Politics & Power Quote by Edward Levi

“Genuine” is doing the real work here. Edward Levi isn’t praising the liberal arts as a quaint campus accessory; he’s warning against the way universities quietly turn them into one. As a public servant and university leader in an era when research funding, professional schools, and administrative growth were reshaping higher education, Levi frames the liberal arts college as an organ, not an ornament: it must circulate ideas through the whole institution, and it must be circulated back into.

The phrasing “within a university” matters. Levi concedes the modern reality that the liberal arts college is no longer the university itself (as it once was in older models), but a component surrounded by specialized power centers: medicine, law, business, labs. In that landscape, liberal arts can either retreat into boutique teaching and symbolic “core” requirements, or it can insist on mutual dependence. “Giving and responding” is an argument for reciprocity, not service. The liberal arts should challenge the instrumental logic of professional training; professional fields should pressure the liberal arts to stay tethered to lived problems rather than pure cultivation.

Subtext: integration is political. A “genuine part” has budgetary voice, curricular influence, and prestige that isn’t measured only by grant dollars. Levi is outlining a coalition model of the university, where the liberal arts don’t survive by begging for relevance, but by practicing it across boundaries - shaping how the institution thinks, and letting the institution reshape what the liberal arts dare to teach.