BRUNSWICK

In this second part of a two-part interview, Bowdoin College President Clayton S. Rose speaks with The Times Record about the role of the humanities in education, and the challenges of creating a community on-campus.

The Times Record: The University of Southern Maine recently gutted its humanities programs. With that in mind, could you speak to the importance of liberal arts in education and its value today as it’s being devalued, even at the lower grades — being pushed aside for science, technology and math (STEM)?

Clayton Rose: One of the reasons that I was so pleased to come to Bowdoin — and it’s a privilege to be in this role, is that I am a true and deep believer in the liberal arts and I’ve benefitted myself from a great liberal arts education.

I think there are several important things that we must keep in mind about a liberal arts education and the value of it.

The first is that it provides a way for us to live deeper, more meaningful lives and understanding ourselves and the world better — to be critical thinkers and to absorb all of the issues and engage us in the history and the culture.

The second it is essential for civic life today. “Essential” is a strong word, but now more than ever we need citizens in the world who are able to reason, to think critically, to analyze, to communicate, to persuade and to cut through a lot of the noise and the disinformation that exists in our civic and political lives — to figure out how to move us forward in a very thoughtful way without regard to political party and partisanship. And a liberal arts education is one important way to do that.

The third is that a liberal arts education, and I spent my first career in business, is incredibly valuable in the workplace for professional success.

The skills of critical thinking, of analysis, of communication — the ability to learn, are skills that allow someone in any kind of job, in any profession, to climb a learning curve quickly, to adjust to changes, to take on new tasks and so forth.

They may lack a particular domain expertise when they walk into a job, but their ability to learn quickly overcomes that domain expertise.

Some of the criticism out there that you hear is that if you have a liberal arts degree, you won’t earn as much as someone whose got some other degree. That may be true when you come out of school in one particular area or another, but it changes over time.

Over a lifetime, those who have liberal arts degrees do incredibly well.

That leaves aside the notion that you should do work that speaks to you as a human being and where you have a passion. You’ll do better at it but you’re also going to have a more fulfilling life.

If you pick a profession simply because it is, at the moment, the highest paying job without regard to whether it’s going to speak to you or you’ll be great at it, I’d say that that’s a huge mistake in life.

Liberal arts education is incredibly important for us as human beings, for civic life and civic engagement and for professional success.

The other thing I would say is there’s often times this juxtaposition between the humanities as being the liberal arts and STEM. Actually STEM is an incredibly important part of liberal arts. I think our humanists need to have skills in quantitative reasoning and scientific reasoning and our scientists need to have humanistic sensibility as well and that’s where the power really comes from, the cross-fertilization of disciplines.

TR: There’s been a few incidents that have happened involving students, usually on an annual basis and it blows up and becomes something huge. This being a prestigious institution with the many great minds and names that have come through here, do you think that maybe that sets the bar too high for looking at what 19- and 20-year-olds do when they’re 19 and 20 years old?

CR: Bowdoin, among many other colleges and universities, does something — and it’s very unique in American society.

We take a group of students that are incredibly diverse — by race, ethnicity, religion, geography, sexual orientation, political view, you name it. We bring them together and say, we’re going to ask you to live together as a community and build an inclusively engaging community.

By and large we all come from, and these students come from, very homogeneous backgrounds where they grew up with kids who look a lot like them and had the same kinds of backgrounds.

And we ask them to come and live here in this inclusive, diverse community which has got incredible promise and it’s an incredibly rich environment but we don’t give them a huge set of rules of the road about how to do that because frankly, in society, we’re not very good at doing that either.

Then we wonder why, from time to time, students stumble and make mistakes.

We have to be a little more forgiving of one another. There are times when things happen which are out of bounds and we need to acknowledge them, to learn from them, to make sure they don’t happen again.

But the notion that somehow, whether it’s a Bowdoin or some other campus, these things are going to never happen is wrong headed because we’ve got the amazing and wonderful dynamic going on here but it has some challenges to it.

Our job here is to acknowledge these things that may happen and create the space and the environment to talk about them and evaluate them and to understand different points of view about why they may or may not be appropriate at that moment and then keep moving forward, having learned from them. We’ll always need to get better at that, but I think we’re continuing to make progress.