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Liberal arts education is getting more pragmatic, two recent articles in the New York Times suggest. The first says that liberal arts colleges are offering more vocational training programs as a supplement to liberal arts curricula. The Times cited Colgate, Columbia, NYU, USC, and Virginia as some of the schools that have been offering additional vocational training, and said that more schools are thinking about it.

"We continue to think that a liberal arts education is valuable in the new economy," said Colgate dean Adam Weinberg. "But it is important for students to know the language—the jargon—when they go on the job market."

But Amherst president Anthony Marx said he'd prefer students use any extra time they have to "go deeper into the liberal arts, because that is the seed corn of an intellectual life and informed citizenship."

That ideal seems more remote today, some educators say. "In the 1960's, the dominant thing kids wanted to develop was a philosophy of life. They were going to college for idealistic reasons," says David Breneman, Virginia's dean of education. "Then making money just shot to the front." A recent University of Connecticut survey found that 64 percent of adults say the primary purpose of education is preparation for a certain career—three times as many as those who say the point is general knowledge. Adds a religion professor at Case Western Reserve University, in a letter to the Times, "Most students whom I have taught in elite liberal arts colleges … are not enrolled in liberal arts classes by choice but merely to satisfy prerequisites en route to a vocational graduate school. The 'life of the mind' has become another catch phrase that is mentioned only nominally at convocations and graduations."

It doesn't seem to matter that most students will change careers like outfits over the course of their lives, rendering vocational training all but obsolete within years of completion. Or that educating students to be complete people and not just drones is the most rewarding aim for both teachers and students. Instead, instrumental thinking about higher education dominates. Which is where the second article comes in.

• The commencement speech season prompted the Times' Peter Steinfels to look back at a recent Stanley Fish screed about higher education and morals. Fish wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year that teachers can make students into good researchers, but "you can't make them into good people, and you shouldn't try." Fish's sentiments echo an address to arriving students at the University of Chicago by political science professor John Mearsheimer. Higher education should have two "non-aims," he said; it avoids making claims about truth and morality. "Today, elite universities operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose," Mearsheimer said, adding, "collectively we are silent on the issue of morality." (Though not Mearsheimer's colleague Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.)

Never mind that morality is not an "issue," or that "silence" or neutrality is impossible for human beings (which is why Mearsheimer noted that the prohibition against student plagiarism is an exception to the university's amorality). As James K.A. Smith pointed out recently in the newsletter Sightings, worldview-free or value-free education is a fantasy (third item here). Steinfels posits two main responses to the idea of "amoral education." One, that it is "liberating … to filter out the moral from the intellectual"; the other, that it is a "preposterous … tearing asunder that is not only impossible but undesirable." He quotes Emerson, who said at Harvard: "Character is higher than intellect." Steinfels suggests this question become part of the undergraduate curriculum.

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