When we speak of the “liberal arts tradition,” there are only two things wrong with the phrase:  the words ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ There’s nothing wrong in this context with ‘tradition.’ However inapt the phrase, the tradition itself is a fine one – or at least, it’s all we’ve got. We’re talking about a 2,500-year intellectual journey, a stagger-step march of Western Civilization (with many infusions from non-Western cultures, and the enormous contributions, but original and preservative, of Arab scholar)  from the Ancient Greeks to the present.