In a world in which higher
education is increasingly thought as preparation for a profession, being multidisciplinary
in college and especially in graduate school is decreasingly sought and valued by
students at universities in the United States. Unlike in the E.U., where it is
more common for the professional schools to be separate from universities given
the difference between training and education—skills and knowledge—American universities
make it institutionally possible for a person to get a MBA and MPA after a BA
in liberal arts or a BS in natural science, or, less commonly, to get a MBA degree
and a MDiv degree after having studied in the liberal arts and sciences. The MBA
and LLB or JD has been a more popular combination, and I spoke once with a MPA
student at Harvard who already had a MBA from Notre Dame and was considering a
degree in law. I think the benefits vocationally from being multidisciplinary
in one’s formal higher education (i.e., college and graduate school) tend to
kick in only after a few decades after one’s final graduation. Perhaps only in
retrospect does the traces of such an education reveal themselves in a person’s
work-life. I contend that the political aide, pastor, and journalist, Bill
Moyers, is an excellent example of how a multidisciplinary education can enrich
a person’s career, which is not likely to stay “inside the lines” of one
particular industry. This is not a bad thing.
“Billy Don Moyers was born on
June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Okla., . . . His father was an unskilled laborer.”[1]
The son was anything but. As a young man after graduation from college, Bill
Moyers was U.S. “President Johnson’s closest aide,” before serving as that
president’s press secretary.[2]
Moyers resigned from that administration in 1966 at the age of 32 after a
falling out between the two men. Moyers then turned to journalism even though
he had studied “journalism, government, history, theology, and ethics in, he
said, ‘deliberate preparation for a career in public service.’”[3]
That he also “spent two years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Fort Worth, preaching on weekends,”[4]
and was ordained at the age of 25 as a Christian minister is not easily discerned
from his years in public service and journalism, but I submit that the study of
theology and especially ethics undergirded his studies in journalism and
government. That he majored in journalism at North Texas State College and
studied religious history on a fellowship at the University of Edinburgh before
going to the seminary, and then taught Christian ethics at Baylor University made
him what the journalist Ann Crittenden aptly wrote in 1981, “one of the most
complicated men that politics or the media ever produced.”[5]
I submit that his multidisciplinary college education made him so—not his years
in the White House or at the American public broadcasting station, PBS.
In its obituary of Moyers, it
is no accident that the The New York Times mentions that “Moyers, an
ordained Baptist minister, explored issues ranging from poverty, violence,
income inequality and racial bigotry to the role of money in politics, threats
to the Constitution and climate change.”[6]
His interest in theology, as well as the closely related philosophical field of
ethics, can be seen in his choices on topics that he would cover in his “Bill
Moyers Journal” and “Now” television programs. So too can his “soft,” or
normative sensitivity be seen in his decision to work on President Johnson’s Great
Society (anti-poverty) program, and before that, to develop President Kennedy’s
Peace Corps program, such that at the age of just 28, Moyers was second in
command in the Corps. James H. Rowe, Jr, a friend of President Johnson, wrote
to the Peace Corps director, R. Sargent Shriver to praise Moyers as “that
curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator.”[7]
Moyers’ studies in theology and ethics, and in journalism and government,
reveal this seemingly dichotomous blend in distinctly educational terms.
As a journalist, his background in theology was perhaps most relevant, though not broadcasted by him, in his famous series of interviews of the hitherto little-known scholar of religion, Joseph Campbell in the 1980s on PBS. Titled “The Power of Myth,” the six-part series focused on world religions rather than exclusively on Christianity, and Moyer’s own vantage-point as a Baptist minister remained nearly invisible against the journalist’s ethic to draw out and understand Campbell’s theories on what the world’s major religions share in common. It should be no surprise that Moyers, as a journalist at CBS and PBS, was seen by many viewers as “the nation’s conscience” who brought “a sense of moral urgency and decency” to television journalism even as the news business in the U.S. was becoming, as he put it, too much like show business at the expense of journalistic standards.[8] For him to have been able to see this trend even as it was underway before the advent of the very ideological Fox News and MSNBC, the multidisciplinary nature of formal education can be credited for it provided him with a broad enough cognitive and perceptual platform to take into account many different kinds of data. In other words, he could look at the compromises being increasingly made in American broadcast journalism not just from the standpoint of ethical theory, but also the deeper theological implications from the ethical compromises. The grounding of his understanding went deeper than what studies in journalism and political science could provide, and it is precisely such depth, or breadth, that enabled him to go beyond being a political aide and then a journalist to be reckoned as something as fundamental as the nation’s conscience.
2. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
