“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”

(King James Bible, Bump 303)

In my years leading up to college, I had always been given a negative picture of what a liberal arts major or education is like. In certain situations, I have even heard people deride the idea of pursuing a liberal arts education as something “useless” and “incompatible with real life.”

Unless you're a radical pragmatist who bases his or her own life around a career or profession or just someone who legitimately hates life, the aforementioned connotation is worthless and holds no true value as to who we are as people in society.

The full idea of an university is not to train us for our future careers or jobs. Rather, it is something that opens our potential by teaching and showing us what we can aspire to become or do. For those who believe that the role of an university is to be solely technical, its purpose is the exact opposite, preventing us from becoming narrow minded individuals who see no other roads but one. Though it is acknowledged that keeping goals in mind is a very efficient way in keeping an individual active, we must draw the line to avoid becoming what Newman notes calls obsessive: “Men, whose minds are possessed with some one object, take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them”(Newman, Bump 311) Therefore, the university is an essential key in preventing us from becoming the people that I mentioned before. Instead of concentrating on “materialistic” values that are closely related with careers, the importance of our knowledge is emphasized. And just as Peter Flawn suggests, “let us as an institution focus on the greatest of all resources- the human intellect.” (Flawn, Bump 307)

In effect, I find that the idea of an university can be best expressed with an analogy of a tree and its different corresponding parts. The base of the tree, which is made up of roots and a stump can be characterized of the “rudimentary” and “basic” education that we all have received in our years leading up to after high school. Then we have the most important part(s) of the tree that is most relevant to the analogy: the branches. It is here where things begin to branch off into different directions, some growing leaves faster than others and others growing only to certain lengths. How that ties in with a university is almost perfectly coordinated. While we are attending The University of Texas at Austin, we are met with many different branches(majors) to pursue, running the gamut from Electrical Engineering to Herbalism.

Coincidentally, I find that the idea of Liberal Arts runs parallel to the idea of an university[as well as a tree...get the joke?] Especially in Plan II, we find that our curriculum is “shaped to give us increasing independence as we move from the early stages of our college careers to the later” (Woodruff, Bump 343 I) Where there is beauty in nature and trees, there is also beauty in Plan II.

We, the Plan II'ers of UT, have the ability to explore those different branches of the tree, taking classes that range from Aristotelian philosophy and morality in politics, to courses that critique movies like “Snakes on Plane.”

Just like Pallavi and Garrison, I believe that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach us “society,” and not what kind job we are to hold in it. We are supposed to leave the latter problem to graduate and medical schools.