking this all sounds great for the children of the rich who can afford to do this but everybody else most people who go to college should stick to the practical subjects a vocational field or stem field this is actually not a new argument Woodrow Wilson who as some of you may know was the President of Princeton before he was the President of the United States made this argument about a century ago in a speech to a Teachers Association and this is some of what he said he said we need one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want one class very much larger to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks just substitute the word technical for the word manual and it's the same argument today but when you put it like that it doesn't sound so good anymore when you put it like that you realize that the elitists are not the advocates of a liberal education they are those who would who would reserve it for the lucky few and Wilson's use of the word class is quite to the point because this isn't just about personal enrichment whether financial or cultural this is a political issue to exclude people from the liberal arts is to exclude them from what I've come to think of as the fields of conscious this the fields that shape the way we think and therefore the way society looks things like journalism and law and public policy and the arts and higher education itself to exclude people from the liberal arts is to exclude them from full political participation because in politics we are also always asking those questions of meaning and value and purpose and freedom and justice and by the way Marco Rubio was a political science major and so is Barack Obama and so is pat mccrory the governor of North Carolina and Matt Bevin the governor of Kentucky who doesn't want any French majors he was in East Asian Studies major the liberal arts are not just a luxury for the privileged they are one of the ways that the privileged retain their privilege that's why it was illegal to teach slaves had to read in the American South a poor person who can read well is a threat to the status quo a poor person who can think well is a threat to the status quo about 20 years ago an educator and activist in New York City named Earl shorris started something he called the Clemente course in the humanities it was a course in the Western literary and philosophical classics for poor people of color and it was highly successful and has been widely emulated and a couple of years after he started the course he wrote an essay in which he explained why and he called the essay on the uses of a liberal education as a weapon in the hands of the Restless poor and this is what he said he said that in order for the poor to escape poverty they needed to enter politics but he wasn't talking about individual poor people who might with a great deal of hard work and perseverance and talent and a lot of luck get to college and become middle-class professional he was talking about communities that have been stuck in poverty generation after generation the way out of poverty is to enter politics to practice politics but in order to practice politics he said the poor first needed to learn to reflect to think about the world and their place in the world and how they wanted to change the world and in order to learn to reflect the poor needed to study the humanities shores pointed out that it's no coincidence that reflection or in other words philosophy and politics or in other words democracy both started in the West at the same time and in the same place ancient Athens and speaking of ancient Athens let me remind you that Aristotle did not say that human beings are social animals there are a lot of social animals bees are social animals but they don't hold elections answer social animals but they don't have Parliament's Aristotle said that human beings are political animals and to be a political animal is to have the freedom to decide for yourself what society should look like now I understand why there are fewer and fewer people setting the liberal arts and that's because they can't afford to even if liberal arts majors often pay off in the long term which they do most students can't afford to wait into the long term they don't have parents who can float them through their 20s they often graduate with a lot of student debt but why is there so much student debt now student debt has been rising because tuitions have been rising and tuitions have been rising because public funding for public higher education has been plummeting for decades the large majority of American college students still go to state colleges and universities and as recently as the 1970s those schools were free or close to free a few hundred dollars a year a few hundred dollars a semester but that's when we started to decide that we did not need to pay collectively as taxpayers for other people to go to college and we could shift the burden from us to students and their families as recently as the 1970s three-quarters of the budgets of state universities came from the taxpayer from the state today that number is less than one-quarter at some of the most prominent public institutions like Berkeley or UVA it's about 15% and here in the great state of Oregon that number is about five percent five percent of the budget of the University of Oregon comes from us during the first five years after the financial crisis alone states across the country cut their public university budgets by 28% 28% and tuitions went up by 27 percent it's a direct correlation student debt has indeed reached a ridiculous level it is now a total of 1.2 trillion dollars as recently as 2003 it was zero point two trillion dollars it's gone up six-fold in 13 years but this is not who we are as a country this is certainly not who we have been despite what Wilson said from the early 1800s all the way through the 1970s we built the greatest public university system in the world we were the first country to commit ourselves to mass public higher education and it was never just about vocational training the liberal arts were always central to that project because we understood that a liberal education wasn't just key to national prosperity although it is but because we also understood that an educated citizenry is essential for maintaining the health of our democracy if you want to see what happens to a democracy when people aren't so educated just look around a system or an attitude that relegates most students to vocational training alone or to no college at all is a system designed for an oleg Archy not for a democracy fortunately this election season has also taught us something else it's taught us that people are fed up with this there is now once again a large-scale movement advocating for return to free public college and university and what I want to say to you today is we must all stand together in that fight even if even though it means that our taxes are going to have to go because what's at stake is not just individual opportunity or national prosperity of although both of those are what's at stake finally is our political liberty the reason the liberal arts are called the liberal arts is that they are understood to be the kind of education that's appropriate to free people and freedom does not mean the absence of government that's anarchy that's not democracy freedom means the privilege of participating in that rarest thing in human history collective self-government I want to end with a quotation from a man named robert maynard hutchins who was the president of the university of chicago in the 30s and 40s and went on to found the organization that became PBS a great believer in democratic education the best education for the best he said is the best education for all the best education for the best is the best education for all thank you