Learning that Frees: Thinking with Roosevelt Montás about the Value of Liberal Arts

Having just recently begun a dean role at a new university, I have been thinking a lot about liberal arts and what the opportunities are at this moment for engaging everything that is inherently valuable about a liberal education. Given the vast array of forces of disruption and change that are swirling about, I am also thinking about what it might mean to re-imagine liberal arts for a new day. As someone who has benefited greatly from a liberal arts education in my own life, I am passionate about ensuring that students from all backgrounds can have the opportunity for transformational learning that an education grounded in the liberal arts offers. I also am aware that, without some kind of careful evolution in the way liberal arts is offered and supported at universities, its future is precarious. 

In such a moment, I am grateful to a colleague who has shared Roosevelt Montás’s excellent and engaging book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton, 2021). I am finding it to be a timely and informative dialogue partner at this exact moment.

In it Montás does five things that I find extremely helpful. First, he helpfully defines what liberal arts means, referring to it as a kind of education that features prominently a “concern with the condition of human freedom and self-determination” (2). In addition, he finds that while liberal education should not be understood as being in opposition to giving students career-ready skills, he also notes that it has a different focus: “Instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for” (3). Thus, when a student pursues a major with clear career outcomes, having that education within the context of a liberal arts foundation ensures they develop the career skills along with those deeper skills and values that promote a meaningful life in other areas.

Second, by sharing his own experience of encountering liberal education through the core curriculum at Columbia University, he provides a compelling personal example of how the liberal arts engender reflection on the most important questions about life. He explains that a liberal arts education grounded in influential texts helps a student “engage in a kind of inquiry that, when successful, produces insights with the power to transform one’s entire life” (13). It did for Montás, as it has for many, myself included.

Third, by spending individual chapters discussing Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Ghandi, he helps readers from any background see the ways in which these significant texts can provoke deep personal reflection and growth, particularly when encountered together with an informed guide and with others who are asking similar questions. For these four authors he points out that they “come from worlds that are in many ways alien to our own, but they speak with intimate familiarity about human experiences we all share” (7). Elsewhere, he concludes, “This is precisely where the greatest value of a liberal education lies: in turning students’ eyes inward, into an exploration of their own humanity under the provocation of works that have proven their power to inspire just such self-reflection” (19).

Fourth, Montás makes a strong case that, since liberal learning is about engendering the freedom to think and determine one’s choices, it is something that is valuable for all, and not just those who can attend elite institutions or who have the privilege and status to be able to afford it as a luxury. Instead he argues that liberal education is “the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down” (12). The people who most need it are not the elite but those who “have historically been denied the tools of political agency” (12). In this line of thinking, the question of the value of liberal arts might be reframed around who is benefiting from the devaluing of liberal education.

Fifth, based on the above, he argues that universities (and the faculty and administrators who run them) have an obligation to reflect seriously and with intention on the importance of liberal education for students and society, and to do the hard work of creating robust core curricula that represent a shared understanding of these fundamental questions. He explains, “In this time of fundamental change, perhaps our greatest need is for clarity and conviction about the values and purposes of higher education” (225). And further, “The corona virus pandemic has exposed the depth of social inequality in America and may give our generation the necessary spur to address it. Making liberal education available and accessible to all students is the most important contribution that higher education can make to this effort” (225).

From Montás I take encouragement and inspiration to continue pressing forward at my institution with the sometimes-challenging conversation about what the goals of university general education are, and how best to support those in the undergraduate curriculum, core curriculum, and first year experience. Montás does not shy away from the hard questions including about his own curriculum which is grounded in Western texts, many of which require us to raise important questions about colonialism, oppression, gender inequality, lack of representation, and so on. He suggests that the debates about these issues, among faculty, with students, and with the public, are part of the rich process of engaging the traditions which have shaped our cultures today, as well as part of the process of imagining new possibilities. Montás also provides some helpful principles that undergird the Columbia University curriculum and useful frameworks for having those conversations within the faculty as a whole without having to start from scratch.

In the moment we are in today where many are trying to make sense of their lives and of this uncertain world in which we live, an education grounded in the liberal arts and in conversation with thinkers who have shaped the development of our world can be a powerful tool. Such an education can help ensure that in the face of a surplus of information, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, we can still learn to think freely (the liber in liberal arts) for ourselves—and to do so in meaningful dialogue with others asking the same fundamental questions.

Book Argues that Students Might be Able to "Hack" College -- And that this is Great for Everyone

Thoughts on Hacking College: Part One

In my first week as dean at California Lutheran University (day two actually!) a colleague gave me a copy of the book Hacking College by Ned Laff and Scott Carlson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.) Published last year, it is a timely book and one that is helping shape a reimagined and integrated student experience at California Lutheran University. Since I’ll play a part in this process of implementing a revitalized model of advising and mentoring, I have been diving into this book. From the start, I have been impressed with its conceptual framework and theoretical underpinning.

 

The aim of the book is to outline “how college faculty and staff can help students "hack" their college experience through a proactive, personalized approach to success.” Hacking College brings awareness for faculty and staff of some features of the student experience that are critical to their success both in college and beyond. The authors advocate a “field of study” approach which takes a wider, more dynamic, and potentially more integrated look at a student’s college and career path than does just a singular focus on “the major.”

 

Key concepts include the ideas of hidden intellectualism, vocational purpose and wicked problems, social and cultural capital, and the hidden job market.

In this blog post and the next, I discuss a few of their key concepts. Today I start with hidden intellectualism and move on to the hidden job market. I was struck by these two “hidden” concepts, both of which offer a lot of potential to open up rich conversations with students at each stage of their college journey.

 

The idea of “hidden intellectualism” is the understanding that every student has interests and curiosities from their lived experiences that, if leveraged, can help them find intrinsic motivation to pursue learning and intellectual development. “Students arrive on campus as latent intellectuals already possessing these interests.”

 

To me, this is one way of recognizing the latent capacity that all students have, whether they know it or not. Faculty mentors, with the right questions and guidance, can tap into this latent intellectualism and help students find a path that is intellectually energizing for them based on subjects and experiences that are already of interest to them.

 

The “hidden job market” are those jobs that people don’t easily see—jobs that are not readily visible for someone without deeper awareness of the field or connections within it. A great example that one of my faculty offered is music production. While a student might envision being a music producer as their career goal, there are actually many more numerous roles in a music studio and in music production that they may find fulfilling.

 

To me, this concept reinforces the importance not only of internships but of universities fostering corporate, community, and professional partnerships that give students exposure throughout their college years to the wide range of paths they could follow in a particular field. The extent to which faculty engage in these partnerships only enhances the mentoring they are able to offer their students and the connections they are able to facilitate.

 

The cool thing about paying attention to these concepts (and the others I will discuss in the next post), is that they strongly suggest that a student can pursue any major—even those that are not directly linked to a specific career outcome—and find themselves well prepared not only for a great job, but also for a meaningful life. This, in essence, is the promise of liberal arts, though this promise may seem challenging to trust in today’s climate of uncertainty and doubt in higher education where students and parents are seeking direct career pathways.

 

The overall idea of the book is that a field of study approach, when implemented intentionally, validates both the major (any major!) and the student experience outside of the classroom as valuable in shaping their college experience and their life beyond college.

 

The authors claim: “Linking awareness of students’ latent intellectualism, vocational purpose, wicked problems [i.e., the ‘problem’ of their career choices], and the hidden job market can help administrators rebuild enrollments in disciplines typically written off as non-vocational.”

 

How that might work in practice is what I explore in part two.

Rediscovering Ancient Hymns: My Upcoming Talks at Cambridge, Oxford, and LST

As my research and writing on ancient hymns among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians has slowly made its way through the wider world of scholarship over the last two decades, I have now been invited to Cambridge, Oxford, and London School of Theology in Feb 2026 to deliver three lectures on my work. It has been an enjoyable process of rediscovering the research and ideas that went into my three books on hymns that I wrote between 2005 and 2018. It is also personally very exciting as this will be my first trip to these renowned centers of research and learning. Below are the three talks. I begin with the last chronologically, as this is the first invitation I received and is the one that started the ball rolling on this “lecture tour” of the UK.

1) “Song in the Ancient World: Echoes of Religion and Resistance.” Cambridge University, Darwin College Lectures Series, Feb 13.

The Darwin College Lecture Series takes one topic each year and, in a series of eight lectures, explores it from a wide range of lenses from across the arts, humanities, and sciences. This year’s topic is “song” and my talk will look at how hymns and religious songs functioned in the ancient world not only as ways of praising the divine but also of communicating with the human audiences that treasured them. This talk is to an educated audience of non-specialists and has been so much fun to prepare. I am happy to share that this talk will be available on YouTube following the lecture and will also be published in a forthcoming volume from Cambridge University Press. I'll share the link once it is available but here is the information on the series and my talk: https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lecture-series/

2) “Hymns in the New Testament? A Conversation.” Oxford University, Keble College, Feb 6.

I am grateful to Professor Markus Bockmuehl’s invitation to present my research at the Oxford New Testament Seminar and to have what he calls a conversazione with another scholar, Andrew Cowan. Andrew’s recent doctoral dissertation reaches some decidedly different conclusions than I do about the possibility and value of identifying hymnic passages in the New Testament. So we will have the opportunity to share our research and have some dialogue about pathways forward based on our findings.

3) “Seeing Jesus through the Lens of New Testament Hymns: Exegetical Challenges and Interpretive Possibilities.” London School of Theology, Feb 11.

In this talk I review some of the challenges raised by scholars (like Andrew Cowan) related to engaging with New Testament hymnic texts and suggest some ways forward that engage the challenges and also open up new areas to explore. I am grateful to Professor Graham Twelftree and Professor Cornelis Bennema for extending this kind invitation to speak to the LST Research Seminar.

Though the talks will draw on material from each of my earlier books, the one that is most accessible and still widely available (and the most affordable!) is my 2018 New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance (IVP Academic).

Three things have stood out to me in digging back into this material and preparing these talks.

• First, I am happy to see that I was asking good questions even in the research I was doing twenty years ago. And it seems to me that much of my work holds up pretty well so far.
• Second, more recent research (mine and others) has helped to bring to light additional questions, perhaps more important than those of a decade or two ago. This is exciting to see the ways in which knowledge and creative inquiry are continuing to develop in new directions.
• Third, I am excited to see that there is still much more that can be explored in these hymnic and poetically-styled passages in the New Testament. As poetry and elevated prose with allusive language, references, and metaphors, there are many more ways to gain new insights into these texts and their significance.

Probably one of the most fun parts for me in a university environment is to see how these ways of exploring ancient religious texts and their themes do not live simply in the ancient world. These approaches invite a new appreciation for the kinds of creative ways we as members of a university community (faculty, students, staff, alumni, community partners) can engage our contemporary world with its unique challenges and use these same approaches to find opportunities for nourishing our spirits as we grow and learn together.