The Liberty and the Right to Study the Arts and Humanities

Deputy Dean Eric Slauter’s column for the Chicago maroon explains how the arts and humanities are a defining element of a UChicago education.

Excerpt

Do you feel you have the liberty to study philosophy or the right to study painting, poetry, and music? Or must you choose something more “useful”?

“I must study Politicks and War,” John Adams wrote anxiously in a letter to his spouse Abigail from Paris in 1780, so “that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry.” An author of the Declaration of Independence, Adams saw contests between freedom and constraint everywhere. The “liberty” to study art and literature could only come with national liberation.

But then Adams changed his mind. He crossed out “Painting and Poetry” and wrote “Mathematicks and Philosophy” instead.

“Philosophy,” a term that encompassed natural science as well as logic, ethics, and math seemed more appropriate. The republican United States needed the “Usefull” arts more than those “fine Arts” Adams encountered in the palaces and gardens of monarchical France. And so, the future president pushed the study of painting and poetry into the third generation.

“My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture,” he continued, “in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, [and] Architecture.” Overseeing the educations of his sons John Quincy and Charles, Adams did not say if their older sister Abigail had the liberty to study anything.

I study the American Revolution. I also oversee the humanities Core here at the University of Chicago. I’ve been considering Adams’s thoughts as I reflect not only on the meaning of the American experiment at 250 years, but on current trends in higher education and on what my own students tell me about how they approach their studies.