New College of Florida President Donal O’Shea: The Liberal in Liberal Arts

I am often asked what it is like to be a mathematician who is president of a liberal arts college. But I never get asked what a liberal arts college is. That is because everyone thinks they know. And because everyone thinks they know, misperceptions abound. Let me address some of them.
First, the phrase “liberal arts” has nothing to do with the word “liberal” in the political sense, or with the word “arts” in the aesthetic sense. Instead, the term “liberal arts” comes from the Latin artes liberales, which refers to the subjects and skills that were considered to be essential for a free person in ancient Greece and Rome. In those times, there were seven such disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Since both Greece and Rome were slave states, and most people were not free, the liberal arts have sometimes been characterized as education for elites.