I have recently decided to change my future plans from attending law school to finding a job in the business/finance world. My reasons for doing so are numerous, but my decision is mostly based upon my emerging interest in economics and finance. I may still go to law school eventually, but I am also interested in MBA programs. So, I am currently looking for summer internships in the field to gain experience and training.

I don’t know if any of you have experienced this yet, but I find it to be extremely difficult to market PLS to a potential employer. Let’s be honest: ‘Program of Liberal Studies’ sounds like a joke. The name conveys absolutely no information about the major. It is not clear in what sense it is a ‘program’, nor does the name connate anything positive about what is studied. If anything, PLS sounds like a not-so-rigorous liberal arts major for slackers, which it is not. To avoid the typical liberal-arts stereotypes, I usually write ‘Great Books (History of Philosophy)’ on my resume instead of PLS.

I have come to the conclusion that the major needs a different name; a name that more accurately captures the rigorous curriculum and the broad skills that students acquire. Could it be ‘Honors Humanities’? PLS is essentially an honors program after all, even though it is not marketed as such.

More importantly, I think that my experience is indicative of a larger problem, and that is the feasibility of liberal education for non-academics in times of economic insecurity. One of the many privileges of living in a materially abundant society is that not everyone has to work constantly, and not everyone has to study subjects directly related to work. I think that one of the reasons why liberal education has remained a popular alternative for students in the past fifty years, despite the rise of undergraduate business programs, is that those who pursued non-technical courses of study were still able to obtain gainful employment. However, if the economy does not stabilize and grow in the long-term future (and I have few reasons to think that it will), then I think that we will continue to see an increase in those pursuing technical degrees and a decrease in those studying the humanities.

In order for liberal education and Great Books programs to survive in the future, such programs will have to reinvent themselves and provide students with a more marketable set of skills than ‘reading, writing, and thinking’. Perhaps this would entail having some sort of concentration within PLS, such as political science, economics, or mathematics. I am not sure how this could be done while still remaining faithful to the Great Books, but I do think that liberal education will have to be redefined in order to meet the economic and cultural realities of the 21st century.

Adam

Those of you who frequent Linkedin may have seen a recent discussion amongst some of the older PLS alums on "Prof. Cronin's Checklist" - a writing style guide compiled by Professor Cronin and distributed to his students.  Never one to be left out of the fun, I emailed one of said older alums and asked for a copy of it.

The Checklist is awesomeness, all 41 pages of it.  It describes the purpose of a Checklist as " To identify what is rubble and how to get rid of it.  Then, when all the rubble is cleared away, one will find what has always been underneath it—just plain good earth.  Usually, only weeds grow in rubble.  So let your hands get ink-stained in the good earth.  You may not grow exotic orchids, neither you will grow weeds."  It also includes lines like, "a Notre Dame priest of long ago—“in my time”—used to speak of the 'sanctity of the sentence.'"

The majority of it is just a long list of stylistic tips, useful but perhaps redundant for most of us.  Nonetheless, I found it a nice glimpse at one of the great PLS figures of times past and perhaps a helpful refresher for those of us who are still writing.

Let me know if you would like a copy, and I am happy to email it to you!

-LC