Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Stiglitz

Institutional boilerplate becomes more revealing when you remember who’s speaking. Joseph Stiglitz isn’t a campus tour guide; he’s a Nobel-winning economist whose career has been spent interrogating how institutions shape opportunity, power, and inequality. So when he reaches for the tidy line - “committed to providing students with a broad education” - the banality is the point. It’s an economist’s reminder that “education” isn’t just job training; it’s a social technology.

“Liberal arts” signals a wager against the narrow human-capital story that dominates higher-ed marketing: learn X skill, earn Y salary, justify Z tuition. Stiglitz’s work is steeped in the idea that markets don’t magically allocate resources fairly or wisely without informed citizens and competent governance. A broad education, in this frame, isn’t indulgent; it’s infrastructure. It trains people to read data and rhetoric, to notice incentives, to understand externalities and tradeoffs - the stuff that keeps democracies from outsourcing their judgment to spreadsheets and pundits.

The subtext also nudges at Amherst’s brand and anxiety. Elite colleges sell “breadth” as moral distinction: we’re not a credential mill, we’re a place that makes whole people. Yet “committed” is doing heavy lifting, implying a promise under pressure from specialization, STEM fetishization, and parents asking for ROI. Stiglitz, famously skeptical of simplistic efficiency claims, is implicitly defending the liberal arts as an antidote to technocratic tunnel vision: a way to produce not just workers, but citizens who can see the system they’re inside.