Purdue University's PR Machine
PR from Purdue celebrates their vanguard integrated liberal arts program after years of attacking its own English department
Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published excerpts from their October 2 virtual forum, “Where the Humanities Are Thriving.” In it, administrators and professors from four different colleges and universities discussed the ways their schools were doing things just a little bit differently. Among the expert panelists was Melinda Zook, Director of Purdue University’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program. The Chronicle’s article came to my inbox Tuesday morning, so as I sipped my coffee, I read about how Purdue had “modernized course offerings and revived interest” in the humanities and liberal arts.1 This was surprising news to me given that since I graduated, Purdue gutted their English department and killed their long-running MFA program—the program I graduated from in 2018.
Soon after, I learned that PBS News Hour ran a feature story on Purdue’s Cornerstone Program on October 21. I missed the initial airing because it was my partner’s birthday—we met at Purdue, coincidentally.
The PBS story begins with a typical note on the death of the humanities—a longstanding and real anxiety in American education for some time. In my composition class at the University of Tennessee, where I am an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the English department, we focus on this crisis, reading essays from Marilynne Robinson and Martha Nussbaum, among others, examining the causes and effects of a cultural shift that has de-prioritized humanities scholarship and education. On PBS, we get an opportunity to see inside a Cornerstone classroom where Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy Brian Kogelmann teaches a class on the “Machiavelli School of Management.”2 I suspect this is a cheeky title meant to help students connect Machiavelli’s sixteenth century treatise to their 21st century concerns as business majors, but as a former Purdue English graduate student, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a mission statement.
Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts
Cornerstone, Director Melinda Zook argues, gives “students that are not liberal arts majors a more holistic education that includes courses that will have them reading classic texts, have them experience the arts.”3 Cornerstone is, in short, an interdisciplinary attempt at infusing the humanities and social sciences into a student’s regular course of study. This is different from the gen-eds that nearly every bachelor’s degree requires in that it organizes these classes around students’ interests and majors. On its face, I have no real problem with this. In many ways, I think interdisciplinary scholarship and study is the future of the academy. We live in a world of “wicked problems”—rising inequality, climate change, global conflict, the threat of far right fascism—and these problems require a robust understanding of science, history, and culture and their various intersections and entanglements. But I’m not at all sure that this is what Cornerstone intends to accomplish.
What is Cornerstone? From their website:
Cornerstone is a 15 credit-hour undergraduate certificate program, which develops Purdue University students’ communication and creative thinking skills, broadens their perspective on the world, and cultivates their minds. The two-semester first year sequence is taught by a team of award-winning Liberal Arts Faculty Fellows. It is followed by three courses built around a series of themes designed to complement academic majors across the Purdue campus.
The Cornerstone certificate functions as a core within a core, providing students with a road map to navigate the varied options of the Purdue core curriculum. Its classes and themes provide context around students’ major areas of study and foster the creative thinking that makes good business and industry leaders, and, even more importantly, good citizens who are capable of self-governance. 4
Those first two semester classes are “SCLA 101: Transformative Texts, Critical Thinking & Communication I: Antiquity to Modernity” and “SCLA 102: Transformative Texts, Critical Thinking and Communication II: Modern World.” The remaining nine hours are chosen from a list of classes across the university that connect to one of Cornerstone’s five themes—Science and Technology, Environment and Sustainability, Healthcare and Medicine, Business and Management, and Conflict Resolution and Justice. Students earning their certificate in these themes can choose from classes in the Art & Design, Anthropology, Communication, English, Languages and Cultures, Philosophy, and Political Science departments. I find it worth noting that neither the Business and Management nor the Conflict Resolution and Justice plans include English classes. Why would a student studying how to communicate with others in a business environment or interpersonal and global conflict and justice need to know anything about constructed communication or literary culture, after all? 5
But the larger thrust of the program makes a certain degree of sense. It seems to me vital that the university show students how ideas from discrete disciplinary lenses can provide nuanced perspectives on major issues. Making critical thinking and deep cultural understanding the backdrop of education seems like, you know, exactly the kind of thing the university should be in the business of providing its students. The problem with Cornerstone is not at all its interdisciplinary nature—this is, I’d argue, something the best university programs are already doing. Rather, I object to the execution of this particular program at this particular university and the way it prioritizes the instrumentalization of the arts and humanities.
As PBS reports, those first two semester classes “replaced written and oral communication requirements for freshmen.” This should be a record scratch moment for anyone working in education. Melinda Zook tells PBS, “If you think you’re just going to build a program and they will come, you’re wrong. You have to take over requirements, and that’s what we did. And we do it through great books, which we call transformative texts.” Setting aside the specter of conservative obsessions with “great books”—though I’ll note Zook was very careful to mention that they teach Rumi (I suspect Coleman Barks’ translation), N. Scott Momaday, and August Wilson—we’re already seeing something I’d call a siege mentality. Taking over requirements is, yes, exactly what they did.6
Purdue English Against the Ropes
I came to Purdue in 2016 and I left in 2018, which (put differently) means that I arrived at roughly the same time as Dean David Reingold and left as they first piloted Cornerstone. For the uninitiated, funding as a graduate student usually comes from a combination of tuition remission and an extraordinarily modest stipend. As a graduate student, your tuition is covered and you’re (sort of) remunerated for teaching, TAing for tenure stream professors’ courses, or serving as a research assistant. In English departments, the typical appointment for an incoming graduate student is as the instructor of record for an introductory composition class. These are classes that, depending on the institution, instruct students on a combination of rhetoric, close reading, writing craft, and argumentation. As instructors, these English masters and PhD students begin building a portfolio of materials and CV lines that (god willing) prepare them for later teaching. At least, if that’s the path those graduates take.
Eventually, these classes can lead to other opportunities. As a creative writing student at both the MFA and PhD levels, I’ve taught introductory courses in fiction writing, screenwriting, a little poetry, and classes in business writing. There are opportunities for other work as well—editing on journals, assisting in administrative roles, working as a research assistant. In my time at Purdue, I was a reader for The Sycamore Review, the long-running and now defunct literary journal edited by the MFA creative writing program, and served as the Assistant Director of Creative Writing—a two-year appointment assisting the program’s director in administrative matters and overseeing the program and journal’s public representation at the annual AWP conference.
When I arrived at Purdue, it became immediately clear that Dean Reingold had been hired as a hatchet man, a job he has performed admirably. “I could show you some projections which would show, by 2024, there would be no students left in this college,” he tells PBS. 7 It’s a remarkably strange assertion. The situation for the humanities in higher ed is indeed bleak nationwide and has been since the 2008 economic crash, but to assert that there would be no students left in the CLA is a bit extreme. The CLA houses Anthropology; Communication; Design, Art, and Performance; English; History; Interdisciplinary Studies; Languages and Cultures, Philosophy; Political Science; the freaking marching band and the orchestra; and Sociology; in addition to, now, Cornerstone. Communications is where the would-have-been English majors crept off to when their parents insisted they get a degree that sounded like a job title, so it’s hard to imagine any projection that would find the classrooms of the CLA absolutely barren. The kind of modeling that imagines trends continuing in a vacuum with zero interference. It’s also bizarre given that at Purdue, it’s a circumstance that was, at least partially, a creation of Dean Reingold’s office.
It is, of course, true that the number of students majoring in liberal arts degrees has rapidly declined in the last two decades. I sometimes tell my students that when I graduated from my undergraduate English program in 2004, the department was so large that we had to have commencement separate from the rest of the college. Today, it’s hard to imagine an English department having several hundred enrolled students. “The reasons why are complex and debated,” the PBS story reports, “the shock of the 2008 financial crisis, the higher costs of college, a shift away from social sciences to technology, seen as better for job prospects, and a devaluing of the very idea of a canon of great books.” 8 This is the way the trend is usually discussed. Could be a bunch of stuff, mate. We’re just not sure. It’s complicated. Oh, well!
But I’m not always so sure that the decline is quite as complicated as we want to make it out to be. The cost of college is a massive contributor, of course, but that rising cost isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the explicit result of deliberate decisions made by state legislatures to defund universities. In 2015, for instance, then-governor Scott Walker announced a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin system, and at the very least floated the idea of changing the university mission by cutting the words “the search for truth” and adding “meet the state’s workforce needs.” 9 The budget cuts resulted in the swift loss of majors. UW-Stevens Point, in 2018, announced that it planned to cut thirteen majors, including English, history, and all three foreign languages taught on campus. But, this is an old song still sung in other states, including the recent cuts at the University of West Virginia, which resulted in the loss of twenty-eight majors and classes in several foreign languages.
There’s no doubt that at Purdue majors in the humanities and social sciences declined in all the ways that Reingold implies, but disinvestment is at the core of the problem. And at Purdue, disinvestment in the arts and humanities was often on full display.
When I arrived in the fall semester of 2015, there were already concerns about graduate stipends. Now, I should be clear about this—nearly every major university in the country depends on graduate student, contingent faculty, and non-tenure track labor. They teach the lion’s share of classes with few of the protections of their tenured and tenure track colleagues. And in the case of contingent and NTT faculty, they’re often still expected to do service and conduct research, but this should be done in their off time, since their appointment is usually 100% teaching. This is increasingly the case as the number of tenure-track positions decline.
As a graduate student, it’s often hard to avoid feeling like your primary commitment is not to your course of study, your writing, your scholarship, or even your professional development, but rather to your teaching explicitly. In my bleakest moments in graduate school, it very much felt like my sole purpose in the department was as an affordable labor source (very affordable at a stipend usually less than $20k a year) for those high-volume, core classes that tenure stream faculty often did not teach.
In the winter of 2015, Reingold announced a new plan to raise stipends for graduate students across the CLA—ostensibly welcome news. It came, however, with much of the belt-tightening you’d expect: a college-wide reduction in the number of graduate students, and in particular a request that English reduce its graduate student population from 150 graduate students to 50. There were also total budget cuts for English, communications, and languages and culture—English’s budget was slashed by $200,000.10 English did end up cutting several graduate student lines, but managed to stave off the worst of those cuts with some creative budgeting.
These cuts came amid an enrollment boom at Purdue, much of which was the result of tuition caps, the special project of university president Mitch Daniels (George W. Bush’s OMB Director, aka “My Man Mitch”). We were surrounded by construction of new facilities, new state-of-the-art teaching and research buildings. But English was housed in Heavilon Hall, which was demolished a few weeks ago. My suspicion is that Heavilon Hall itself was grateful that its time had finally come. The building was in rapid decline. On the second floor hall, the yellowing wallpaper had come unglued, and it had peeled and been taped back so many times that someone finally drew the outline of a human figure behind it—the kind of humor you’d expect among English majors. On more than one occasion, I stepped from the building to hear an undergraduate giving a tour to a squad of prospective students and their parents. “The sign of a growing university is the construction on its campus,” I heard one say. “We always have a building under construction, so we’re doing pretty well.”
Perhaps I’m imagining maliciousness when it’s really just one of those times when “hard decisions have to be made.” But it also seems those “hard decisions” usually come at someone’s expense and to someone else’s benefit. I’m not necessarily saying Cornerstone is the beneficiary of a kind of low-stakes disaster capitalism, I’m just saying that when Zook says Cornerstone took over requirements, we ought to believe her and imagine what that means.
When Cornerstone was announced and piloted, it was an option for freshman—as it still is. SCLA 101 could fulfill the requirement for English 106—the four-hour introductory composition class taught by those English graduate students. Still today, Cornerstone is offered as an option for discerning students. While students are still able to earn the Cornerstone certificate if they’ve already taken English 108 or Communications 114 (ENGL 108 is the accelerated version of freshman composition), the Cornerstone FAQ tells students they’d “prefer that you complete both or one of SCLA 101/102.” 11
The declining number of admitted graduate students, the rising number of students, and a CLA initiative poised in direct competition with one of its own departments would have been a recipe for disaster in the best of circumstances.
And then the pandemic gate-crashed the university and partied all over their budgets.
The Pandemic and the Gutting of Purdue English
In December 2021, after admissions portals had already open, after the English department had already received a deluge of applications, and after these hopeful applicants had already paid their application fees, the CLA demanded the English department take a one-year moratorium on graduate admissions. The immediate effect was to devastate the MFA program. Then-interim director of creative writing (and also, for full disclosure, my thesis advisor) Brian Leung told student newspaper The Purdue Exponent, “This moment is really the culmination of a six-year attack on the entire Department of English, not just creative writing.”12 This is exactly right.
From a distance, it’s not difficult to conclude that several universities used pandemic-related budget shortfalls as an excuse to gut programs—typically in the arts and humanities, those usual victims. In 2022, for instance, Emporia State in Kansas fired several instructors, including tenured professors, using an emergency rule created so the university could be nimble in the face of the pandemic.
At Purdue, Reingold insisted that the department had exceeded its budget by $303,000, and he demanded those funds be repaid over a period of three years. In the fall of 2020, the English department, he claimed, had over-extended their commitments to graduate students. The CLA had provided them, he said, a loan to ensure they could honor those commitments. In his statement, he seems positively apoplectic that “the English department brought in a cohort of 18 students at a time when many humanities programs at Purdue and nationally paused or decreased their graduate admissions.”13
But Dorsey Armstrong, then-chair of the English department, argued that the money CLA insisted was a loan had never been referred to as such. In an email extensively quoted by the Purdue Exponent, she writes, “Suddenly, the $304,000 that had been given to us in order to balance the 2020 budget was described as a ‘loan’ (a word that was not used ONCE until just a couple of months ago) and we were ordered to repay it.”14 Armstrong argued that this change was in retribution for how the department had managed to find funding for a full cohort of graduate students. Purdue’s famous Writing Lab (everyone’s used the Purdue OWL, right?) and Modern Fiction Studies, the academic journal housed in Purdue’s English department, offered money to help assist in funding the new cohort.
But the moratorium was just the start. Following it, English would only be able to admit 10 new graduate students a year, despite the fact that “[a]n external review of the creative writing department paid for by the CLA dean’s office said 12 new graduate students should be admitted in the MFA program alone.”15 A cohort of ten students to fill the three programs—Rhetoric & Composition; Literature, Theory & Cultural Studies; and Creative Writing—would hardly make for the robust classes one would need for a graduate seminar. And it would certainly make for a paltry version of the classes I remember from my time. Moreover, a cohort of ten new students each semester—reducing, at long last, the number of graduate students in English to the desired 50—would hardly be able to teach those introductory courses in creative writing, composition, or even business writing.
Which, I’m convinced, was the point.
After all, as Armstrong points out in the Purdue Exponent, the CLA had refused to fulfill requests for new faculty to replace those who had retired or left the department. And they refused to authorize transfers from accounts where the English department had money available in budget requests for several years leading up to the crisis. “The leadership and faculty of the English Department, like every department on campus, is charged with determining how to allocate its budget," Reingold said, but given the events of 2021, it certainly seems like the dean’s office felt they needed to punish those who didn’t choose as they would have liked. 16
Purdue’s Creative Writing MFA program graduated its last cohort in May. The Sycamore Review, which published its first issue in 1989, printed its final earlier in 2024.
Artes Liberales
“Once you get to a point where some of the domains which gave rise to the modern research university are either withered or nonexistent, I think we have sort of lost what it means to actually have a university,” Reingold tells PBS. 17 It’s hard to parse what he means here, but the best I can work out, Reingold is abdicating the mandate of the university. What does it mean to be an R1 university? Especially now? If some of those domains—English, languages, and cultures, apparently—are “withered and nonexistent,” then who or what defines the purpose of the university?
In her responses at the virtual round table for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zook says part of rebranding the humanities at Purdue was about making clear to students the value of the humanities. “The skills-based argument that so many of us make is really problematic,” she says. “And it was a real turnoff to students. If you talk to students about the humanities, I would talk about how the humanities will change your life. The humanities are inspiring. They will give you new views, and most students, regardless of what all the pundits say, come to college to be changed. They want that experience that will change their lives. They want transcendence, and we have transcendence.” 18
Cutting through the rhetoric, though, we’re back at those age-old defenses for the liberal arts. Either we represent the skills learned in these classes as “soft skills”—employers need people who can write, who know how to think critically—or we represent them as soul-fulfilling and fun. I don’t necessarily like the language of soft skills, but I don’t suppose there’s anything particularly wrong with either of these defenses. In any case, they aren’t new in the slightest, and what’s more is they both truck in service.
We have no problem articulating the value of an engineering class or environmental science research. Ask someone what the point of an education degree is, and unless they’ve been swallowing a lot of dreck from the right about eliminating the Department of Education, they’ll likely be able to assemble at least some answer about childhood psychology and pedagogy (even if they manage to touch on the nobility of teaching as a profession in the process). But ask about history, and the best you might get is some variation of George Santayana’s dictum. Ask about English? Well, you’re back to writing or some sweeping generalizations about cultural literacy. Neither wrong, but neither terribly useful.
I think much of this comes back to the fact that most people don’t really understand what’s done in an English department, though I also don’t think the English academy has historically been particularly good about articulating their value. And as more majors have moved to other schools—Cinema Studies used to live in English departments, journalists once cut their teeth in literature classes rather than Communications schools—it’s maybe harder than ever to articulate the concrete values of English, try as we might. I think the core issue, however, is that the English department just does so many different things that it’s hard to encapsulate. Literary history, linguistics (still housed in English at some schools), rhetoric and writing, aesthetics, creative writing, theory and culture, to say nothing of interdisciplinary approaches like environmental literature, disability studies, or the medical humanities. The difference is that as the university shifted toward branding that emphasizes specific jobs training, the English department (as well as history and other classical humanities programs) maintained a disciplinary stance.
One of the more important lessons I learned at Purdue, in a space that felt (at times) openly hostile to the humanities and humanities research, is the value of articulating why what I studied and what I taught was important. In all of the classes I teach—whether fiction writing, screenwriting, or composition—my focus is on the creation of narrative. My primary goal is not simply to help students become adept at telling stories so they can go off and be professional writers—though, if that’s what they want, I hope to support them in that endeavor. Rather more important, I think, is to frame and discuss the way narratives are created. For even those students who take fiction writing or screenwriting as an arts elective or what they think will be an “easy A,” learning something of a writer’s labor, their aesthetic or formal decisions, or their disciplinary approaches will hopefully help them to comprehend the world around them differently.
Stories matter. They’re deeply significant to understanding ourselves, our culture, our relationships with each other, the way we interpret our history, the underlying logic of the economy, injustice, the environment, and on and on. If there’s one thing that makes humans unique, it might be that we tell stories—though I find myself less and less convinced those stories aren’t being told in every part of the living world. That’s another essay, though. Stories and studying stories helps us to understand how we see ourselves. So for me, the creative writing classroom is about unpacking how that work is created, which requires understanding the confluence of history, philosophy, aesthetics, and craft. Students in a creative writing class are not just learning how to write a story, but the mechanics of how those stories are told.
Embedded in those mechanics are a host of cultural assumptions. We’re sitting at a horrifying moment in human history, a period when our modern understanding of the world is collapsing under the weight of its very tentative structure. Stories erected those walls, and understanding stories—their structures, their characters, protagonicity (what makes a character worthy to be a protagonist), the treatment of setting, and so on—is understanding how those walls were shaped. Those stories are also the tools for rethinking and reshaping, narratives that enforce connection, meaning, love, and (yes, I suppose) transcendence.
In a discussion of the value of the liberal arts, Martha Nussbaum outlined what she called the “three abilities of citizenship.” These are:
“Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about one’s own traditions.”
“The ability to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation—and world—and to understand something of the history and character of the diverse groups that inhabit it.”
“Narrative imagination,” or “the ability to think about what it might be like in the shoes of a person different from ourselves, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.” 19
Self-criticism (the seed of critical thought), connection to a diverse community, and narrative imagination. Maybe these hew too closely to what Zook might call a “skills-based argument,” but it seems to me fundamentally essential to understanding what we’re doing in the liberal arts. What about beauty? What about transcendence? Yes, those, too. But engaging these core competencies through the liberal arts is precisely thinking about beauty and understanding transcendent experience. In other words, finding and making meaning.
An understanding of story is to me about the very thing that makes us human. Something so important in a world where the accelerating automation of narrative (or generative AI, if you must) reveals that our world is built on the commodification of literally everything. Exposing the core human impulse that drives our story-making, that constructs the narratives in which we live, has never been more important.
Cornerstone may very well be providing these undergraduates the holistic education in liberal arts that they promise. I’m certain the professors teaching these classes are dedicated to their work, and I’m certain they’re helping students to make these connections. I do admit to an anxiety about the instrumentalization of the humanities. One of the chief organizing principles of Cornerstone is expressly to “provide context around students’ major areas of study and foster the creative thinking that makes good business and industry leaders.” 20 Does this mean that we’re limiting our reading of Frankenstein to a discussion of medical ethics? I don’t know. I would hope not.
When we talk about beauty and transcendence and ethics and motivation and connection and empowerment—all of these ideals that we turn, again and again, to the humanities to trace—we’re talking about more than the implicit lessons we can peel out of a text. We’re talking about the way a voice speaks to a mind across ages.
I should be clear—the interdisciplinary focus of Cornerstone is great, and I think increasingly we need to make a much more robust argument for the vitality of the humanities. Helping students see how their education in English, history, and philosophy serves them in other seemingly disconnected parts of their life is crucial. But I don’t know that students misunderstand this in the first place—at least, not in any greater numbers than they have in the past. My father has talked about not understanding why he was required to have literature classes when he was studying for his electrical engineering degree in the late 60s.
We live in a culture that has already instrumentalized so much of life. If we already see human cultural production as mere commodity—enough that we can automate it and derive the same flaccid entertainment value from its facsimile—then I’m not sure how comfortable I feel telling students that a few humanities classes will help them to become better citizens and business people. That it will inspire and transform. That it’s going to serve them in some distinct, concrete, reliable way.
But we also live in a world where that instrumentalization means we have to appeal to the student population in some way, and that will mean helping them to understand this connection in explicit terms. It’s something incumbent upon me as an instructor. But it’s an argument that I think we in English departments have been trying to make for a long time. I know they did in Purdue’s English department. It’s where I learned how important that argument really is.
“Where the Humanities Are Thriving.” Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed 29 October 2024, https://sponsored.chronicle.com/where-the-humanities-are-thriving/index.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawGQaeFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVw_dIMDQ61hucWE6uUBLLteyVwsm85SD_KvnRVtUOCWblVL1FzSXRQZ5A_aem_UbIMidJRunqoCQR0pTnKUw
Brown, Jeffrey and Ryan Connelly Holmes. “Purdue program works to revive liberal arts as key part of the college experience.” PBS News Hour, October 21, 2024, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/purdue-program-works-to-revive-liberal-arts-as-key-part-of-the-college-experience.
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
"Cornerstone.” Purdue University, accessed 31 October 2024, www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/cornerstone/index.html.
"Cornerstone Certificate.” Purdue University, accessed 31 October 2024, www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/cornerstone/academics/themes.html
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
Bump, Phillip. “Scott Walker moved to drop ‘search for truth’ from the University of Wisconsin mission. His office claims it was an error.” Washington Post, February 4, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/04/scott-walker-wants-to-drop-search-for-truth-from-the-university-of-wisconsin-mission-heres-why/.
Holden, Megan. “Purdue's head of English to step down” Lafayette Journal and Courier, 24 October 2024, www.jconline.com/story/news/college/2016/10/24/purdues-head-english-step-down/92515592/.
“FAQ.” Purdue University, accessed 31 October 2024, www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/cornerstone/faqs.html
Murley, Sean and Nidhi Shekar. “English department threatened by budget cuts,” The Purdue Exponent, 9 December 2021, www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_7fb84f38-1e6c-5b84-8050-a4a084b05671.html.
Christopherson, Margaret. “Purdue's English head responds to announced halt to graduate program.” Lafayette Journal & Courier, 18 December 2021, www.jconline.com/story/news/2021/12/17/purdues-english-head-responds-announced-halt-graduate-program/6507621001/
Murley and Shekar, “English department threatened by budget cuts.”
Murley and Shekar, “English department threatened by budget cuts.”
Christopherson, Margaret. “Purdue's English head responds to announced halt to graduate program.”
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
Brown, "Purdue program works to revive liberal arts.”
Nussbaum, Martha. “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom.” Liberal Education, Summer 2009, 10-12.
"Cornerstone.”