This is a guest opinion column
(Note: Birmingham-Southern College has announced it will cease normal operations on May 31, 2024 - Related stories)
The legislative repeal action, proposed and passed by the Alabama House and Senate Committee, for resuscitating a crushed, compromised, closing Birmingham-Southern College by restructuring “The Distressed Institutions of Higher Education Revolving Loan Program” (passed in 2023 with the expressed purpose of alleviating BSC’s financial jeopardy), has failed, never even being brought to the House floor for a vote.
Previously declared dead and having already announced its looming closure, Birmingham-Southern College has now formally been declared DNR (do-not-resuscitate.)
Birmingham-Southern’s cruel murder at the hands of the unsympathetic Alabama State Legislature is not a special, stand-alone case unique to Alabamian politics and education, however. Many struggling small, private liberal arts colleges across the nation are being forced to permanently close their doors due to financial constraints and lack of public sympathy and support for the classical educational model they offer.
About one university or college per week so far this year (2024) has announced that it will close or merge. Small, private liberal arts colleges, reliant on private funding sources and lacking state-backing, have been hit the hardest of all. This statistic is up from two closures a month last year (2023), according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO.
As an alumnus of one of these small, private liberal arts colleges, I never could have conceived a day where Birmingham-Southern College, my beloved alma mater, would be declared dead after suffering as the victim of prolonged false hope.
It’s one thing to die. It’s far worse a fate to have lifeboats dangled out before you only for them to be yanked away at the last minute by an apathetic state government, then die.
Never could I have imagined that Birmingham-Southern College’s future would be determined by the pitiless, capricious clutches of lenders, unimaginative state treasurers, and scheming political bureaucrats who know nothing of the diverse, dynamic ways the college (and so many other small liberal arts institutions like it) touch the lives of countless young students.
Sadly, the hacks in charge of this situation with the power to rescue Birmingham-Southern from its cataclysmic state care only for the measurable. This shortsightedness, which views schools’ “worth” by balance sheets and quantifiable economic factors, chooses to ignore the myriad of dynamic intangibles these liberal arts institutions provide.
Similarly to comparable liberal arts colleges in every state nationwide, Birmingham-Southern College fills a crucial role in Alabama’s educational landscape, providing a much-needed private educational alternative to the common university-structure.
The death of the liberal arts education is a widespread epidemic corrupting American society. The ramifications of this widespread withering will be ruinous for all.
It is impossible to ascertain the vast value these liberal arts institutions bring to the table purely by assessing them “on paper.”
Allowing these culturally important institutions to be judged by pencil-pushing bureaucrats based on balance sheets rather than considering the myriad of material AND immaterial benefits they provide is a travesty of the most societally perilous kind.
We will all pay the price of this nefarious negligence.
We must open our eyes and wake up before the last liberal arts college is irreparably lost and education has become an echo of what it used to be.
I find myself in an increasingly dwindling minority of those willing to take up arms in the righteous fight to do what is ethically and educationally right by defending these invaluable liberal arts institutions. Too many turn a blind eye to the sordid fate of these schools as they one-by-one wink out of existence.
The long, slow death of the liberal arts degree is, most unfortunately, reflective of the decadent values of our society.
More than ever, our society, an anti-intellectual one which concerns itself more with net worths than Nobel Prizes, needs an infusion of intellectualism, ethics, inquiry, and the arts, leading to a redirection of cultural values.
Our college graduates need to enter society not only as employable assets prepared to excel in a specific field; they need to be equipped with the comprehensive cultural outlook necessary to shape society for the better.
It does not, however, have to be a mutually exclusive, “either-or” situation. A happy medium can be struck.
You can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to education.
Invariably, certain students will always gravitate towards the “earning” degrees (pre-med, pre-law, engineering, business, etc), neglecting the humanities and liberal arts. This is not the problem.
The issue at hand is how we educate our students (regardless of their chosen major) before setting them loose into the world.
Wouldn’t we prefer our doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have an appreciation for the arts, to be culturally dynamic and well-versed, and to be all-around educated and ethically informed people rather than specialistic savants?
Similarly to the movement to eradicate general education requirements for the sake of fast-tracking degree specialization, the neglect of the liberal arts educational model is symptomatic of a societal fixation viewing reality purely through a quantifiable, material “ROI” lens.
To be clear, I am not advocating for the reduction or the redaction of the traditional university experience. Rather, I am campaigning for the option to be readily available for the collegiate student to choose which educational experience is best for them: the traditional university structure or the liberal arts model.
The issue we are facing is the limitation of this choice due to the widespread perishing of liberal arts institutions nationwide.
We cannot afford for one more of these invaluable institutions to die. Birmingham-Southern, while the latest liberal arts college to bite the dust, will not be the last.
Rather, looking at the nation as a whole, it is just the deceased of the week.
Soon, when the last liberal arts institution has been eclipsed and its echo no longer felt in the world, we will be left wondering why our engineers have no conception of “Hamlet” and why our financial advisors think that Holden Caulfield is a stock brokerage firm.
Maybe then, only when it is too late, will we wonder why the art museums and theaters are empty.
Maybe then, the gravity of our mistake allowing these liberal arts schools to die will dawn on us.
Maybe then, it will be too late.
Conner (CR) Hayes, is a 2017 graduate of Birmingham-Southern College
Updated at 6:08 p.m. May 19 to correct that the legislation failed in the House.
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