It’s a pleasure to celebrate with you on such a momentous and joyous occasion. All of you are to be congratulated on your upcoming graduation, and on the academic achievements that have distinguished your career here at ASU. Well done!
One hundred thirty years ago, in 1894, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech at the dedication of the Manassas Industrial School, a secondary school for Black youth built on what had been a Civil War battlefield. The day was also significant, Douglass told his audience, because it was the anniversary of his own escape from bondage, 56 years earlier.
For Douglass, these two events were linked: “Education,” he said, “means emancipation.”
According to Douglass, “To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness. . . Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted.”
Founded by Jennie Dean, who, like Douglass, had been born into slavery, the Manassas Industrial School would, until segregation was declared unconstitutional some 65 years later, offer African-American students a liberal arts education.
Today we gather to recognize your academic achievements and to welcome you into Phi Beta Kappa, our nation’s oldest and most prestigious honor society for the liberal arts and sciences. It too was founded in Virginia, at the College of William and Mary in 1776, and today it boasts chapters at nearly 300 colleges and universities, including ASU. Its mission is to celebrate and advocate excellence in the liberal arts.
So what, it therefore seems fitting to ask, are the liberal arts, and why might excellence in them be worth celebrating?
Nowadays the term “liberal” is bandied about rather. . . liberally. It means so many different things that it is easy to forget that it derives from the root word liberty. Liberal means free. And this is where the term “liberal arts” originates.
In antiquity, the liberal arts were those disciplines and skills thought to be appropriate for a life of freedom – that is, for a free man, as distinct from an enslaved one. Women, too, were excluded. The realm of freedom presupposed a realm of unfreedom. Freedom belonged only to an elite. And only they deserved a liberal education.
Today we recognize the liberal arts as in service to a different, more egalitarian, project: they equip us for self-rule, not to lord it over others. Liberal education is education for democracy.
Not all universities have fully embraced this democratic project. Some continue to understand their mission as educating an elite, a ruling aristocracy. That version of the liberal arts remains fundamentally illiberal.
But what if education is not a commodity to be monopolized and hoarded, but a public good – a resource the value of which remains undiminished by being made accessible to everyone?
If you were to Google the “liberal arts,” you might get a list of specific areas of study – history, philosophy, politics, mathematics, literature, the sciences. All of these are, of course, important. But the disciplines required for freedom are many. And some have yet to be invented.
Nearly 70 years ago, Francis Henry Horn, a onetime president of the University of Rhode Island, argued that what makes education liberal isn’t its subject matter per se.
“The fact is that no subject, of itself, is liberal. It is not what the student studies that gives him a liberal education, but how he studies it, and the way it is taught.”
Horn, like Frederick Douglass, thought that education was liberal when it expands the frontiers of freedom. For instance, in a letter to his dean of students written in 1962, during the Civil Rights Movement, he wrote:
"I regret I cannot agree with you that this Freedom Ride activity should be ‘slowed down.’ For almost the first time since I’ve been here at the University, students seem to have become interested enough in a matter beyond their own personal concerns to take some positive action. For years many college administrators, and I have to admit to being among them, have urged that students should get more excited about issues of consequence. I consider segregation to be one of these."
For Horn, building a more democratic society was not a distraction from education but its very purpose. Education means freedom.
Now, there is a view of history that can make all of this look too easy. According to this view – let’s call it the progressivist view of history – things are always improving. The arc of history bends, as it were automatically, toward justice.
As the historian Joan Scott notes, this view “is associated with the Enlightenment belief that there is but one History, which moves in an ever-improving direction: forward, upward, cumulatively positive.” For the nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for instance, history is the story of freedom unfolding in time.
In retrospect, it might seem obvious that Douglass and Horn were on the “right side of history.” But, as Horn’s letter implies, that wasn’t how everyone saw it at the time. 3 We, too, might find it comforting to imagine our projects vindicated by “the judgment of history,” but why should we assume that those who come after us will agree with us, or be more enlightened? Why should we trust their lights more than our own?
The fact of the matter is that we have no vantage on the world other than our own, no shortcut to freedom.
What we do have is the full panoply of resources at our disposal – the wisdom (and folly) of the past, the many discoveries of science, the best available social scientific data, the counsel of others . . . the various liberal arts, which are techniques of freedom.
If the arc of history bends, it will be because you bend it.
In a matter of days, your time as an undergraduate at ASU will end, and you’ll go on to something new. For some of you, that might be a job; for others, a service project; for others, graduate or professional school.
Your work here at ASU might be ending, but the work of the liberal arts continues. It continues at your place of business and in your home; in your neighborhood and online; when you assemble and when you vote. These are spaces for exercising and enlarging democratic freedom, spaces that require liberal arts.
Congratulations on your achievements, which are truly impressive, and on your induction into Phi Beta Kappa. You’ve achieved excellence in the liberal arts, the arts of freedom. I invite you to put those arts to work in a world that needs them.
Richard Amesbury
Director of SHPRS
May 1, 2024This speech was given at 2024 ASU’s Phi Beta Kappa Induction.