Recently there was a proposal for mention of “liberal arts” to be omitted from Fort Lewis College’s mission statement by the Stragtegic Planning committee of Fort Lewis College.
Students were asked on Tuesday through an email survey on how they would feel about a change like this. The collective response has yet to be concluded.
While we wait on that, let me just say that the primary reason I came to FLC was that I receive a liberal arts education and almost more importantly, so I could tell my hipster Santa Fe friends that I was going off to receive a liberal arts education.
Since those radical days of selecting colleges and semi-intelligently defending those selections, I’ve come to be familiar with the larger concept of what it means to be educated by an institution that advertises themselves with all that liberal arts rhetoric.
For me, it meant having access to small class sizes and discussion based courses. It meant that I should come to expect that my course subjects would overlap and that I could use what I learned in the paper I just wrote for my Social Construction of Sexuality class to contribute to class discussion in my Media Topics: Youth Media Writing class discussion without having to be anxiously worn down with the constructed need to intellectually compartmentalize all my classes.
Now I know that there may have been a sort of saturation of these sorts of articles in recent times, what with the credit shift, the vague push for “Fort Lewis University” and everything else that is trying to slowly turn our magical mountain liberal arts campus into something of a boxy state school.
Let me just try distinguish my opinion by saying that if the small class sizes, discussion based classes, acceptability of interconnected subject matter, and genuine opportunities for individualized education all stay the same, than how attached should we really be to the terminology?
That is of course assuming that the change the terminology wouldn’t change the character of school, and who is to say that it will not? It could also be argued that change is inevitable.
Should we let the potential future of what kind of school we identify ourselves as be decided by nostalgic alumni? Or some nostalgic college senior writing this op ed who is going to graduate in May anyway? Well, obviously the students should decide, regardless of proximity to graduation.
What should not go overlooked, however, is the recognition of how flippin’ cool our school already is for the liberal arts amenities. If we take away the mention of liberal arts in our mission statement, we may very well be taking away what we love most about Fort Lewis College.
Now, let’s embrace for a minute that the change needs to happen. FLC had its run as a liberal arts school but now it’s time to grow. Embrace change. Embrace the future. Why not right?
How then, will future FLC students look at the college’s history in regard to that time window when we were a liberal arts school and everything was really cool and rad? Will it be grossly overlooked and filtered like….say….our history as a Native American boarding school? Or will it be looked at nostalgically as the time when things were more authentic and courses overlapped and professors knew the students’ names?
Time will tell, but that it not to say that we are at a pivotal moment in regard to what our school will be thought of in the future. This also is not to say that we have not been in a continuously pivotal time for the past three or five years in regard to this change and the controversies that embody it.
What is now changing, is how we officially identify ourselves through our mission statement. That will affect the people we draw, and it will affect the school we end up becoming.
Update 10/2: An earlier version of this story cited the proposed mission statement change as having originated from the ASFLC. It has been corrected to identify this as being proposed by the Strategic Planning Committee.