Ashley DeVolder
LSFY 115-01
Dr. Youngberg
The Importance of Liberal Arts in Business Majors As reported by Earl Shorris, a Liberal Education is tool that is extremely beneficial. A Liberal Education teaches a person a way to think and behave, and view the world not just as a problem that has a specific way to be solved, but as something complicated that one must interpret for themselves. A person graduating from a Liberal Arts college leaves with so much more than just a degree from one field of study, but with the background knowledge of so many different areas of education. This is why I am conflicted as to why the majority of Liberal Arts colleges do not offer Business as a possible major to pursue. Wouldn’t a liberal education setting for a business major actually be more beneficial than one without? A person would still receive all the necessary requirements to receiving a degree in business and even more. As insisted by Shorris and Plato, Liberal Education is an extremely useful and is just an added bonus for business majors. In Shorris’ piece As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor, he proclaims his idea in the title itself. Shorris believed that he could change the minds and possibly lives of people living 150% below the poverty line just by supplying them with a liberal education. He conducts an experiment doing so and has unbelievable results. Some students learned to control their temper using the ideas of Socrates while others found ways to explain disagreements to a problem with their own reasoning instead of argument. This liberal education and focus on the humanities changed the minds of these students and their way of reasoning and thinking. Look at how much of an impact this knowledge had on these students and they didn’t even have all the luxuries that actual liberal arts colleges supply, they had the bare minimum. If a liberal education can change someone so dramatically I don’t know why every business major wouldn’t want some background in liberal education and I do not understand why colleges would not supply it. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, the same idea of liberal education can be interpreted. Plato described a scene of people chained to a wall, with fire burning behind them, and these captivated people just watching shadows all day with no real knowledge of what they are. This can be interpreted in many different ways but in my personal opinion the chains are a representation of someone without a liberal education. Someone without a liberal education is “trapped” in a certain way of thinking, not using different areas of study to help broaden their way of thinking, and instead just attending a large university and receiving a very basic area of study with no connection to other areas of education. I think the shadows represent this misguided minds of people who look at problems having one direct answer and not trying to see things from many different perspectives. They have their own idea of what an area of study entails but only look at it from one view instead of considering the other areas of study along with it.
Another opinion we could examine is one of an actual business professor of a liberal arts college. Professor Jeffrey Nesteruk is chair of the Department of Business, Organizations, and Society at Franklin & Marshall College and in his essay Teaching Business at a Liberal Arts College, he explains how a business degree in a liberal arts college is important, and the ways to achieve it. He writes that in order for a business school to succeed in a liberal arts college three things must be achieved: blending, bridging, and building. He defines blending as “teaching traditional business subjects from a liberal arts perspective” (1). What he means by this is not just teaching these traditional subjects with one set answer to the problems they approach, but looking at these topics through different perspectives. This is a very liberal concept. He also insists to not teach broad courses such as marketing as a whole but to have a more focused class which examines maybe one exact kind form of marketing and study it very closely. The following thing that must be achieved is bridging. He defines bridging as connecting what the students learn in business class to the things they learned in a liberal arts class. Although some students, with their previous year of liberal learning may make this connection themselves, he believes it is the responsibility of the professor to also help point them out. The final step is building. As he explains it, building means to use the business program to help broaden the study of the liberal arts in the college. What is classified as liberal education has developed over the years and by including business as a core component it would just help to make liberal education even that much more diverse. In the end of his essay he sums his ideas up by proclaiming “Liberal arts colleges that welcome the innovative teaching of business thus stand a better chance of addressing successfully such larger questions of liberal education”(1). Right here we get a firsthand experience of a business professor in a liberal arts college. He shows how beneficial receiving a business degree from a liberal arts college could be compared to a degree you may receive from a non-liberal university where things are taught very basically instead of diagnosing the smaller areas of business in a much more decisive way.
What is not commonly known though is that a lot of people running some of the top companies in America today were not even full business majors. They actually started out with a much more liberal degree which could very well be the reason to their success. Some examples include Michael Dell, James Dimon, and Carly Fiorina. Michael Dell was a drop-out pre-med student at The University of Texas. He now runs one of the most powerful computer companies in America named after himself. James Dimon, current CEO and chairmen of JPMorgan Chase, holds a degree from Tufts in psychology and economics. And finally Carly Fiorina, graduated having studied philosophy and medieval history, was the former chief executive officer at Hewlett Packard. These examples prove that there is a direct relation to the study of business and the liberal arts. Obviously their background knowledge of these liberal fields helped them to succeed in the world of business and these are only three small examples.
Using all these examples it is easy to see why all liberal arts colleges should consider have business as a possible major to students. The Liberal Arts are supposed to supply students with a wide variety of learning from many different fields and having business as another factor would just make the school that much more liberal. As long as the professors are using Nesteruk’s ideas and incorporating a liberal approach to the teaching of the business courses, it would be a great asset to any Liberal Arts college.

Works Cited
Allegory of the Cave. Translated by Tom Griffith. 220-227. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007.
Lavelle, Louis. “Accidental Moguls: College Majors of Top CEOs.” Bloomberg Businessweek. Bloomberg L.P., 2010. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Nesteruk, Jeffrey. “Teaching Business at a Liberal Arts College.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 2010. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Shorris, Earl. “In the Hands of the Restless Poor.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1997: 50+. Print.