Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim is the latest president to ignite a small firestorm after recording an interview about leadership, available at washingtonpost.com. During the interview, he related an anecdote about how his father told him that studying philosophy might be fun, but he would “have to get a skill” to succeed in life. The viewer is left to assume, from this segment and others, that Kim is advocating the pursuit of a purely practical education. The video earned the ire of some Dartmouth alumni, including those at the blog Power Line, and it made the requisite rounds on IvyGate.
Kim’s comments only allude to the most important aim of a modern education: to teach us how to self-evaluate our lives and actions. He’s correct about the importance of skills, but he is a little too dismissive of those parts of an education not explicitly focused on them.
In defense of Kim, it’s dangerous to think of a liberal arts education as simply four years of academic soul-searching and underwater basket weaving. It’s not a vacation that we take on our parents’ or the University’s dime before we sally forth into the “real world” and trip over high-paying job offers that are our rightful inheritance.
So we should take some sort of skill into the world. But it doesn’t mean that we should all major in engineering or bench science. For some — thankfully — that skill will be the ability to write poetry that captures the human experience, or to analyze and craft philosophical arguments that bring light to the dark parts of our existence, or to work in the field of theoretical physics at the cutting edge of our quest to understand the universe. Kim himself holds a Ph.D. in anthropology in addition to his M.D. I’m not sure if he would agree with me, but I’d argue that those are just as much “skills” as the ability to build a hydrogen fuel cell or diagnose lupus.
We would also be neglecting our duties to society if we did not view our four years as a time for acquiring an understanding of our responsibilities, too.
In the interview, when talking about his time doing relief work in Haiti, Kim asked, “What is the nature of our responsibility to the rest of the world?” This is exactly where he’s right. This is another, overarching skill: the ability to recognize our responsibilities and how we might achieve them. Each of us is entitled to do as well for ourselves as we can — don’t get me wrong. But we must also do good for others.
Here is where the study of philosophy or political theory or religion factors into the skills equation. The liberal arts education must make us citizens capable of meaningful self-reflection about the skills we have acquired and our use of them.
Perhaps our most solemn duty pertains to democratic self-government. When we vote, we should be able to analyze the impact of different policies on our country, and we should be able to develop our own philosophical judgment of good policies and bad ones. If the person sitting next to you in lecture is elected to high office, he should be able to take actions not with the aim of being reelected, but because it is part of his idea of justice.
Even in our individual lives, we must be able to delve into the purpose of our existence and our activities. The man who designs a bomb for aggressive purposes may be quite skilled, but the evil outweighs the raw ability. He needs to be skilled at making moral judgments, too.
One final caveat is that some invisible chain does not enslave us by dint of our time here at Princeton to perpetually only do good for others. Instead, the point of the education is to generate an appreciation for the proper extent of our duties to our communities and our nation. We should realize the importance of a virtuous life.
In that spirit, a modern university should graduate students with skills. Some will choose to further those skills in business, medical or law school, where practical skills are layered on top of a liberal arts education. Indeed, Princeton, or any other college for that matter, should position its students well for further education — or for the real world.
But our four years of college also mark the beginnings of a meaningful life — they act as both a foundation and an intensive period for thinking. For the 21st century, this is the true purpose of the liberal arts education: skills, but more importantly, reasons for having them.
Brian Lipshutz is a sophomore from Lafayette Hill, Pa. He can be reached at lipshutz@princeton.edu.
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