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When Charles William Eliot launched his radical reforms at Harvard in the late 1870s, he was convinced that the fixed curriculum, based on English liberal education models, was ill-suited to the democratic spirit, the cultural diversity, and the rapidly changing circumstances in America. By introducing the free elective system, he hoped to develop in students the habits of self-reliance that he regarded as essential to the American democratic system. Seventy years later, in a post-World War II climate of concern about the "unifying purpose and idea" for American education, Harvard issued a new version of liberal education in its famous Redbook. To address the new American circumstances, these reforms reduced rather than increased choices for students. These benchmarks of American higher education notwithstanding, the final chapter of a widely respected study by Bruce Kimball, published in 1986, opens with the observation that there is no "distinctively American view of liberal education. This observation contains an irony that raises interesting and significant questions. After such high-profile efforts as those made at Harvard, why is there no clear model of American liberal education? And if there is no such model, do we need to develop one, especially in the context of the dramatic changes affecting American society today—changes that in many ways are more radical than those faced by Charles William Eliot? Why, in this latest round of debates about the core curriculum in our colleges and universities, has the issue been posed in terms of the primacy and purity of Western civilization rather than in terms of the adequacy of our educational models to address the realities of America in the late twentieth century? These questions are even more striking when one considers the almost complete reversal of roles and the dramatic changes in orientation that have occurred in the relationship between the United States and its cultural ancestors in the Anglo-European world.

Today, as the demographics and culture of America change, the demands made on any number of social, cultural, and educational institutions that had their origins in the traditions of Europe and earlier American history seem almost impossible to reconcile. The current demand that these institutions serve all members of American society—people of a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and interests—and at a higher technological level than ever before, gathers increasing weight, weight that threatens these institutions. At the same time, those with a vested interest in universities, museums, social services, and arts organizations desperately try to shore up their beloved institutions from within, with the result that no one is pleased. Reform attempts seem to lead to the creation of yet more bureaucracy, further stifling institutional ability to respond to the new needs. Goals apparently so simple and clear as "We must better educate our youth to compete in the new world economy" become complicated and muddled. To complicate all the more this process of "change"—to use the current buzzword—we are coming to realize that in tinkering with our traditional institutions, we no longer have confidence in the traditional ways of passing along our values, nor is there a strong consensus on what those values are. William E. Brock, chairman of the Wingspread Group, which was convened to study higher education, states that we must pass along to the next generation the "critical importance of honesty, decency, integrity, compassion, and personal responsibility in a democratic society." Who could disagree? The problem is that people of goodwill no longer necessarily define terms such as "integrity" and "personal responsibility" the same way. So while everyone of every political persuasion is able to agree that something must be done, it has become almost impossible to agree on what to do. Goals become either so idealistic that they are laughable or so watered down, in order not to offend any interest group, that they are useless. In today's political climate, it is clear that to call for "major reform" plays well in the press but can actually forestall any needed change.

Liberal education has always proved a challenge to deliver systematically, if only because by its very nature it is difficult to specify. In the United States, institutions that seek to offer liberal education on the threshold of a new century operate under new or, at least, significantly more chafing constraints. This article examines some of these constraints and suggests ways in which they can be relieved or accommodated. The principle constraints discussed here are those of shrinking material resources, expanding and accelerating expectations, and increasing heterogeneity across the student body. In the face of these constraints, academic institutions from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities are no better able than other institutions to adapt themselves to changing circumstances—and perhaps a little bit less so. Resource constraints stem from internal and external causes. The internal causes, I will argue, are the result of an economic anomaly. It is not possible for the direct delivery of liberal education to become significantly more efficient in the same way that other economic processes do, at least in part because liberal education is not something that can be "delivered": thus, there is a productivity lag behind other sectors in the economy. The institution cannot fully compensate for this lag by making improvements in the efficiency of other activities (e.g., computing or building maintenance). The external causes, in the public sector, arise from the insistent demands for other uses of public funds, combined with continued popular resistance to tax levels comparable to those of other industrial democracies. In the private sector, the external cause is the declining capacity (or willingness) of families and individual payers to meet even a partial share of the cost of liberal education. Other constraints result from expanding and accelerating expectations as students and their families demand that they be prepared for specific jobs or get a leg up on specific postgraduate professional training. In a sense this is the other side of the coin of employers' broader demand for higher education. As the proportion of jobs requiring undergraduate and graduate degrees has increased, the vocational aspect of higher education has increased accordingly.