In his Goals of a Liberal Education (PDF), William Cronon argues that a liberal education seeks to teach a certain worldview—a preference for curiosity, for empathy, for clarity of language, and so on. An illiberal education, by implication, teaches professional skills but leaves students’ worldviews untouched.
Cronon also has a thorough study of the purpose of a dissertation (PDF), in which he argues that the act of writing a dissertation in the humanities is analogous to apprenticeship: a seven-year exercise in skill development.
It would be going too far to suggest that dissertation-writing is inherently illiberal, but there is a suggestion here that somehow the work we do in the dark of the morning—staring at a 13-inch screen, unsure which of the 20 books on the desk have that interesting footnote about Ruskin—is a simple sort of craftwork.
I’m not sure about this. There must be students so attuned to academic work they enter the dissertation stage working to craft a salable product, but in my case the act of dissertation-writing has been a slow stumbling toward a more professorial worldview. When I first drafted my proposal in the winter of 2005–06 I was deeply unsure what the standard of argumentative proof in a dissertation could be, and for all my committee’s generous advice this standard remained stubbornly unteachable. It was only in the quiet worldview-shifting process of digging at that first chapter that I began to understand how to ask questions and how to answer them, and I am sure that I will keep happily learning how to write until the day they take my keyboard away.
Cronon argues that dissertation work is essential to producing strong instructors for the reason we would expect: it forces us to execute in depth the mechanisms of data collection and analysis we hope to spend our lives teaching. But commensurate with this, the act of writing a dissertation gives students a depth of relation to their world, a sense of meaningful participation in the slow exposition of history, or art, or what have you.
