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Washington and Lee Installs Virginia’s Largest Solar Power Source
By Kenneth P. Ruscio, The Washington Post, August 11, 2011
As college ranking season comes around again, Washington and Lee University is focused on a new superlative: the ninth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States has just committed to building the largest solar power source in the commonwealth of Virginia. Those two distinctions have more in common than they might at first appear, according to the university’s president, Kenneth Ruscio. “We cannot help but be aware of how some of the decisions that our predecessors at W&L made decades, even centuries, before our time continue to have a critical impact on who we are and what we do today,” Ruscio says. “This is the kind of project an educational institution—particularly a liberal arts institution—needs to raise our students’ awareness that decisions they make today will impact the citizens of tomorrow.”
W&L’s focus on liberal education is what makes it the ideal place to confront issues of environmental sustainability and other challenges for the future, Ruscio says. Meeting those challenges requires knowledge of politics, economics, science, literature, and philosophy—“and an understanding of how all those areas of knowledge come together and are woven into a single problem,” he says. AAC&U has long advocated for this breadth of knowledge and focus on integrated and applied learning as part of its LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes. The solar power project also offers W&L the opportunity to align its institutional practices with “what we preach to our students about their duties as responsible citizens.” AAC&U supports such goals through its Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement initiative, an initiative founded on the belief that the future of our democracy is dependent on an engaged, informed citizenry. Ruscio would agree. “Our motto, Non incautus futuri,’ is not a mere slogan for us,” he writes. “Being not unmindful of the future is our mission, one that seems ever more fitting for this day and age.”
Read the full article online.
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