Usefulness and the liberal arts
When George Pepperdine founded his college in South Los Angeles in 1937, he did so “to help young men and women to prepare themselves for a life of usefulness in this competitive world.”1 But given that his goal was useful preparation, it’s surprising that he also insisted on teaching the liberal arts: “Young men and young women in this institution will be given educational privileges equal to the best in the liberal arts, business administrations, Bible training, and later, we hope, in preparing for various professions.”2
We can get a sense of what Mr. Pepperdine meant by “the liberal arts” from the context: he must have meant those subjects taught at the college, minus business, Bible, and professional training. That leaves subjects like English, history, mathematics, the sciences, foreign languages, the arts, etc. We’ll have to discuss just how useful these subjects really are, but first it’s worth pointing out how common an idea it was for an institute of higher learning to aim for usefulness while teaching the liberal arts.
George Pepperdine College (GPC) was founded in the tradition of colleges associated with the American Restoration Movement, a Protestant sect with origins on the US frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first such school was Bethany College, founded in 1840 in what is now West Virginia by Alexander Campbell, one of the movement’s most prominent leaders. Bethany’s charter described the school as “a Seminary of learning for the instruction of youth in the various branches of science and literature, the useful arts, agriculture, and the learned and foreign languages.”3
And, of course, usefulness wasn’t just an aim of restorationists like Messrs. Pepperdine and Campbell. An early ad for King’s College, which went on to become Columbia University, promised “a Course of Tuition in the learned Languages, and in the liberal Arts and Sciences” to train students to be “creditable to their Families and Friends, Ornaments to their Country and useful to the public Weal in their Generations.”4 Thus, GPC was just one more in a long line of liberal arts colleges aimed at usefulness.
You might be thinking to yourself: Why should we be surprised that the liberal arts are compatible with useful education? Math and science are useful, and even English majors learn to parse difficult texts, to write clearly, and to think critically. Such skills are always in demand in the workforce! And that may well be so. (Full disclosure: I was an English major.)
But traditionally, the liberal arts have been those worthy of a free man, the arts undertaken in leisure, studied for their own sake rather than instrumentally for some other end. That’s why they are called liberal, after all!5 Understood this way, studying the liberal arts in order to gain marketable skills would be like walking the galleries of the Louvre not to see the pictures but just because you have to “get your steps in.” To advertise the liberal arts as useful would be to misconstrue something intrinsically good as merely instrumentally good.
It isn’t just the disciplines now thought of as the humanities that we shortchange when we study them for some other use. The medieval notion of the liberal arts included subjects now more often grouped with STEM, like arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Surprisingly, these, too, were (and often still are) undertaken for their own sake, quite apart from whatever practical applications they might have been found to have.6
As far as the historical record gives any indication, Mr. Pepperdine does seem to have enjoyed the liberal arts for their own sake. He had very little in the way of liberal arts training himself, receiving his highest formal education from Parsons Business College in rural southeast Kansas, where he learned shorthand and bookkeeping. But well into adulthood he derived solace from writing poetry, especially in the period between 1928 and 1930 when his first marriage was in jeopardy (and following his wife’s unexpected death in 1930). And his world travels sparked an interest in history.7
Given this view of the liberal arts, why would Mr. Pepperdine have included them in a curriculum aimed at preparing the student for a life of usefulness? First of all, his curriculum involved more than just the liberal arts. As a successful businessman, Pepperdine knew the value of professional training. It was precisely the combination of liberal and so-called servile arts that he thought would prove so useful for the students at his college. In his 1957 commencement address to the school’s twentieth graduating class, he explained his thinking about the advantages of such a mixed curriculum:
There is still much to be done. You have yet to perfect the radar, automation, the electronic brain, atomic power for peaceful use and inter-planetary travel. Young people who help to solve these problems, by taking technical courses in addition to their liberal arts education, will enjoy great opportunities to succeed.8
In short, Mr. Pepperdine’s vision for his college’s curriculum was not one that staked out a position on the usefulness of the liberal arts so much as it aimed to provide usefulness and the liberal arts. Looking back on the college’s first twenty years, he opined:
In these modern times many people are more concerned with the problem of making a living than with the goals and purposes for which life should be lived. I have often said that this College tries to teach students how to live, as well as how to make a living.9
Mr. Pepperdine’s belief in the intrinsic value of the liberal arts has been one of the most enduring parts of his legacy. Nowhere is this influence seen more clearly than in the general education (GE) curriculum at Seaver College, spiritual heir of the original GPC in Los Angeles. Seaver’s GEs inaugurate students into a tremendous breadth of knowledge, including the cultural history of Western civilization, literature, foreign language, mathematics, natural and social sciences, fine arts, and more. The heavy load of GE courses means that even students taking more vocationally oriented degrees receive a well-rounded liberal arts education, giving the lie to the idea that Seaver is “a pre-professional school pretending to be a liberal arts institution.”10
There is much about today’s university that Mr. Pepperdine would have had a hard time imagining at the founding in 1937. But Seaver’s liberal arts curriculum is one of the aspects of the modern university that would be most legible to the founder. I think he would be pleased to know that Pepperdine still strives to provide a useful education grounded in the liberal arts.
George Pepperdine, “Dedicatory Address,” 21 Sept. 1937, George Pepperdine Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
Ibid.
Quoted in Thomas H. Olbricht, “Whatever Happened to Alexander Campbell’s Idea of a Christian College,” Scholarship, Pepperdine University, and the Churches of Christ, 2004.
Samuel Johnson, “Original Prospectus of Columbia College,” New York Gazette, 3 June 1754, reproduced as appendix III of George H. Moore, The Origin and Early History of Columbia College, Trow’s (New York), 1890: 45.
Cf. Thomas Aquinas, who distinguishes the liberal arts (“artes liberales”), which are sought for their own sake (“propter seipsum quaeritur”), from the mechanical or servile arts (“dicuntur mechanicae sive serviles”), which are ordered toward a useful end (“ordinantem ad aliquam utilitatem”), in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book I, Lection 3.
For a notable example, see G.H. Hardy, “A Mathematician's Apology.”
See his travel letters, e.g., “World-Travel-Letter No. 4,” 29 Mar. 1928, George Pepperdine Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
George Pepperdine, “A Vision and a Challenge,” 1957, George Pepperdine Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
Ibid.
The quoted line is from UPenn educational consultant George Keller, as recorded in David Baird et al., “Opportunities for Liberal Learning in the Twenty-first Century,” 1997: 17.