STILL HERE: CHANGE AND PERSISTENCE IN THE PLACE OF THE LIBERAL ARTS IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION Robert A. McCaughey Barnard College, Columbia University This essay was commissioned by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the Mellon Research Forum on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education. © 2019 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License. To view a copy of the license, please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. The Mellon Foundation encourages distribution of the report. For questions, please write to
[email protected]. STILL HERE 1 Preface & Introduction The following essay offers a brief history of the idea and practice of the liberal arts in America. It is based upon a rich body of writings by historians of American higher education. A contributor to that literature, I am here reliant mostly upon the work of others, some my teachers and colleagues, others through their publications. In discussing the recent past, I draw on six decades of personal experience as student, faculty member and erstwhile dean. I welcome the invitation from Mariët Westermann and Eugene Tobin of the Mellon Foundation to undertake this essay, but I have tried to do so in the way John Henry Newman commended “liberal knowledge” to the Catholic gentry of Dublin in The Idea of a University: “That which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation.” [1.] A prefatory word on definitions.