Making the Case for Liberal Education

Our Place in the Sunlight: Oregon's Contemporary Public Liberal Arts University

Elisabeth Zinser
Excerpted from Presidential Investiture Address, Southern Oregon University, April 6, 2002

A RENAISSANCE

We are seeing what I believe to be precursors of a renaissance for broad education and deepened understanding about civic responsibility and international justice, about human capacity and world cultures.

September 11 has become the bellwether for all Americans to see and feel our inescapable connection with peoples, histories, places, and ideologies heretofore poorly understood. Across the nation, Americans feel more poignantly and personally than ever the plight of peoples far away. Their suffering is ours, too; their peace and well-being will be ours as well. We want to better understand them and be wisely engaged with them, with all communities of the world. Yet we are challenged to overcome counterproductive instincts of paranoia.

Americans yearn to resolve other troublesome paradoxes of American life: Being the wealthiest nation on the planet and yet unsure how we will protect Social Security for the baby boomers about to retire; being the most powerful nation in the world and yet having a self-centered, "pre-Copernicus view of the universe" ; having large and influential corporations while seeing the scope of the pain when one loses its moral compass; commanding great technologies while suffering persistent illiteracy; experiencing high levels of community volunteerism alongside a deplorable turnout at the polls.

The apparent disconnect between what we care about and our attitudes toward "the System" sets the stage for renewal of principled leadership and broader public engagement in shaping the future of our society, our democracy.

Colleges and universities are uniquely poised to engage this disconnect, and, through our research, our teaching, and our service to the community, to help our society inaugurate a new era of civic responsibility and human progress.

The imperative for a renewal of basic values in quality education is palpable.

Our Case for Contemporary Liberal Learning

For too long, too many students, and too many of those who influence their thinking, have regarded the liberal arts and sciences as a luxury—important sources of knowledge, yes, but not the right preparation for those who seek employment after graduation.

But, change is in the wind, bringing with it a renaissance for liberal education—although in the twenty-first century, it will be taught and applied differently than in its earlier manifestations. It will recognize the practicality of liberal education, moving away from being satisfied to learn just for the sake of knowing. It will be available for all students, not only the self-selected and the privileged.

Southern Oregon University is going to write a new chapter in the history of the liberal arts tradition. In doing so, it will help to meet two of the most urgent challenges for higher education in our era, and they are related: to improve access to high quality public liberal arts and learning and to forge the connection between liberal and professional education.

Our Case for Liberal Arts Colleges in the Public Sector

The United States has achieved nearly universal participation in higher learning; yet, many students of all ages, and especially those from less privileged backgrounds, do not readily seek the kind of education that will build the nation of learners and educated citizens we now must be.

Such education must be at once grounded in knowledge of many pasts, in experience with the present seen differently, and in the quest for wisdom about our shared futures. As we celebrate our successes in the era of access, we must commit our new century to a higher level of expectation for access to quality liberal education by, for, and about all of us.

I turn to an essay written last fall by one of Oregon's most respected business leaders, Mr. Stuart Hall, president and CEO of Liberty Northwest Companies. In it, he lauds the role of private liberal arts colleges in Oregon for their vital importance in the New Economy.2

Mr. Hall points out that the world's economy centers on ideas and that generating new ideas and translating them into business opportunities begins first with "moving ideas in people's minds" through knowledge and critical thinking. He observes, "Many of society's best thinkers and creators . . . are . . . people who've studied in literature, history, music, art."

Approximately forty percent of the workers in one of Portland's fastest growing industries—the creative services industry of computer software, motion pictures, and graphic design—earned their degrees in English literature, journalism, communications, and the fine and performing arts. In other words, this fast- growing industry needs talent trained in the arts and humanities as much as it needs talent from science and engineering in order to fuel its dynamic growth.

This Oregon picture tracks with the national scene. About forty percent of Fortune 500 chief executives in 2000 had graduated from a liberal arts college or earned a degree in a liberal arts major.3

Now, Mr. Hall's message is good, but he too readily assumes that the creativity he seeks is mainly developed in the private liberal arts colleges. Our nation needs just this kind of creativity from its public institutions, especially from its public liberal arts colleges.

Southern Oregon University is a prime resource for this high-quality liberal arts experience, and as such, it must move forward with creative and bold plans to renew the character of public liberal arts education in our new era.

Our Case for Balance and a New Design

Alongside the need to increase access to the liberal arts college experience in the public sector, we are challenged to rebalance and better relate our principal aims for universal education in America. Public policy and public opinion have emphasized work preparation as higher education's most important aim. Preparing students for work and careers is very important. But twenty-first century education for all students must entail more than technical knowledge and on-the-job skills if we are to achieve high ideals for corporate responsibility and just governments. This is a call for renewed balance and a new design.

The aims of a strong liberal education include: developing the intellect and the capacity for lifelong learning; shaping ethical judgment and the capacity for insight and concern for others, our habitats, and the future; increasing understanding of cultures, languages, and societies, and the connections among them; comprehending relationships between landscapes and built environments, institutional systems and conditions of populations; expanding scientific horizons and mastering common scientific literacy and technological competence; nurturing democratic and global knowledge and engagement—and, yes, even reaching out to try to understand adversaries.

Clearly, we want our graduates to be well-prepared for their engagements with this turbulent and interdependent world just as we want them to contribute to their work environments in a dynamic economy driven by honorable institutions.

But how do we do this? Specifically, how do we do this here at SOU?

We shall build a new generation of innovation and excellence in the public liberal arts university where the liberal arts and the professions don't just live side by side, but where they engage, enrich, and renew one another.

Liberal arts majors must acquire practical skills, such as managing and leading change, while professional majors must gain a wider knowledge of cultural, global, and ethical issues. As we bring these two aims even closer together in classrooms, residence life, and community practice, students across majors will help to educate one another and thereby command much higher levels of active, reflective, and collaborative learning.

The case is made especially well by Lee S. Shulman,4 President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Advocating a "hybrid" of the Hutchins orientation to the great books as liberal education for its own sake and the Dewey view of liberal education for the professional educator, he argues, "If we are to preserve and sustain liberal education, we must make it more professional; we must learn to profess the liberal arts." So he looks to professional education for ideas.

Teaching a profession is challenged by the inevitable gap between theory and practice, as any medical student or teacher education student can attest. Theories are powerful and valuable for narrowing or simplifying the field of study, but they rarely explain fully the circumstances of practice. Hence, these students need live experience. The study of cases captures experience for analysis and review and creates a teaching method of theoretically grounded experience that prepares students for the unpredictability of practice.

Teaching a liberal art, on the other hand, is challenged by the inevitable sense of remoteness or irrelevance, as an early student of the Socratic dialogues may complain. The new "service-learning" pedagogy makes liberal education more professional and gives liberal arts and science fields a clinical component or the equivalent to an internship. The study of cases brings to liberal arts instruction the most perplexing problems in contemporary life and work. Cases create a bridge between the rigorous study of theory and the exciting work of hands-on service-learning and internships. In Voltaire's terms, this is the play between the read and the dance.

Shulman explains the benefits of these methods for "professing the liberal arts." Learning is more active, hence more meaningful and memorable. The student learns by reflection, heeding John Dewey's lesson that we don't learn by doing alone, but by thinking about what we are doing and why. And educators employ collaboration so that students "scaffold" on one others' learning.

In the process, this "hybrid" helps students acquire knowledge and skills that are more lasting, reliable, and useful—for them, their careers, and their communities.

Contemporary liberal education must look beyond the classroom to the challenges of the community, the complexities of the workplace, and the major issues in the world. It must seek informed and passionate public service. It must ask students to apply their developing analytical and communication skills to progressively complex problems. It must link theory and practice, real problems and real solutions. It must celebrate cooperative as well as individual performance, flexibility as well as commitment, creation of ideas as well as seizing of opportunities. And it must use the best of traditional liberal arts methods in professional study and the best methods for professional study in liberal learning.

Our Case for Southern

Recognizing that all Oregon University System institutions produce well-rounded graduates and further develop knowledge in the liberal arts, I believe it is vitally important to have at least one Oregon university that offers a public sector alternative to the national, mostly private, liberal arts colleges.

Southern does not seek exclusive rights to taking this place in the public sector. Rather it seeks to be Oregon's beacon for contemporary public liberal arts education so that Oregon is positioned strongly in this sector nationally, with the attendant benefits for its sister institutions and the state's citizens.

Oregon higher education is strengthened by having each of its institutions stand tall in national and international competition within its unique mission and special character, each one excelling in contemporary practices from its position of distinction to reach out across Oregon, the nation, and the world.

Southern Oregon University is well-positioned to provide leadership as Oregon's Contemporary Public Liberal Arts University. Embracing our new era, as president and with my new colleagues, I want to lead a renewed generation of innovation and excellence for contemporary public liberal arts and sciences education. Drawing upon the liberal arts and professional strengths of our university and the new curriculum begun by my predecessors, I will work with the faculty and staff to create a new twenty-first century pacesetting approach for liberal learning in the public sector.

THE BEST OF ITS KIND

Southern is well-suited to become a national leader in contemporary public liberal learning, while grounded in loyalty to its region and state. Why? Because devotion to liberal education is found in its history, it is emboldened in its character, it is in tune with its community, and it is our vision.

As far back as the beginning of this institution's "third incarnation," President Julius A. Churchill insisted on the liberal arts, along with preparation in pedagogy, for his teacher-education students. That theme continued across the generations at Southern as many more fields of study were added and responsibilities for graduate education and research were undertaken. This is our history.

One of the great strengths of the nationally recognized liberal arts colleges is their tradition of small classes, close relationships with faculty, and emphasis on informed independent thinking. Southern has every one of those strengths, nurtured by a faculty with the credentials and passions for teaching and scholarship in liberal education across academic fields. And student learning is at the center of attention in the work of staff and faculty at every level of the enterprise. This is our nature.

But Southern has also crafted a contemporary design for liberal education where classical disciplines meet the professions, where classroom learning meets the community and workplace, where students meet the world, where living and learning blend in the residential experience on campus and in town, where teaching and learning merge in strong mentorship. It teaches through research, and researches through teaching. It imports these values to youth programs and its extensive offerings to senior citizens; and it exports them in its programs at Medford, Grants Pass, Klamath Falls, Guanajuato, and other communities. It is poised to do more in graduate liberal arts and sciences along with its current liberal learning commitments to advanced professional study in applied psychology, business, and education.

Southern's campus is among the most beautiful of liberal arts colleges, with both a traditional character and a technologically rich environment for today's students and faculty scholars. We are expanding our library as a progressive interactive learning resource center connected across Oregon and around the world. Facility expansions for theatre and science will follow, as will new spaces in Medford.

In short, Southern's students experience liberal education as a way of learning across the college experience, in majors and general studies, in the cocurriculum and the formal curriculum, on campus and off campus. This is our character.

Ashland and the region are well-known around the nation and world for the creative arts and culture, just as the area is known for its natural beauty and healthy business climate. The retail, medical, scientific, and educational industries are burgeoning here in no small measure because of the highly educated and increasingly diverse populations, the fine schools, the nationally recognized arts, and, of course, SOU.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival casts the longest and widest beam of light for the arts, and Southern Oregon University intends to be its friendly rival for liberal education. This is the tune of our community.

Our way at Southern is to be "regionally responsive, nationally recognized, and internationally engaged." This is our vision.

We focus and will build on our strengths in both residential learning and community involvement. We enrich our capacity to serve the region by being a strong partner and broker to secure the unique services of other institutions for our region. We do so by forging complementary ties with Rogue Community College, the Oregon Institute of Technology, and other Oregon and northern California schools to expand our reach and to broaden the region's opportunities.

I could give a number of examples in which Southern is on the national stage on Oregon's behalf. I share but one that tells my story of this university's promise in the contemporary public liberal arts mission.

Recently, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) invited our university to be one of ten sites across the nation where a national initiative will be launched in October. AAC&U will sponsor community-campus dialogues to identify and enhance understanding of the educational needs of twenty-first century students. More than 375 colleges and universities have signed on for this Presidents' Campaign for the Advancement of Liberal Learning, but just ten will host the kickoff in October. Southern is one.

I am delighted for Oregon and this institution that we have been singled out for this responsibility, and equally as happy to tell you that President Rick Levine of RCC and President Martha Anne Dow of OIT accepted my invitation for their institutions to participate. Our Chambers have signed on, as well. We shall draw leaders in all walks of life and work throughout Oregon and across our borders for this campus-community discussion about the value and purposes of liberal education. I invite the Board, our sister universities, Oregon's private colleges, the region's community colleges, and local public schools to join us and to bring their colleagues and community leaders into this vital conversation.

Finally, our vision of focused international engagements is inspired most by our thirty-three–year relationship with the Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. From it have come scores of better-educated students from here and there, marriages and friendships that enrich our communities, business alliances, sister city connections, and trade opportunities. And we keep adding dimensions, such as the new SOU Master in Management Program, to begin at Guanajuato this fall. Among all of the international alliances SOU enjoys with Japan, Korea, and other nations, our association with Guanajuato is our flagship.

CLOSING

Before I close, I want to acknowledge that we assemble here today with our morale challenged by difficult and uncertain financial times. But this is a day to reflect upon our good fortunes in being part of Southern Oregon University in this incredible city and region, and to redouble our pledge to serve it well.

We alone can keep or give away our attitudes, and we can use our minds and hearts to make the best of our circumstances.

I challenge us, as the Southern Oregon University community, to do all that we can to encourage investments in our University and to make the best of our circumstances, and then to look beyond them in crafting a future that guarantees this university will be all that it can be for those we serve.

Today, we are "remaking" the history of education and our university by redefining and advancing our battle to overcome ignorance and its resulting tragedies, by creating avenues to richer lives in all honorable meanings of the term rich.

We remake that history by being among the very best public liberal arts universities and by interpreting the juxtaposition of liberal education and professional study with new levels of insight and judgment in our times. We shall succeed in this test of endurance for our University and for American education.

It is a struggle on behalf of our local communities and state. And it is a struggle for democracy and freedom that is worldwide and civilization-long—this great toiling for sustainable human society.

It is a struggle worthy of our best and to which I dedicate my best.

It is a struggle in which Southern Oregon University will be engaged as Oregon's Contemporary Public Liberal Arts University.

This university has been, as our ancestors knew, a vessel more lasting than any of its voyagers. Our charge is to catch our ride by tending to this vessel so that it sails well and long, and to direct its course with the will and wisdom of our entire beings—toward a destiny of merit and meaning.

This is our promise; this is our mission.

Elisabeth Zinser is president of Southern Oregon University.

The Presidents' Campaign for the Advancement of Liberal Learning is supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more information contact Bethany Zecher Sutton at 202-387-3760.