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Two years before his Gulliver’s Travels appeared in 1726, Jonathan Swift began publishing a series of six letters deconstructing a British scheme to debase Ireland’s currency and weaken its trade. Writing under the pseudonym of M.B. Drapier, Swift attacked a patent granted by the British Parliament to William Wood that would flood Ireland with flimsy copper sixpences. Swift clearly understood Sir Thomas Gresham’s famous principle that bad money drives out good.
Gresham’s Law has proven popular in many fields other than economics. Artists have always recognized how bad art drives out good; readers have found that simplistic, popular writing often drives out great books; and voters have recently come to realize how mindless, divisive political campaigns often drive out good candidates and serious debate. Even scientists now realize how ideologically driven, non-empirical theories about evolution or the climate can force solid science out of our schools.
In much the same way, the phrase liberal education has begun obliterating more precise and meaningful terms. At first I assumed that in using it, those public intellectuals who regularly gather to redefine higher education or set benchmarks for it had merely found an abbreviated way of describing a liberal-arts education, as when the November 21, 2004 online Boston Globe reported that Harvard professor Louis Menard questioned whether the “firewall” between liberal education and a university’s professional school is either “sustainable or desirable” during a conference at Dartmouth.
Maurice O’Sullivan, Kenneth Curry Professor of Literature at Rollins College, has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books on Florida, popular culture, Shakespeare, religion, and pedagogy. A former teamster and jail guard, he is also the director of the Florida Center for Shakespeare Studies.
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