Why Liberal Arts?

A liberal arts education forces students to be thrown out of their familiar corners and confront multiple viewpoints.

- Kishalay Bhattacharjee

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.  Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,  And human love will be seen at its height.  Live in fragments no longer.  Only connect...

—E.M. Forster, Howards End

THE characters in Forster’s Howards End struggle with making connections between their own personalities in an often-hostile world. This tension within us is salient in an age of information, misinformation, and dis-information.

February 25, 2022. I was teaching (still online) Yehuda Amichai's The Diameter of the Bomb when one of the few on-camera students interrupted the class announcing Russian tanks have rolled into Ukraine's capital Kyiv. The war has divided the world yet again into power blocs impacting supply chains and threatening millions of lives. Democracy is under attack even as ordinary people are hitting the streets across the world protesting totalitarianism. According to the UNHCR, some 32 million people around the world currently are refugees, meaning they have fled their country due to persecution, conflict, or violence. When you add the internally displaced-that is, people who have been forced from their homes within their country, the number dramatically rises to more than 100 million. The pandemic may be behind us but the adverse effect on individual health and livelihood are felt every day. The planet is heating up in more ways than one. How does one make sense any longer of what is happening to us and around us? I say, "only connect!"