Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts

People who inhabit the spacious Venn diagram intersection between proponents of the Liberal Arts and those of General Education form a “community,” a word simply but elegantly defined by Bruce Kimball (1986), and quoted by J. Scott Lee in his new book Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts, as “a group of people who talk to each other and do it well” (p. 191). But lately, this beloved community has suffered chains and challenges comparable to prisoners stuck in some Platonic COVID-19 Cave. But hearken now to a messenger down from the realm of light who has spent his whole career shuttling up and down and adjusting his vision between a brilliant Idea-scape and darkened subterranean conditions. The aforementioned Lee, University of Chicago–trained in Great Books and more, is the former Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC), whom I first encountered when I was a lucky participant in a three summers–long National Endowment for the Humanities grant entitled “Bridging the Gap Between the Sciences and the Humanities.” (To complete my disclosure, I now serve on the ACTC Board of Trustees.)Consisting of talks and republished essays pitched both at scholars and an interested general public, Lee's book also serves as a memoir of his impressive worldwide diplomacy. He has been a tireless Paladin for the cause of teaching core texts, an educational practice too often dismissed as elitist or even racist. Although the preponderance of the core texts discussed by Lee and others were admittedly written by dead white men, the conservative reputation of Lee's paideia is still undeserved. There are no “canon police” at an ACTC gathering, and Lee militates in this book for inclusion of American texts of all genres and eras, written by all races, plus world literature writ equally large and broad. In a particularly useful appendix to the book, entitled “The Concept of Core Texts: A Synopsis,” Lee points out three sources for core texts. First, they are the texts, including artifacts, that “descend from ancient to modern times recognized as significant human achievements” (p. 275–276). Second, they are classics as determined by world cultures themselves and made available worldwide to augment the “ancient uniting of Greco-Roman and Hebrew-Aramaic texts into one tradition of reading, as exemplified by Augustine” (p. 276). He continues, “Equally likely, however, is that a third tradition of core texts, that of educational institutions, may provide a rich pluralism of future canons” (p. 276). Though Lee's history of faculty-devised institutional canons gives medieval, renaissance and nineteenth-century Oxbridgian examples, there is no reason that this category should not also be liberally construed to include a canon extra-rich in African American classics at, say, an HBCU such as this reviewer's own former home, Norfolk State University, where core texts are encouraged in honors courses (though, admittedly, not always chosen).In another progressive, even radical move in his book, Lee repeatedly enthuses about performing arts texts (especially theater) and visual arts texts (especially painting); moreover, he encourages students not only to learn from the greats but also to invent their own works of art that others might someday likewise tout as “core.” The book's titular words “art” and “invention” serve as lively leitmotivs, as in the following: In other words, invention is the characteristic response in the liberal arts to the project of continuing the quest for knowledge. In our context, invention provided the bridge between old and new knowledge, while it simultaneously constructed both the distinction between past and future, as well as the distinction between the sciences and the humanities. (p. 171)Lee is by no means dismissing scientists as uninventive (he is an avid promoter of scientific core texts); it is just that the sciences proceed, as he defines them, by hypothesis rather than invention. But note that the liberal arts and humanities do seem more truly Janus-faced, inventing a future by constructing the past.A closer look at the book's prefatory material (acknowledging the pandemic-exacerbated crisis in higher education) and its table of contents will begin to convey the breadth of Lee's critical acumen, coupled with a mastery of statistics and reporting that made him such a formidable grantsman and administrator. Lee dedicates the volume to his mentor and partner in founding the ACTC, Dr. Bruce Kimball, and there is a helpful, pithy foreword by Dr. Patrick Malcolmson, professor emeritus at St. Thomas University in Canada. Section 1 of the volume explores “Invention, Possibilities and Student Capacities” with chapter 1 on Lee's theory of invention, and chapter 2 a skilled practicum in core text analysis using Leon Battista Alberti's essay “On Painting” to illuminate Botticelli's Uffizi Adoration. The 1475 painting concomitantly receives an elegant close reading by Lee himself. With chapter 3, Lee takes on the faculty and students who resist the core text concept, bringing in the philosophical argument between John Dewey and Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1936 as further mediated by Louis Menand in 1997. Lee also introduces a Platonic phrasing he relishes: the “argumentative joint,” i.e., the spot where dialectical reasoning opens itself up to “flexing” or further thoughtful intervention.Section 2 of the volume, entitled “Making Liberal Arts Education,” begins with chapter 4, “History and Imagination in the Core: The Achievement of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.” This chapter combines exempla from the Catholic core tradition at Thomas More (e.g., from Augustine's Confessions) but alludes, as well, to Shaw's Pygmalion, with its instances of self-discovery and emancipation through education. The next full chapter reintroduces Doolittle and Higgins for a more leisurely, romping close reading of the play by Lee. Chapter 6 covers some of the author's several visits to universities in Colombia and Taiwan. (The People's Republic and especially Europe have also shown interest in the power of liberal arts teaching.) The core texts mentioned in this chapter—the Torah, the Bible, the Phaedrus, the Analects, and Don Quixote—get cursory but useful commentary. Chapter 7 is another musing on invention, innovation and technē, another of Lee's master terms.Section 3 of the volume, “Curricula as Objects of Art,” includes two chapters (8 and 9) focused on faculty accomplishments in core curriculum design. Chapter 9, “Aeneas' Shield and Arts of the Future,” offers Lee's critical prowess again on display as he examines the shield as an objet d'art, that Virgil places en abîme (my term) to encapsulate the thrust of the entire epic.Section 4 supplies what Lee calls a “Poetic Coda,” or “The Ultimate Argument for the Liberal Arts.” Far from insisting that core texts should be consumed because they are the super-texts of literature (as kale is a sometimes bitter-tasting super food), Lee analyzes Aristotle's Poetics to emphasize “a loving joy in inventive learning for its own sake, shared by a community that takes freedom and invention as its greatest good” (p. 258). The emphasis is more on the joy than salutary effects. There follow appendices in the hard-copy volume with additional material posted on the Respondeo.com website.Scott Lee has long served, in his own words, as “an executive producer of liberal arts projects” (p. 262), and there are moments in the book when his energy and erudition almost overwhelm (perhaps in the manner of Cecil B. DeMille). It is sometimes tough to wade through Lee's Red Sea of exempla, including copious, often lengthy, content footnotes that sometimes threaten to swamp the main text. But like passengers clambering aboard a lifeboat, all these notes do deserve a place, and I would be loath to sacrifice any.Lee's is a voice that should be heard, from the depths of our collective cave to the highest heights inhabited by our public and university officials. As he says, “a crisis is really an opportunity for humane education” (p. 19). It is way past time to rescue, reconceive, and rebuild Liberal Arts curricula and the General Education curricula they so importantly inform. And, for goodness sake, let us build back better.