Why Middkids Should Work on Enviro Campaigns

Making its way around the interwebs recently is a call for “the new liberal arts” — the idea that “a generation of digital natives” has not only new “responsibilities as employees, citizens, and friends” but also “new capabilities” which must be expanded upon to create a new type of liberal arts degree. In wide-ranging web articles, bloggers and others make pitches for “new liberal arts that are smart, provocative, insightful, surprising, and/or funny.”

This is my pitch.

Middlebury teaches old school liberal arts: critical thinking, writing, reading, etc. That needs to stay. Those skills still matter and will always matter. But the new liberal arts can be found bubbling up in the various environmental campaigns of Middlebury. Under the wings of Bill McKibben, Jon Isham et al., grassroots web-centric environmental projects (starting with Step It Up!, most recently with Powershift and 350.0rg) have provided opportunities for Middlebury students to develop the new-school skills that layer on top of the traditional liberal arts background. These skills include: web activism, collaborative , social networking, finance, political activism, web design, creativity, media arts (photography, video, etc.), and digital communications. Chatting with one of the Midd organizers of Powershift ’09, I quickly realized the effort needed to 150 Middkids in DC on Feb 27, 2009. Scale that up: what would it take to put 150,000 people there? What would it take to get 1.5 million people to pay attention?

These new liberal arts skills are not being taught in the classroom and maybe shouldn’t be taught in the classroom. But Middlebury needs to consciously create and push opportunities for students to learn these skills before hitting the job market. Environmental campaigns are a start, but why shouldn’t Middkids be the ones starting companies while still in school or penning foreign language magazines?

To train students, we need to rethink how we reward credit. Why aren’t adequate summer internships awarded credit? We’re not talking about giving academic credit for being a golf caddy, but just like we give credit for J-term internships, why don’t we reward experiential learning? Rewarding and promoting experiential learning should be at the centerpiece of a new liberal arts degree.

Can a Middkid be successful post-grad without working on a environmental campaign? Yes. But these new liberal arts skills are what will enable the Millenial generation to move from thinking about getting a non-cubicle job to actually getting a non-cubicle job. Conveniently enough, Middlebury is creating for itself a community of environmental alumni that go to work for the likes of 1sky.org and brighterplanet.com.

MiddBlog wants to know: what do you think should the new liberal arts at Middlebury look like?