CHICAGO — It’s a familiar question: Do the liberal arts need saving? The answer here Thursday at a conference on the topic — yes — was familiar, too. But keynote speakers at the opening of the conference at the University of Chicago focused less on the question itself than on from what and whom a broad education needs rescuing.
And their concerns went beyond the usual suspects of politicians, administrators and the introduction of identity studies (though ample blame was still reserved for the first two), to both deeper cultural factors and more practical ones — such as how the liberal arts are quantified.
