When I’m asked by incoming students to summarize the character of Ithaca College, I tell them about our third president Leonard B. Job, a vinegary Hoosier who could have stepped out of a Grant Wood painting. His ramrod integrity kept creditors from foreclosing on the college during the Depression. This ordeal reinforced Job’s native thrift. Despite a Ph.D. from Columbia, he personally surveyed the future site of our South Hill campus. Up at dawn, the lanky ex-farmboy from Putnam County would lug transit and tripod over misty fields, perplexing the landscape.

 

This historical story illustrates Job’s practicality and curiosity. A graduate of Indiana University, he treasured a remark the English logician Bertrand Russell had made upon visiting Job’s alma mater: “Your professors are as passionate about turnips as they are about physics!” That fact, Job thought, explained the unique character of an American education, even at a time when less than a third of the population went to college. Sixty years later, 75 percent of American high school graduates get some form of postsecondary education. If Job could survey the current educational scene, what would he observe?

Today’s generation is pragmatic. Just as it craves politics free of ideological blinkers, it craves an education transcending obsolete categories. When tuition costs $40,000 a year, students ask questions about value and values: What economic value does and can a college institution offer? What values does it impart? Practical to a fault, students seek concrete results but should still insist on being educated rather than trained. The global economy and their own self-development demand it. That dual demand is transforming American campuses.

As Richard M. Freeland, president of Northeastern University, observes: “Slowly, but surely, higher education is evolving a new paradigm for undergraduate study that erodes the long-standing divide between liberal and professional education. Universities encourage students to include both liberal arts and professional coursework in their study programs, while internships and other kinds of off-campus experience have gained widespread acceptance in both liberal and professional disciplines.”

Freeland calls this model the Third Way, but I prefer Professor and Chair of the Park Graduate Program Gordon Rowland’s expression “liberal professional education.” No term better captures Ithaca College’s mission, which considers not only the practical application of liberal education but also the application of professional education to self and society. This premise is hardly new. According to Aristotle, true knowledge proves itself in action. But this classical humanist ideal must be redefined in our postmodern world.

“What we now mean by knowledge,” explains management theorist Peter Drucker, “is information effective in action, focused on results. But the results are seen outside the classroom—in our society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself.”

In other words, all professionals (not just academics) are professors because they profess and pass along knowledge along with values to engage with and interpret the world.

Ithaca College is built on this idea. “The integration of liberal and professional studies,” notes President Peggy R. Williams, “gives students the best of both worlds,” providing a dynamic and rewarding alternative to older models of higher education. Benefit from this advantage, whatever your major, and imitate Leonard Job’s dedication to this community.

Anthony Direnzo is an associate professor of writing. E-mail him at direnzo@ithaca.edu