Asia in the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Case for Asian Studies in Liberal Arts Education

A Case for Asian Studies in Liberal Arts Education

Van Jay Symons, Suzanne Wilson Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315500638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The contributors place the development of Asian studies programs in small colleges in historical context, make a compelling case for the inclusion of Asian studies in the liberal arts curriculum, and consider the challenges faced in developing and sustaining Asian studies programs and ways of meeting such challenges now and in the future.

1 Asia and the Undergraduate Curriculum

Thomas B. Coburn

DOI: 10.4324/9781315500652-1

In a general way, the place of the university in the culture of Christendom is still substantially the same as it has been from the beginning. Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, it is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community’s highest aspirations and ideals. But these ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing character of Western civilization; and so the university has also concomitantly so changed in character, aims and ideals as to leave it still the corporate organ of the community’s dominant intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, these changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always been, and are always being, made only tardily, reluctantly, concessively, against the protests of those who are zealous for the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Such is the character of institutional growth and change; and in its adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered scheme of culture the university has in this matter been subject to the conditions of institutional growth at large. An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and as such is subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.

—Thorstein Veblen¹

When the words quoted above were penned by their author, the year was 1918. What Veblen had in mind, among other things, we may surmise, was the tumultuous debates that had convulsed American higher education in the latter part of the nineteenth century, revolving around the new free elective system that Charles William Eliot advocated so relentlessly during the forty years of his presidency of Harvard (1869–1909) and that has had such a profound effect on college curricula ever since. But it is also possible he saw beyond that lengthy episode to the antecedents of the controversy in the Enlightenment, for, as W.B. Carnochan has keenly noted, “‘Ancients’ and ‘moderns’ take their names originally from the ‘battle of the books’ fought in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries between defenders of ancient literature and learning and defenders of, among things, the new science.”²

Veblen’s analysis can be extended prospectively as well, for it was in the following year that Columbia University’s Contemporary Civilization course was first established, a collaborative venture between economics, government, philosophy, and history to serve as a common core, an antidote to the rampant elective spirit.³ A similar yearning appeared in the roughly contemporaneous “Great Books” vision of Robert Maynard Hutchins, which “merged the history of Western civilization with that of its great books,” to which the famous Harvard Redbook of 1945 (General Education in a Free Society) served as a kind of riposte.⁴ Add to these episodes the “culture wars” of the past decade, fueled by the growing possibility, originating in anthropology, that “culture” is not a singular but a plural phenomenon, and Carnochan’s claim seems persuasive: “There have always been ancients and moderns, and lines of allegiance may be generational as much as intellectual. If Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, the pedagogical debate of the past few years has been a series of footnotes to the several battles of the books that began with Bacon’s proposals for the ‘advancement of learning,’ his program for the overturning of Scholasticism and for an empirical conquest of the natural world.”⁵

In this context, where the study of Asia might now appear as a potential upstart, a relative newcomer in the centuries-long battle over the substance of university education, how might we best situate Asian studies in the curricula of private liberal arts colleges? Is this emergence of Asian studies simply another turn of the cyclical wheel of curricular debate, eventually to give way to an as yet unknown successor, or is something more substantial, more enduring at stake here?

It is my judgment, shared by my fellow contributors to this volume, that Asian studies is not a mere passing fancy, that something of surpassing significance is afoot here, and that all who care about contemporary education must pay attention. Moreover, what is at stake is of consequence not just for higher education, but for the “habitual frame of mind” of the larger community that is correlated with the life of the university every bit as much today as it was in Veblen’s day. If we can get clear about why the study of Asia is so important, especially in the liberal arts colleges of America, then those institutions can continue to provide the leadership—and the leaders—for which our country and our world so ache today. Historically the liberal arts colleges of America have not simply been mirrors or microcosms of the larger ebb and flow of American social and cultural life, as Veblen’s analysis might imply. They have stood in a dialectical relationship to the surrounding society, provoking and inspiring as well as reflecting it. Although liberal arts colleges are few in number and size, constituting less than 5 percent of American institutions of higher education with less than 2 percent of the student enrollment, they have had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. This continues to be the case in important, often neglected ways. For instance, of the 30 institutions producing the highest ratio of doctoral to bachelor’s degrees in their alumni, 16 are private liberal arts colleges.⁶ Liberal arts colleges produce Rhodes and Marshall scholarship winners at a rate per number of bachelor’s degrees awarded that is nearly double that of research universities. As of 1990, 9.4 percent of the nation’s foreign service officers and 10.4 percent of its ambassadors were liberal arts college graduates.⁷ If we can discern and articulate the importance of Asian studies in the liberal arts college curriculum, we shall have done something of potential usefulness not just for Asianists and for Asians, but for those more broadly engaged in contemporary education as well.

To make such a case is the burden of this chapter. The broad gauge introduction up to this point has been intentional, for unless we wish absolute inclusivity in our college curricula—a vision that even the most well-endowed university cannot realize today—then no subject matter that clamors for inclusion in the curriculum, including Asian studies, should be exempt from the requirement of self-consciously positioning itself in relationship to the larger educational goals of the institution. I shall therefore pursue these broad matters further in the following section, with some additional reflections on contemporary liberal arts education, many of which will be seen to have implications for Asian studies. Then I shall turn to consider the place of the study of Asia in the Western academy generally, without regard for the particular kind of educational institution. Finally, I shall bring these considerations to bear on strategies for increasing Asian studies in that uniquely American institution, the private liberal arts college.

Asia and Liberal Arts Education

For the past thirty years a recurrent metaphor has been employed to describe the multifaceted struggles to reform college curricula. It has been employed by both proponents and opponents of reform, both ancients and moderns. This is the metaphor of “decentering” the curriculum. What this means specifically varies from context to context, but it has been applied variously to such matters as the interest in popular history as opposed to that of elites; to women’s issues as opposed to men’s; and to African American, African, Asian, or Hispanic literature as opposed to “Western”—and the list could be extended. Wherever concern for issues of race, class, and gender has been raised, it has been seen as a destabilizing presence, alternatively seen as a cause for celebration or for alarm. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” declared William Butler Yeats.⁸ And so the academy has agreed, pursuing the implications of this discovery with either joy or terror ever since.

But has there ever actually been a center? Granted that each of the decentering initiatives has had a specific conception of its antagonist and of what needs displacement, and granted that each of those antagonists has had a specific conception of the educational center that warrants defense, one still needs to ask the question, has there been an enduring core to liberal education? Veblen and Carnochan, who have already oriented us to this inquiry, suggest on historical, not ideological, grounds that the answer to this question is no, there is no abiding essence or center to liberal education. There is an ongoing concern for intellectual training and critical thinking, often linked with specific subject matter and a concern with education for informed citizenship, but subject matters change, as does the meaning of citizenship. There is no linear continuity to the liberal arts tradition, no essence.⁹I suggest, therefore, that the metaphor of decentering—and its assumption that a center exists—be dropped from discussions of educational curricula and of the broader goals of liberal education.

In its stead I propose an alternative metaphor, also drawn from the realm of geometry. It is the ellipse, and I intend this metaphor to be understood in the very specific way that an ellipse differs from a circle. A circle is defined as the pattern that one point traces when it revolves around another point so that it is always equidistant from that point. That reference point, of course, is the circle’s center. An ellipse is defined as the pattern that one point traces when it revolves around two other points so that the sum of its distances from those two points remains a constant. Those two reference points are known as the foci of the ellipse.

The virtue of this metaphor, I have found, apart from the fact it gets us away from the chimerical notion of there being a single center to the educational process, is that it invites us to think of the curriculum, and of education more broadly, in terms of balance, of point and counterpoint, of constructive tensions between antinomies that cannot be overcome, of dyads in a dialectical relationship, neither of whose members can be reduced to the other. Once this metaphorical door is open, then a host of possible applications come tumbling through. For instance, one might identify the two foci of liberal education as curricular and extracurricular, or as major requirements and distribution requirements/general education, or as major program and minor. One might suggest that the way content and skills consistently and mutually implicate one another reflects their role as the two foci of the curriculum. Teaching and research are obvious candidates for the two complementary emphases in faculty life. Conventional classroom learning can be seen as juxtaposed with an alternative focus, such as service learning or study abroad or internships. In a highly regarded little article, which also happily uses an Asian metaphor, Elizabeth Blake suggests that academic affairs and student affairs offices attract different personality types, offer different assessments of formal learning, envision opposite learning outcomes, and have differing perceptions of power. But rather than striving to be more alike, they should be seen as “The Yin and Yang of Student Learning in College.”¹⁰ It is this same “elliptical” way of thinking that has prompted me to suggest that an effective way of teaching survey courses on Asia is to juxtapose the “Great Tradition” of textbooks with units of “contemporary counterpoint” that introduce very different perspectives and content, throwing the alternative assumptions of both perspectives into bold relief and teaching through contrast.¹¹ One way to do justice to the energy and vibrancy that characterize our campuses, then, is to conceptualize the tensions as the necessary and creative manifestations of an ellipse’s two foci, variously manifested, rather than as the compulsive search for a single, monolithic center, which is never to be found, either historically or ideally.

There are additional reasons for preferring this binary understanding of the educational process. One is epistemological, the fact that we now know that the basis for much learning, if not all, is comparative. We distinguish between different objects “out there” on the basis of similarity, contrast, and analogy. It is in the juxtaposition and analysis of apparently similar or apparently different data that we deepen our understanding of all of them, that we test the validity of those appearances. This holds true whether we are seeking to understand biological fauna or political systems or cultural creations. As Jonathan Z. Smith has pithily noted, “In Comparison, a Magic Dwells.”¹² That magic is the magic at first of perceiving, then of knowing, and eventually of understanding.

A second corollary reason for thinking of liberal education as a binary, dialectical process follows immediately. One of the “objects” we are trying to understand, and to help our students understand, is ourselves, both individually and in terms of the groups, cultural and other, to which we belong. The traditional way of putting this is to say that liberal education aspires to raise students out of the parochialism of particularity, to free them from the singularity of their own experience. The postmodern phrasing of a similar point is that we aspire to help students become aware of their own positionality and subjectivity, to develop their own voice while learning to understand and appreciate others. In either case, the challenge is great because of the inevitable affection for one’s own perspective and the subtle, transparent way in which the knower’s perspective is unwittingly operative in all acts of knowing. It is uncommonly difficult to become alert to differential power relationships when one’s own position of privilege is at stake. There exists no better way for “problematizing” one’s own or one’s students’ subjectivity than through deliberate engagement with people and cultures that offer powerful contrasts to the would-be knowers’ starting-point.¹³ William Perry’s now famous scheme suggests that students start their college careers with a “basic duality” in their engagement with the world, and that the challenge of the college years is to help them move from this dualism through relativism to commitment.¹⁴ Vital engagement with cultural difference can play a crucial role in effecting students’ intellectual and moral development. As Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us, for both “insiders” and “outsiders,” cultural artifacts are wonderful “goods to think with.”¹⁵

The utility of dualistic thinking for understanding both oneself and cultur...