Season 5: Episode 11 Transcript
A Degree in Thinking
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's dean of admissions and financial aid. Welcome to Admissions Beat.
Seniors, Juniors, we've been having an ongoing conversation with you about discovery, about how to understand your options as you move to and through this thing called college. A couple weeks ago, we had a pod about the worth of going to college, and in an age of ChatGPT and generative AI and careers that seemed to make a lot of money right out of the gate without a degree—what's the point of going to college? And the answer to that question is, yes, college is worth it. Always has been, still is. And as we had that conversation, the liberal arts surfaced as a topic: this classic, enduring exploration of ideas across this range of disciplines we call the liberal arts.
And it occurred to me that a lot of you may not fully understand the liberal arts, what we mean by that term, what is the enduring value of a course of study and a degree in this space. And so today I welcome Cecilia Gaposchkin, a professor at Dartmouth and a longtime dean of advising at the college, to have a conversation with me about this thing called the liberal arts, and how you can see yourself, or not, perhaps, in this academic space as your college search unfolds and as your enrollment decision approaches. When we come back, we'll meet Cecilia and we'll have a conversation about the liberal arts and its enduring value. We'll be right back.
Cecilia, hello. Welcome to Admissions Beat. I feel so lucky to have you as a guest this week.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Thanks, Lee. It's great to be invited. I appreciate it.
Lee Coffin:
No, of course. Every time I hear you speak, I'm always wowed by the elegance and eloquence you bring to everything, but especially when I've heard you talk about the liberal arts. You are one of the most sincere and poetic advocates of this course of study, so I'm excited to introduce you to our listeners. And by way of doing that, listeners, Cecilia is the Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth. She studies late medieval cultural history. And she has published on the Crusades, on the kings of medieval France and on liturgy. And for almost 16 years, she served as assistant dean of faculty for pre-major advising at Dartmouth. So we'll come back to that in a minute. But Cecilia, let's start with you. I love to ask my guests to go back in time and share their college search. So put yourself in your senior year of high school. What happened?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
I barely remember. (Laughs) I grew up outside Boston and I went to the University of Michigan. I had done a summer program as a high school graduate. I was on the debate team, and we did what was called Debate Institute. Actually, Dartmouth holds one and Michigan held one. And I loved the Ann Arbor campus. I wanted a big school. I wanted a school with a lot going on and a lot of different moving parts. And Michigan seemed like a great fit, so I was extremely excited when they admitted me. And I went off thinking I would be a lawyer, because I watched LA Law and I saw Gracie. Any parents out there who remembers Gracie? And was told I could study anything and go to law school, and that was really awesome.
And it was a kind of not knowing at the time how education worked and what its value was that was kind of a wonderful, I guess, permission structure for me to "find my passion." Because everybody said, "Oh, yeah, you just need to lean into getting a good education." And in college I discovered medieval history. I was an art history major. Actually, I didn't receive a degree in history, I received one in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. And I had assumed I would go off to law school. And in my junior year, I just realized I wasn't ready to give up thinking about the past and thinking about the sort of work I was doing. So I ended up going to graduate school at Berkeley in California, and that was my story.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So the medieval kings of France grabbed you and didn't let go?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
You know, I think it was more the medieval cathedrals, the great Gothic cathedrals, which was born in France, in the Paris area. Actually, many years later, I traveled with my husband; we went to Istanbul and I discovered the early mosques, the wonderful mosques of Sinan. And had that been my early experience and not the Gothic cathedrals, I am certain I would be studying the Islamic past.
Lee Coffin:
So you're very persuadable. You're romantic.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
The aesthetics, the beauty, the aspirational beauty of past cultures is really amazing to me.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So when you went to Michigan as a pre-law, pre-law, a lot of students come out of high school with that as their plan. Were you thinking political science and government? What was your leaving high school thought?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Yeah. I had assumed I would probably do political science. I, in fact, never did take a political science class.
Lee Coffin:
That's funny.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
I was in the honors program, the specific program within the big university. And they had a year-long great books class that began with The Iliad and ended with Boccaccio. And read Plato and the Bible and the Aeneid and obviously Homer and Dante. And in that class I discovered... It was like putting on a coat that fit perfectly. It was the realm of thinking and ideas and discussion and hitting my brain against the wall, trying to get something to work, an idea to work out. And I just really loved that.
Lee Coffin:
And off you went.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Well, I'll say at the time, I mean, in retrospect, it's clear to me how important that experience was in a series of other courses I took at that time. I can think of a lot of experiences that were formative for me. At the time, I certainly didn't see that. I didn't see the transformative nature of what I was doing in the time. I was just doing it, and enjoying it or not, or stressed out about an exam or a paper or whatnot. It's only in retrospect can I look back and see that those experiences were intellectually enormously generative and nourishing and consequently, very, very valuable to me in my path.
Lee Coffin:
And for listeners, that's the news you could use. You get post-admission, you're in your first weeks, months at college, and there are many moments of serendipity where... For me, it was I went to college planning to be an English major. And I placed out of the freshman English course based on my SAT score. And in its place, I took a Colonial American history course. And like Cecilia, I got swept off my feet and never looked back, and never took an English course my whole way through college. Which feels crazy to me because I love to read and write and books.
But history had all of those things organically as part of its curriculum. But if you had said to me during my senior spring of high school, "Lee, you will major in history," I would've said, "I like history, but that's not what I'm thinking." And these turns and twists happen and you need to be open to it. One more question about your work as a professor. So what do you teach? You're a professor of history and you've got a focus in the medieval space. What types of courses do you offer at the undergraduate level?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Sure. I teach a sort of basic survey of the pre-modern world that starts with the fall of Rome and goes up through the Reformation. That's sort of a standard survey. Right now I'm teaching a senior seminar, which is right in what I'm working on, on saints and relics in the Middle Ages. We taught the wonderful Merovingian queens that became saints in the 5th, 6th, 7th century. And tomorrow we're working on the development of an economy of relics and the theft of relics. So that's fun. That's an upper-level seminar.
I teach courses on the Crusades. I teach a course I love on art and ideology from Augustus through Louis XIV, sort of thinking about political theology and its ritual and artistic propagandizing or conceptualization. That's sort of, again, a broad sweep look using visual and material culture to get at political ideas and worldviews. And I'm sure I'm missing courses. There's a ton of them. But that's the realm.
Lee Coffin:
I mean, again, as a history major, I listen to that and think, "I want to take all those courses."
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
It did actually occur to me in prepping and sort of revisiting this material on liberal education that next time I do a first-year seminar, I should do one on the history of the liberal arts, just its texts in sequence.
Lee Coffin:
So you just made my job easy. You took me right to my next question, which was we want to talk about enduring value of the liberal arts in the 2020s. And so you've just described a really rich set of courses you offer from year to year, on, to me, compelling and interesting topics. Some parents may be listening to those topics and say, "That doesn't seem very practical. Why would you study the relics of Paris?" So let's do a foundational question. Describe the liberal arts. When we use that term in higher ed, what do we mean by it?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Can I begin by saying a bit about the history of the liberal arts?
Lee Coffin:
Yes.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Okay.
Lee Coffin:
Go wherever you want.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Well, because it has come to mean something specific in this context. For me, of course, the university itself, being a faculty member, is a medieval institution. And it's hard for me to disentangle what it is we're doing now from the long history of how we've done it. The liberal arts goes back, really, to the ancient world, the system of education. Its definition comes from Latin. It was sort of coined in the Roman period, the liberal artes. Artes is a skill. It's a craft, it's an art. Not in the sense of the humanistic arts like a painting, but a craft, a skill. As opposed to scientia, which is knowledge; not science, but knowledge. And both of those things are encompassed in a liberal arts education. So it was the practice, the training and skills required for liberales, for free people. That is, it was the things you needed to be able to do and know to be able to participate in political society and civic society.
So free men; not women, not slaves. So it was an elitist concept, but the people that ran things, ran the world, ran communities needed to be able to do certain things, think in certain ways, participate, in order to govern and participate in civic life. And as that developed in the medieval world, there were seven artes, seven skills that needed to be mastered or taught. And in the medieval period, in my period in the 11th and 12th century, this was defined as the trivium, the threesome, and the quadrivium, the foursome. The basic three R -- I wrote them down -- grammar, reading and writing, logic -- so critical thinking -- and rhetoric, the ability to make arguments. Those were the fundamentals, basically reading and writing. How do you manage knowledge? How do you understand in language, and then be able to process that and then make arguments from that, persuasive conclusions and arguments?
And then the quadrivium, the set of skills that is the next step, was arithmetic. So math, geometry. Different forms of science. Music, which we can understand actually as the precursor to physics because it was spatial physical relations. And then astronomy. So those are the basic skills. And the idea was before you could do any real thinking in whatever it is you wanted to think about, and for the medieval world, it was usually God and God's role in the universe -- that was theology, that was the most important. They called it the queen of the sciences. But whether it was medicine or law or administration, anything that you needed to be able to do, these were the skills, these were the artes that you needed to master in order to be able to critically approach any higher level task and be competent at it.
And so really that's what liberal arts are. It's a variety. And it requires a diversity of different things, different ways of thinking, whether it's arithmetic or geometry, that are the... I think of it as the intellectual toolkit that you have to use. So you pull out your geometry if you need to attack this problem, or you pull out your music, your physics, or you pull out your rhetoric in order to attack this problem. And you need to know and be competent in a variety of these different skills, artes. And they can be taught using a variety of different things. So you can learn how to use language through literature or through history or through government or through classics or through religion. They're all disciplines that use and develop their knowledge within certain types of skills, mostly language, the use of language and putting language together.
There are other disciplines that will lean more into numeracy or arithmetic, other disciplines that will lean more into statistics, which is a different set of skills. And so the liberal arts is really a broad training in these different artes. And the point is to acquire the high level of skills, not to learn the content through which those skills are taught. And that's, I guess, the thing that I see and I saw in advising and I see all the time as the misconception of what we're doing. Which is that -- my medievalist colleagues should not listen to what I'm about to say -- I don't think anybody needs to know who Charlemagne was in order to succeed in their life. But teaching through, teaching about the Carolingian Empire in order to understand those texts and read those texts and then write about those texts, we are developing what... This phrase that we hear all the time, those critical thinking skills, the use of language arts or arithmetic arts or interpretive arts, those skills, those artes, so that we can be participants and leaders in life.
And my catch line is always that you're training your brain, like any muscle, through the increasingly demanding use of an application of those. And like if you were to play a lot of tennis and you would work on it, you would get to be a better tennis player, if you continue to use your brain within a discipline at increasingly high levels, you in fact, just get smarter. And that's what we're doing.
Lee Coffin:
Fascinating. And in an essay you wrote, you had a line, "A liberal arts degree is a degree in thinking."
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Yeah, absolutely.
Lee Coffin:
That's sort of a statement in and of itself, to people saying, "Well, what's the value?" There it is. So you just described how the liberal arts teach you how to think.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
One of the misconceptions that I've battled, and made very little progress, I think -- it's a common challenge of teaching in the liberal arts -- is the misconception that a major is either determinative or influential in a career, and that they're qualitatively different. I mean, in some senses they are qualitatively different, because some artes, some of these skills are different and you lean into them. So we have breadth requirements, a liberal arts school has breadth requirements so that you touch on and have some capacity and some facility with all these different types of artes, of skills. And then you major in an area so that you develop a particular suite of skills to a much higher level.
But the idea that what students are learning, or rather what is valuable about what students are learning, are the facts or the content is a really basic misunderstanding of the value of what we're offering. Particularly in this day and age when you can just ask Google or ChatGPT to give you those facts. So the really important thing is what do you do with them? How do you discern between them? And those are the things that we're practicing in the classroom at every moment.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and I think the point I've heard you make is this is not technical training in a particular subject matter that leads to a particular job, a particular career. And I think a lot of students and parents come to college admission with that expectation. And there's certainly lots of colleges out there, so let me own the big array, where you can do exactly that. You can study a subject that prepares you for a career, and there you go. That's not what we're talking about. This is more about a career trajectory that's more fluid, I would say.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Yeah. The way I like to think about it is a liberal arts degree done right -- a lot of this is incumbent upon a student's embrace of the process -- doesn't prepare you for a career, it prepares you for any career, or any number of careers, that it opens up a huge realm of possibilities. And again, it's been a long time, but there was this line going around some years ago that people will engage in seven different careers in their life, or the different types of jobs I've had, even within the 25 years I've been at Dartmouth, I've had a whole variety of different jobs. And it's the capacity to have those skills and use them and apply them creatively and with, again, the thinking capacity that permits that range of options.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. No, I think that thinking is the really essential, simple truth. And I go back to my declaration of history and my father's skepticism. And I said to him before he passed, we were reflecting on his reluctance to see me go down this path. And I said, "I think I turned out just fine." And he said, "You know, you did. And I didn't appreciate the idea that..." Because I had started my college search thinking journalism. So I was in that space of, I had been a high school newspaper editor. Journalism attracted me. I thought, "I'll study it and I'll be a journalist," which could have happened.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Yeah. You're doing a podcast now.
Lee Coffin:
Right. We've joked about that, that I landed in that space via the pandemic. But when I think about what did I learn as a history major, I studied Colonial American history and the origins of the American political system, which I'm not doing that now. But it taught me how to think. It taught me how to read. It taught me how to listen. And I think about my senior year of college, so the '84-'85 academic year, and my senior seminar was on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. And we were on the brink of the Soviet Union collapsing.
But what I studied, four years later became... Things shifted. But the lesson to me was how to surf current events and learn from where we've been, and how to interpret new information and make informed decisions. And you talked about looking for ideas and new ideas. And I think that's the key. To me, the key kernel is what's the new idea? How do you use that idea to find a solution? That kind of intellectual creativity to me is very valuable.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
One of the things, some years ago when I was overseeing advising, I did a project where I interviewed employers who were recruiting Dartmouth students. And I worked with the career services, the staff down there, and said, "Can I take some of these people out for lunch and just have conversations with them?" asking them, "Why do you hire our students? What is it that is useful? Does what they major in matter to you? Does whether they have two majors matter. Is two majors better than one?" The answer is no. And one of the themes that came through is of course, that they want people who, again, have these skills. And they kept saying, "We need people who are good critical thinkers, who know how to read, write and think." And one of the themes that came up is the knowing how to deal with ambiguity, sort of deal with the gray areas, and then draw conclusions, come to conclusions, come to informed consensus, and then make a case for it.
So it's the capacity to manage the gray space, but then do something active with it, make an informed and confident forward strategy. And I think of that often as the kind of things that we're working, we're helping students when... I mean, again, I'm leaning into my own field. This is going to have analogs in every different discipline. But when I assign and then oversee a research project, it is about going and reading a whole series of primary sources in Colonial America, or in my case, 13th century Paris or whatever it is, figuring out the gaps, the gray areas, but trying to make patterns and draw conclusions and then make an argument.
And that's the kind of skill that is not easy. And it's easier to do in a two-page paper than in a 10-page paper than in a 30-page paper than in a senior thesis. And so that's the kind of thinking capacity, capacity to develop ideas. And I think of it as forward motion. So we think of liberal arts as often studying known things. But done right, it's about figuring how to apply that knowledge with those intellectual skills to creating forward plans, to creating new solutions or paths forward.
Lee Coffin:
I painted my office gray. Someone said, "Is this symbolic?" I said, "Yeah, because I navigate gray." There's a lot of things that aren't just a clear choice. So I sit in a gray room because it is the spirit of the work, is to manage the gray and act on it. I wrote that down, Cecilia, as a really important lesson of this conversation. Speaking of managing gray and new info, you've mentioned a couple of times, ChatGPT and generative AI, and the way it is present in our lives and our academic spaces. How do you reconcile that with the liberal arts?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
We as a whole society don't know where this is going and what is going to develop. My understanding of ChatGPT is that it is based on predictive language models, that it is looking at the consensus or the whole of written stuff that's out there on the internet, and it's figuring out what is the most likely word to push forward. And that is not new. That's looking backwards. And that's relying on known knowledge and past ideas, past conclusions. And that is, that stasis, I mean, it might be a shortcut to figuring out what we already know or to having that articulated, but it is not new thinking. Can I give you a historical analogy?
Lee Coffin:
Sure.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Okay. One of my great heroes is a guy called Abelard. Peter Abelard was probably the greatest thinker of the 12th century, a really profound philosopher, theologian, intellectual. Got himself in a whole series of troubles because of how smart he was. He was trained in a situation of education where education and knowledge production and study was based on the reading and the acceptance of auctoritas, of authorities, of past authorities. So mostly scripture, but the church fathers, the great thinkers of the early church.
And the way in which theological and intellectual work was done was by reading and studying and then commenting on the past. Now, the recourse to past authorities can mask really impressive intellectual work that was being done in the 10th and 11th century. But for the most part, the idea was you study by reading and thinking about the great authors of the past, the authorities. And Abelard, who is bright, obviously, in the first quarter of the 12th century, was doing precisely that. And he couldn't reconcile certain issues. He couldn't reconcile what Gregory the Great said about penance with what Augustine said about penance.
And I mean, in the past, you needed to rely and to accept past authorities as being the auctoritas. And what he did in this famous work called Sic et Non, which just means yes and no, is he lined up these contradictions. And he made a bunch of propositions. And in this fantastic prologue that he writes, he, to my mind, invents what we're doing here in the liberal arts education. And he said to his students, there are problems of interpretation, and there's problems of translation. There's problems of ambiguity, there's problems of scribal error, when errors creep into texts. There's problems of the change of language, like the way in which a word might change over time and so we misunderstand it. And so what we need to do, students of mine, is put these propositions together and use our mind in order to reconcile them.
And he has this famous line which reads, "By doubting, we examine. By doubting, by questioning, we examine. And by examining, we come to the truth." And what Abelard was doing was inviting his students and himself to open up new areas of thought and to come to new solutions. And the reason for me this is important is because this is, one, when the university comes into life, the institution that we are heirs to. And it's also when Europe took off as an economy, as a society. It's sort of the takeoff of the, if you will permit me, the Western tradition is rooted in the optimism that came with opening up the brain, the mind, to seek new ideas. And so for me, ChatGPT is 11th century scholarship. For me, ChatGPT is, this is what we know and we apply it and we recycle it and we regurgitate it.
And it's very good. And there's a lot there to learn from, but it doesn't give the capacity for moving forward, for moving ahead. And in this day and age, particularly with ChatGPT and AI, the thought leaders, the people that are really going to have both the interesting jobs and be the leaders of the next generation, are the people who know how to do the intellectual work of figuring out the gray areas and moving forward, for questioning, for reconciling, for using human ingenuity to think about forward-looking solutions. And you can't rely on past knowledge in order to do that. I mean, ChatGPT by definition relies on past knowledge and predicts what past knowledge is going to say. That is not the application of human reason.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and it's so fascinating. As you said that, I thought, I have not thought of AI or ChatGPT as looking backwards. It seems so modern and revolutionary. But you're right, it's pulling on information we already have. Yeah, fascinating. Well, let's shift a sec. So before we wrap, I want to capitalize on your long tenure as assistant dean of faculty for pre-major advising. So for listeners, pre-major advising is exactly what it sounds. You arrive at college and it's your journey from day one till declaring a major. Most places, everywhere I've worked, that has to happen by the end of your second year, by end of your sophomore year, sometimes earlier. But you go through this opening year of exploration, discovery, distribution requirements, they're called different things in different places. But Cecilia, that was your job, to work with students and faculty on navigating that.
So for the seniors in high school, who are a couple of months away from picking classes and going to their first college course, what guidance would you give them? And I ask that, I did quick math. You served as dean at Dartmouth from 2004 to 2020. We have roughly 1,100 to 1,150 students per year. That's over 12,000 pre-major advisees. So I think you have a great reservoir of students to pull this from. So what guidance can you share to our high school seniors as they get ready to hit college in a few months?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Yeah, I would say, I mean, a couple things and I suspect you'll hear this often. One is explore. There's going to be all sorts of ways of thinking and disciplines and topics that you just won't have had access to, you won't have had access to in high school. And so, an anthropology department, a geography department, a religion department, sort of ways of thinking about the world and information that you won't have had access to, which might be just interesting. And to explore and lean into different parts of your brain and see what you like. Expect that your mind might be changed. It is fair that somebody who comes in thinking they're going to do organic chemistry ends up being, I don't know, a classics major. It happens, but usually the shift isn't that dramatic. Again, it sometimes is, but usually it's like somebody comes in thinking they're going to do chemistry and they end up doing chemical engineering or something like that.
There's the shifting the ability to understand that you're learning new things and then you're learning new things forward. Understand that one of the values of the liberal arts is in the diversity of exposure to different things. And so, one of the things that really pains me is when my students, any student that I'm talking about, talks about killing off or getting rid of a distribution requirement. It just seems like a lost opportunity. I would think that everybody's job is to... I mean, their own job is to figure out how to take as many courses that they're excited about, they'd love to take, they're excited about. So use the requirements and the structures in order to... And maximize within that the number of courses that you just are very, very excited about taking, in what you think you're going to study and not.
Another piece of advice is it is extremely important, it will repay for you to figure out what you truly love. Because honestly, if you're studying the thing you love, you'll do better at it. And doing better at it both feels better, but it is also this education is about making you think and making you smarter. I truly believe that you're going to get further and you're going to do better at it you're going to be smarter within the thing that you love and you're excited about. To be open to that and be open to having your mind changed.
Lee Coffin:
What about the student who hears college admission officers talk about passion. They will say, "Find your passion." And the high school student says, "A, how do I do that? And B, I don't know."
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
This is an extremely important question because students hear it all the time. And I often get different responses to that. One is, "I don't really have a passion." That's always a little sad. More frequently is, "I have a lot of passions. I could be interested in any number of things." Or, "I'm interested in a lot of things, but there's not a single thing." When I think about the students I've worked with, and I've known from when they began to when they graduate, more happens in those four years than... I mean, it's just such a precious time of self-discovery and just self-actualization, figuring out who you are and what you want to do. So permitting yourself that process is important.
But I think part of this issue of passion can also be understood as a commitment to something. What are you going to commit to? And so that can either be me going into a Gothic cathedral and saying, "I'm not religious, and it's not a religious vocation, but this is just a meaningful thing to think about, the society that produced this gorgeous space. I just think it brings meaning to my life." And so part of it is the passion you find because it's in you, and the other is the passion you commit to because you think it's important. And that's another way of thinking about it, is something that you think is valuable, either socially, intellectually, communally, that you are going to commit to.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I think that's right. I did pre-major advising when I worked at Tufts, and I would always say to my brand-new advisees each fall, "Don't come into this curriculum with a pre-programmed set of expectations. Because you are going to discover faculty members who are exciting, and they're teaching something you've never thought of." Or, "You named several departments, like linguistics where you may not have the definition to that, but something you love and you take it." And I heard a dean once say to the entering class, "Your four-year journey adds up to about 32 courses. So from start to finish, 32, 35, 36, you're in that mid-thirty range. That's your degree. So use each one of those courses."
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Don't waste them, certainly.
Lee Coffin:
Don't waste them. Don't kill them off.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
That always is like a dagger into my heart.
Lee Coffin:
I remember a student I had who was in ROTC. He was very focused on the Middle East and was going to major in economics and was just lamenting the distribution requirements. And one of them was in the humanities. And I said to him, "Jonathan, take this Religion of the Middle East course." And he said, "Why would I ever take..." And I said, "You want to be stationed in the Middle East. I think understanding the religions of the Middle East will be a huge asset to your career in the military." Long story short, he took the course, he loved it. He became a religion major. And he said to me, "I never would've thought of that." And I said, "Serendipity sometimes shows up." And you know, that distribution that you were lamenting ended up becoming your major because once you got in it, you realized, this is really what I hope to study: people, and the way they believe."
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
It's interesting. And I think it's a great asset of our institution, I think. Well, it's a feature of Dartmouth. Our engineering faculty, who are part of our College of Arts and Sciences, and our engineering students are getting a liberal arts degree so they take all these classes. The engineering faculty feel very strongly about their students' capacity to... or the requirements, their need to take courses outside of engineering. And they say it just makes them better engineers on a variety of levels because it brings sort of human concerns or ethical concerns or concerns.
And also, when they go off and be engineers, they have to know how to, if they're stationed in Vietnam, how to deal with the cultural knowledge, or if they're going to make presentations about what they're doing, the job, the way the engineering profession is made up these days, excelling in it is aided massively by these other skills. And these others, artes, I want to go back to the idea of the artes. And so the interconnectedness is super important.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, I think you just answered the question I was going to end with, which is, I asked Anthony Carnevale and Jamie Merisotis on a previous episode, is college worth it? And the answer was a strong yes. It always is. Yes. So I was going to ask you, knowing your answer, are the liberal arts worth it?
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I think they're critical. I think they're more and more critical. I mean, on two levels. One is if you're talking about just return on investment, it's the people who have the capacity to think with information that are the ones that are going to be leading in every different industry that we have. So that's what you have to learn to do, particularly when so much is going to get automated out to AI. So I think more than ever, if I can say that, this is, I think, the strongest way of going about having those capacities.
And then going back to actually an old debate on the value of the liberal arts. So there's an old dichotomy. Is it about vocations or is it about internal fulfillment, the intellectual capacity? In a long life, the ability to enjoy various elements of human society is enriched by having these capacities. And it is without a doubt an internal value, this kind of education, that will feed you, feed one, for the rest of your life. Not necessarily in a professional capacity, but just in a…
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I don't think those two things you just posed are mutually exclusive. I mean, it could be practical and fulfilling. And I think that is the promise. I mean, the liberal arts for a lot of families, especially in parts of the world where a liberal arts college is not the norm, this seems like an anachronism.
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
Or an indulgence.
Lee Coffin:
An indulgence, right. And it's not. But I think this conversation, Cecilia, has made a strong case. I go back to your opening comment about debate camp or the debate. That skill is still there. You laid out your argument really well. So thanks for joining me on Admissions Beat-
Cecilia Gaposchkin:
It's an honor, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
... to help our seniors embrace their liberal arts opportunity over the next couple of weeks. And juniors, put some liberal arts colleges on your list. And parents, go there with them and open yourself to this remarkable opportunity. So Cecilia, thanks so much. Everyone, I will see you next week for another episode of Admission Beat. For now, I'm Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks so much for joining us.