Personal Transformation for a World in Crisis   

What lies at the heart of liberal learning? To answer this enduring question, a growing body of American scholarship and advocacy is coalescing around a new key term: “personal transformation.” This term does not appear in institutional mission statements. Nor does it appear in studies of the science of learning, which have long dominated discussions of the business of liberal arts education. But recent work is establishing “personal transformation” as a cornerstone of the liberal arts tradition: John Churchill’s The Problem with Rules (U Virginia P, 2021), Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (Princeton UP, 2021), and Andrew Delbanco’s advocacy through the Teagle Foundation. In this paper, I will develop the term further, clarifying a definition of “personal transformation” and focusing on the mechanics by which that value might be delivered and fostered. Personal transformation is perhaps a uniquely American construct. I observe that context not to ring a note of American exceptionalism. Rather, the term denotes American parochialism, especially the United States’s traditions of small liberal arts colleges, which pride themselves on robust general education curricula and which often make lofty claims to their vital role in harboring democratic institutions. Despite its parochial contexts, however, personal transformation may nevertheless be exportable and scalable to help us meet the crises we face.

Personal transformation is directly applicable to global crises involving polarization, misinformation, and nationalism. The purpose of personal transformation, as my presentation will explore, is not an indoctrination that manipulates a student from one religious view to another, from one politics to another. Rather, the bedrock of personal transformation is the student’s acculturation to Socratic self-examination. When students make habits examining their own values and biases, they open themselves to the possibilities of continuous, lifelong reinventions. As Martha Nussbaum argues in Not for Profit (Princeton UP, 2010), Socratic self-examination is vital to the health and success of democratic institutions. Of the many virtues of Socratic self-examination that Nussbaum identifies, perhaps this one is most haunting for our situations in the 2020s: “Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.” Socratic inquiry, Nussbaum argues, is “unauthoritarian.” Personal transformation is a long-term benefit for the liberal arts student, and it is a long-term solution to acute global crises. Given those long timelines, it is all the more urgent that liberal arts institutions commit to curricula and pedagogies of personal transformation.