The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education

My essay "The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education" appeared at Minding the Campus on December 28, 2015. What can fix higher education? Better attention to basic skills, including memorization of the multiplication tables, reading-and-writing practice, writing correction, math correction, and grammatical skills are a start.  These need to occur at the K-12 level, but they also need to occur at the college level when they are needed. Liberal arts is problematic because it's not done well.  The liberal arts tradition was rooted in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but today's college students often cannot write English.

Indeed, the claim of today's colleges that they encourage diversity is belied by many students' (also here) getting no exposure to a language.  Indeed, I very much doubt that most faculties can teach from diverse perspectives because they are trained in narrow specialties and mostly do not have broad education. As well, few are interested in improving the skills needed to study liberal arts, including writing.