There’s a good series of posts over at Slate this week centering on higher education.  Several of the pieces engage the question of what a liberal arts education ought to be.  Since I teach at a liberal arts college, I cannot help but be drawn into these conversations.

    Today’s post by S. Georgia Nugent, the President of Kenyon College, takes up the issue of whether and how we might inject practical morality into our pedagogy.  As she states it:

 Rather, a recommitment to the moral dimension of higher education
requires all of us who are teachers to re-focus our sights on the Big
Questions: Why am I here? What is asked of me? What is the good?

    I’m all for raising these sorts of questions in the curriculum.  But we really must broaden our sources.  Nugent is a "classicist," which I take to mean a "Western classicist," and, in her suggestions for how to engage these "big questions," she makes no reference to ancient Chinese thought.  But these are precisely the questions at the center of a centuries long, and continuing, debate among Confucians and Taoists and other schools of Chinese philosophy.  If we are going to do what she suggests, we really have to bring the Chinese in.

     Indeed, I would go further.  We cannot adequately address these questions without the Chinese.  To take just two examples.  Confucianism provides a unique expression of communitarian ideals – those understandings of the good that place an individual in an inescapable social context.  Communitarianism is to be found in Western sources certainly.  But Confucianism has a distinct vision of how people are enmeshed in social networks, emanating initially but not exclusively from family ties, that allow for the construction of an ever-expanding range of humane behavior.  If we are to fully engage various possibilities of "why am I here," and "what is the good," we must take Confucianism seriously. 

   As a second example, philosophic Taoism is profoundly skeptical about our capacity to shape our destinies.  It is not nihilistic in this manner, just very humble about the limitations of human efficacy.  Taoist thinkers place humanity in a larger natural and cosmic context.  While we may think we are having significant effects on the world around us, from a broader naturalistic perspective, we may be merely the "tip of a hair."  On the "why am I here" question, Taoists have a lot to contribute.

     I cannot take Nugent too much to task – her training naturally leads her in certain directions.  But, as a college president, she should (and maybe she does on her campus) press to widen the boundaries of the conversation.  These kinds of questions are too big and too interesting and too important to restrict to the Western cannon.

    Another piece in the Slate series is, in its own way, pushing to expand the conversation of practically morality in the liberal arts: by inviting the disabled into the debate.  Michael Berube points out how the emerging field of disability studies is not just another vehicle for political advocacy (though it might be that, too):

Disability? you wonder. It’s not enough that the pomos and
multicultis have insisted on race and gender and sexuality and
what-have-you? Now students have to think about marginal subjects like
disability?

Well, yes, it would be nice—if only to prevent people
from thinking about disability as a marginal subject. From genomics to
prenatal testing to special education to employment discrimination to
mental illness to advance directives to Alzheimer’s, disability is
integral to how humans define the parameters of the human. It’s central
to every idea of autonomous personhood and every

    I would push this a bit further.  It is not necessary to limit our definition of the "human" in terms of "autonomous personhood" – something we can appreciate when we turn to Taoism.   Chuang Tzu brings many images of disability into his text, while, at the same time, rejecting a sense of true personal autonomy.  None of us, disabled or not, are self-possessedly autonomous in the Western liberal sense.  We are all embedded in Way (Tao), where we "move as one and the same."  Yet it is precisely in that context of interdependence that we find and express our humanity and recognize the humanity of others.  By bringing the disabled into the picture, Chuang Tzu reminds us of the wondrous range of human experience and significance.

    So, yes, let’s interrogate anew the liberal arts curriculum.  Let’s ask the big questions.  But let’s also make sure we do not ignore ancient Chinese thinkers who have been wrestling with these questions for a long time and who can bring something new (in all of their ancientness) to our contemporary educational mission.