Liberal Arts Program Transforms Graduate to Advocate

Published February 17, 2025

For a ‘Renaissance soul’ like Master of Liberal Arts alumna Cheryl Sadowski ‘23, the Johns Hopkins experience has reinforced her stance on the true value of a liberal arts education.

Now a self-professed ambassador and advocate of the liberal arts, Sadowski is a volunteer with the Center for Humanities Communication. She is developing a series of blogs highlighting the perspectives of those who have developed a similar point of view through their personal studies of the liberal arts and humanities.

It is a full-circle moment for Sadowski who can trace her long-held interest in the holistic, interdisciplinary advantage of the liberal arts to the local branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library. She can still conjure up the sight, smell, and feel of the trolley of books that she dutifully wheeled and shelved as a high school library docent, not far from her childhood home in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

“Even at that young age, it became apparent to me that everything was connected to everything else,” Sadowski said.

“Working at the library was my earliest realization that I was interested in the world of ideas in a very broad way. I always felt hard pressed to pick between literature and history or philosophy over art. They were all so wonderful to me.”

Nearly four decades later, after exploring these interests casually by enrolling in an occasional class or through personal reading, Sadowski formally enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program at Johns Hopkins University.

“I decided in my early fifties that I wanted to go back to school and deepen my knowledge of the humanities and liberal arts. A lot of people asked me, ‘Why?’ ‘Why not get an MBA or a degree in organizational behavior?’ ‘What does a liberal arts degree have to do with the real world?’,” recalled Sadowski.

With an undergraduate degree in journalism, she had built an enduring and successful career as an advertising account manager, marketer, branding expert, storyteller, senior leader, and, most recently, consultant, with stops in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. Based in Northern Virginia for the past 25 years, she continues to help organizations and individuals clarify their values and vision by crafting messaging that articulates those things in compelling and effective ways.

The time had come to concentrate on her own personal branding.

“My answer to all those who questioned me was ‘The liberal arts have everything to do with the real world’,” she said. “Understanding political philosophy, all the way back to Aristotle, helps you to understand the United States’ political philosophy today. Learning about the evolution of medieval England helps you understand how nations are born and how fluid borders are. Learning about different religions and different art forms helps you appreciate the perspectives of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds. I’m interested in the world, in all its cultural and philosophical permutations. That is what drove me to enroll.”

Sadowski also was confident that the liberal arts route would be a better path since she already had amassed so much practical experience in budgeting, hiring, communications, decision-making, and leadership through her professional career.

“I craved a different kind of education, and even more so than that, a different kind of conversation,” she said. “After so many years in marketing and communications, you get used to speaking a certain lexicon – value propositions, channels, target-audiences, analytics. After decades of looking at things through that lens, I wanted to have conversations about the history of ideas and knowledge. I chose the Hopkins MLA program, and it delivered!”

Through the Hopkins’ online MLA, Sadowski became reacquainted with classical philosophy and comparative literature. She was introduced to Islamic art and architecture and Anglo-Saxon hagiography. She dove into Western political theory and the origins of capitalism, and used the metaphor of geological time as the basis of her capstone portfolio to demonstrate how cultures inform and influence other cultures.

“When you are a writer and a storyteller, you have an ‘I’ and an ‘eye,” she said. “You use the capital I to look inward, while you use your eye to look out into the world. The MLA program helped me to bring those two ways of seeing together. Not everything we learn needs to be connected back to productivity or performance. Some things we do to enrich our souls and ourselves. That is largely why I pursued this degree, But, having said that, there is no doubt that my liberal arts education has made me a better storyteller. I’m more apt to see and integrate patterns and commonalities that allow me to write, speak, and bring people together in new ways. I learned to marry the ‘I’ with the ‘eye’ and bring it to life, both professionally and personally.”

Sadowski also attests that the MLA has built up her confidence to write creatively. In addition to her continued professional work as a communications consultant, she is more frequently and more extensively flexing her creative muscle through writing art reviews, personal essays, and short works of fiction. And yes, she is now working on a novel.

“Before I enrolled in Johns Hopkins, I drew a thick line,” Sadowski said. “This is my work life, and this is my personal life. And as I have aged and grown, I have found that organizational storytelling, the liberal arts, and humanities complement each other beautifully. The borders are very porous. I might never have experienced that depth of connectivity had I not gone to the MLA program. I am grateful that I was embraced by faculty who were receptive and reflected my passion. The Hopkins MLA courses are so varied and valuable because they are taught by expert scholars who encourage plurality in thought and dialogue.

“Critical thinking about knowledge and ideas really matters,” Sadowski continued. “The humanities and liberal arts build character, perspective, and equanimity, and the world really needs these attributes. But these programs are under threat from society, government, and even educational institutions themselves, who must justify why they should continue to be funded. I want to celebrate the liberal arts and sing their benefits from the hills.”

Read Cheryl Sadowski’s three-part series on the value of liberal arts, that was published in the Liberal Arts Lighthouse blog in 2024, on her website.