MADISON — Several years ago, I wrote an op-ed for the Commonwealth about the need, the opportunity and the opening for Mississippi Valley State University to become the state’s designated public university for liberal arts. Now is the time to bring this up again to help bring much-needed niche focus at the institution.
Many states have this institutional designation as the distinctively branded university for the state and for aspiring students to study and receive a liberal arts education at a lower cost compared to other private liberal arts colleges. Examples of this are Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, the College of Liberal Arts as part of Louisiana Tech University, the University of Montevallo in Alabama, the College of Charleston in South Carolina, New College of Florida, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, University of North Carolina at Ashville, University of Minnesota-Morris, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and State University of New York at Purchase. All of these institutions are state-supported liberal arts universities or colleges.
Liberal arts at these institutions has nothing to do with being “liberal,” as could be mistakenly and unfortunately misunderstood in today’s conversations, media, dialog and lexicon. A painting at the Birmingham Arts Museum is an original Italian masterpiece from the Renaissance era called “The Seven Liberal Arts.” It is a work of optical images and symbolic illuminations that describe grammar, logic and rhetoric as well as arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. In historic Latin lexicon, we called this the “trivium” and the “quadrivium,” and which, as a scholar, I refer to as the two cerebral domains for navigating the left side and the right side of the human brain — something so critically important for “wider” higher education and preparing undergraduate students for quantitative and qualitative research in graduate school.
The painting at the Birmingham museum graphically displays these pictorial images around human images to make the connections between the human mind and the intellectual domains. This is what liberal arts is truly about.
The Delta is a wonderful place to recreate its vast environment as a living, learning and “leading” laboratory. The Delta’s scientifically enriched agriculture, its cultural history, its geographic backdrop, its artistically sparked innovations such as the blues, and its incredibly warm, consistently welcoming and constantly thoughtful people make the region — and Mississippi Valley State in particular — an intellectually rewarding venue, a reflective learning place and a conducive living space to be educated, engaged and liberated about truly living, learning and leading in life through the pure and the emancipated understanding of historic liberal arts. Valley is perfectly positioned to endeavor this for our state.
First, it would be a perfect place for students and faculty to study the quadrivium and trivium of environmental justice and related science — what can be learned from environments that are agriculturally rich but sociologically poor.
Second, Valley would be a perfect regional place to systemically, synergistically and seamlessly collaborate with Mississippi Delta Community College and Mississippi State University concerning the environmental challenges occurring all over the world amid apparent global-impacting climate change.
Third, Valley would be a perfect academic space for establishing a national “Liberal Arts and Environmental Sciences Learning Center” to draw aspiring students from other states who are currently seeking this type of liberated higher education experience within their states. Given the central location of Valley, many of the students in the Southeast would probably enjoy a nearby higher education experience that is “close enough,” yet “far enough” away from home.
Fourth, given there are few other historically black colleges and universities studying environmental and scientific research, Valley could be the national “HBCU Higher Education Hub” for drawing philanthropic resources, partnering agricultural sectors, aligning together prominent environmentalists, and bringing together faculty as well as students from other HBCUs to the Delta — thus igniting the beginnings of national conversations, global dialog, narrowing gaps between poverty and wealth, and adding to bodies of academic knowledge or literature in the humanities about people, the land they live on, and the environment they live in.
Fifth, Valley would be the perfect global place and living-learning space for drawing international and foreign students who come from similar, if not the same, environmental terrains, eclectic landscapes and agricultural soil as the alluvial soil in the vast Mississippi Delta.
• Joseph Martin Stevenson, of Madison, is a former provost and professor at Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State universities.
