An old joke has it that while Gutenberg’s first major print job was the Bible, his second was about the death of the publishing industry. Similarly, concerns about the decline of the liberal arts in higher ed have seemingly always been with us—at least for most of our lifetimes. As Alvino-Mario Fantini’s essay in this issue (“The Lost Inheritance”) ably demonstrates, “the story of the liberal arts in America is a tragic one.” Yet it is not—here is some consolation—a story that has gone unremarked upon.
What follows is a dramatically condensed bibliography of the effort to explain and preserve the role of the liberal arts in American learning. As many readers will recall, that project in its contemporary form received a significant boost from the publication, in 2010, of the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum’s widely lauded book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Among Nussbaum’s arguments was that the neglect of the liberal arts had caused “a worldwide crisis in education” as nations jettisoned mere “useless frills” in pursuit of “the global market.” Whereas once we had trained up our children in the way they should go, to quote the Book of Proverbs, vogue educational practices had embraced the shoddy utilitarianism of commerce.
In making such an exchange, Nussbaum asserted, mature democracies had sacrificed tomorrow’s political steadiness on the altar of today’s profit.
All modern democracies … are societies in which the meaning and ultimate goals of human life are topics of reasonable disagreement among citizens who hold many different religious and secular views. […] One way of assessing any educational scheme is to ask how well it prepares young people for life in a form of social and political organization that has these features. Without support from suitably educated citizens, no democracy can remain stable.
Nussbaum’s book provided a stark warning about a future in which the liberal arts have been discarded. Yet many of the book’s influences and sources struck a more hopeful note, framing the liberal arts not as talismans to ward off catastrophe but as helpmates of human flourishing.
These two strands of thought—in which the liberal arts both shape souls and stand athwart totalitarianism—have continued to give way to one another in recent analyses.
In 2009, for example, then-president of Harvard University Drew Gilpin Faust took to the pages of the New York Times to argue that “higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present.” Two years before that, a report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities stated that the liberal arts can “provide students with opportunities to explore the enduring issues, questions, and problems they confront as human beings—questions of meaning, purpose, and moral integrity.”
These two strands of thought—in which the liberal arts both shape souls and stand athwart totalitarianism—have continued to give way to one another in more recent analyses. In his Medium article “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (2025), author Ray Williams writes that “what Americans are deciding now [about education] will shape not just individual lives but the character of their society for future generations.” Americans must “have the collective will,” Williams says, “to resist the siren call of narrow vocationalism … in favor of the more challenging path of comprehensive, liberating education.”
A similar note is sounded in Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Public Discourse essay “The Liberating Power of the Liberal Arts” (2020). There, Hooten Wilson suggests that “the liberal arts free the soul not only from oppression and dominating power structures, but for the good life. Once you are a free soul, you are compelled to liberate others” (emphases in original).
Writing in the University of San Diego’s Arts & Sciences magazine, Noelle Norton and Brian Clack argue in “Reaffirming the Liberal Arts” (2025) that “what’s at risk [in the liberal arts’ diminishment] is not just a set of disciplines, but also the depth and breadth of human learning itself.” If we are not careful, some crucial element of our humanity will be “laid to waste in the rush toward short-term gain and mechanized efficiency.”
In her 2024 report for the Manhattan Institute, “Protecting the Liberal Arts and Humanities in American Higher Education,” my colleague Shannon Watkins contends that “higher education, properly conceived, has a mission to cultivate intellectual, human, and civic excellence.” The liberal arts mustn’t be discarded because they are
invaluable in forming the kinds of citizens needed for the country’s welfare [and] critical for social unity itself. For the social fabric to remain strong, it must be animated by a robust common culture: a citizenry with a shared baseline of cultural knowledge. Americans should not be atomized individuals pursuing their own isolated destinies but a people living, working, and communicating with one another toward a common good. Otherwise, society breaks apart and becomes a cluster of competing factions.
Ian Oxnevad’s Minding the Campus article “Long Live the Liberal Arts” (2025) goes even further, declaring that “a society devolves towards [psychopathy] without the liberal arts infused into its culture. Avoiding a civilization collapse means bringing them back into every level of education.” Moreover, “citizens armed with a good liberal-arts education safeguard each other against predatory government and rally together when attacked.”
Other arguments for the liberal arts have taken an economic tack, suggesting that a more narrow skills education will not outfit students for tomorrow’s economy. In his New York Times article “What’s Lost When Liberal Arts Schools Close” (2025), Kevin Carey of the think tank New America writes, “In a world where technology is constantly upending the job market in ways impossible to foresee, the abilities to think, adapt and communicate are the most valuable skills of all.” Such is the conclusion, too, of author and speaker David Meerman Scott, whose blog post “The Future-Proof Value of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of AI” (2025) suggests that “a liberal-arts education has never looked more valuable than it does right now. Rather than teaching a specific set of technical skills that could become obsolete tomorrow, a liberal-arts program teaches you how to think.”
As acknowledged earlier, the essays listed here are merely a representative sample—one writer’s recollection of those articles and op-eds that have made an interesting case in recent years. For more on the subject, the reader is invited to Google “Why Are the Liberal Arts Important?” and while away a lengthy afternoon. If he or she fails to emerge convinced, I will be greatly surprised.
Indeed, the sheer volume of material on our subject is itself a demonstration of what we stand to lose if the liberal arts slip away. So many of us, in one way or another, are living testaments to their necessity and beauty. Let us continue the good work of advocating for their, and our, future.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and of From the Academy.