Deukmejian Makes Plea for Liberal Arts : Governor Cites Dangers of Merely Making Students ‘Employable’

Gov. George Deukmejian made a strong pitch for a return to liberal arts education Saturday, saying that the current infatuation with high-tech courses may “all too often serve to drastically limit a student’s overall knowledge and abilities.”

Deukmejian also suggested Saturday that if Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) does not want to stash away large amounts of campaign contributions every year, he does not have to. “There’s nobody who’s making the Speaker go out and raise all that money,” Deukmejian said.

The governor was chiding Brown after the Speaker, on Friday, had criticized Deukmejian for not exercising proper leadership in the area of public financing of political campaigns.

The governor--himself a product of a small upstate New York liberal arts college--told members of the National Institute of Education meeting in Los Angeles that “the first order of business for higher education must be to teach students how to learn, to equip them with those fundamental verbal, mathematical and communication skills so that they can function as productive, well-rounded adults in society.”

Noting that graduate school entrance tests have shown marked declines in 11 major subjects between 1964 and 1982, Deukmejian said that it makes no sense to simply make students “employable” if they cannot also “adequately read and write and communicate and compute, (and) fully comprehend our history and our values.”

“Specialized courses may be helpful in the first job a student gets out of college, but as we all know that is not necessarily the only job you will have all your adult life,” said the governor, a 1949 graduate in sociology from Siena College in Menands, N.Y.

“It is advisable to have a good foundation in the liberal arts. I don’t want to say that (the liberal arts) should be exclusive, but I don’t think it should be overlooked or ignored.”

On Friday, Speaker Brown complained during a seminar on money and politics that there is a crucial need for public campaign financing if legislative leaders such as himself are ever to shake loose of the need to continually collect large sums of money to finance their colleagues’ political races.

Brown lamented that he has to raise $3,000 a day if Democrats are to keep control of the Legislature.”

Chides Governor

“But it is just as clear,” Brown said Friday, “that the public is not prepared to support (public financing) without a considerable amount of educating and a considerable amount of legislative leadership. . . . We have to have a governor who is prepared to say there should be public financing of campaigns. . . . I don’t think George Deukmejian is interested in that.”

Deukmejian confirmed Saturday that he, indeed, is not interested in public campaign financing.

“The difficulty is two-fold,” the governor told reporters after his speech. “One, the taxpayers don’t support the idea . . . and secondly, there would be a decided advantage to the incumbent.” Deukmejian also said that there are court decisions “which indicate limiting contributions is an infringement on freedom of speech.”

“I think it is unfortunate that in recent years--and it’s not just Speaker Brown, it’s other legislative leaders, as well--that they have felt that the only way they can retain their position of leadership is if they go out and raise a lot of money. . . .”