GLOBAL POSITIONING
Essential Learning, Student Success, and the Currency of U.S. Degrees

HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS

Preparing Students for 21st Century Success

Why Post-Secondary Completion Matters
In the next decade, higher education needs to apply the same kind of rigor, innovation, and determination to success as it has over the last fifty years to access. We need to do better than 50 percent completion rates in 150 percent of expected time to degree. Achieving the goal of increasing completion, while maintaining access and quality, will require innovation and transformation – not business as usual. Join Hilary Pennington of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in examining the evolving landscape of higher education and the importance of creating a postsecondary experience that meets the needs of the modern student competing in a global economy.
Hilary Pennington, Director of Education, Postsecondary Success & Special Initiatives, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Global Positioning: Developing a Strategic Vision for U.S. Higher Education
AAC&U is pleased to welcome Assistant Secretary Eduardo Ochoa, head of the Office of Postsecondary Education at the Department of Education, which formulates federal postsecondary education policy and administers programs that address critical national needs in support of the Department’s mission to increase access to quality postsecondary education. Prior to his appointment, Eduardo Ochoa served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Sonoma State University. As a member of the California State University Academic Council, he played a significant role in system wide strategic planning and academic technology initiatives. He has also served as Dean of the College of Business Administration at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona and Professor of Economics at California State University-Los Angeles.
Eduardo M. Ochoa, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education, Department of Education

How Should We Prepare Today’s Students for a Daunting Global Environment?
Members of AAC&U’s LEAP National Leadership Council will tackle some of the “big questions” facing higher education today. Panelists will draw upon their expertise in three critical areas—STEM education, the global economy, and knowledgeable citizenship—in order to sketch the kinds of far-reaching educational changes that higher education should make to ensure that students gain the knowledge and skills they need to participate as active and engaged citizens in a globally interconnected society. The audience will be encouraged to translate the panel’s sketches into concrete practices.
Moderator: Ronald A. Crutcher, President, Wheaton College
Speakers: James Gentile, President, Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Eric Liu, Co-Founder, The True Patriot Network; Michelle Asha Cooper, President, Institute for Higher Education Policy
All speakers are members of the LEAP National Leadership Council

Bringing New Currency to the Meaning of US Degrees:
The Pros and Cons of Lumina’s Proposed Degree Qualifications Profile
As the United States coalesces around the goal of dramatically increasing the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees, the debate shifts to what is a high-quality degree? American higher education is focusing on learning outcomes and the value of defining a quality degree in terms of student learning. Building on work within the US and looking to international examples, the Lumina Foundation brought together higher education experts to create a Degree Profile that makes explicit what a student with a degree should know, understand, and be able to do. This session will discuss the need for a US Degree Profile and explore what can be learned from the international experience with degree frameworks.
Holiday Hart McKiernan, Vice President, Operations and General Counsel, Lumina Foundation for Education, Inc.; Peter Ewell, Vice President, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; Carol Geary Schneider, President, AAC&U; Tim Birtwistle, Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies and Emeritus Professor of the Law and Policy of Higher Education, Leeds Law School;

Preparing Students for Ethical Complexity
Walter Fluker grounds leadership in story, the appropriation of one's roots, as a basis for personal and social transformation. In his book, Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character, Civility, and Community, he develops a model of the specific virtues that embody each realm of ethical leadership before applying them to the practical aspects of leadership and decision making. In this session, Fluker will outline strategies that can help develop “ethical decision making at the intersection where worlds collide."
Walter Fluker, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership, Boston University School of Theology

Academically Adrift:  Limited Learning on College Campuses
Academically Adrift – by authors Richard Arum (New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia) – questions whether students are acquiring the skills necessary for graduates to compete in the global marketplace. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45% of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, the authors argue that, for many faculty and administrators, they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.
Richard Arum, Professor of Sociology and Education, New York University; Josipa Roksa, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia, and Fellow, National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education

Why Liberal Education and General Education Are Becoming Rising Stars in China
Panelists – all leading figures in promoting general and liberal education reforms in China – will showcase examples of China’s general and liberal education curriculum development programs, discussing the challenges faced by Chinese universities. Increasingly, Chinese educators who promote general and liberal education argue against approaches designed only for competitiveness in the global economy. Instead, they support a more classical liberal education that emphasizes the value of broad learning and humanistic education in cultivating students’ free minds and their civic and ethical responsibilities in an interdependent and diverse world.
Yang Gan, Chair and Professor, Dean of Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, and Dean of Liberal Arts College, Sun Yat-sen University; Sidong Xiong, Professor of Immunology, Vice President, Soochow University; Cao Li, Professor of English Literature and Deputy-Director of Liberal Education, Tsinghua University; Maybo Ching, Professor of History, Chair of Academic Committee of Liberal Arts College, Sun Yat-sen University

The Bologna Strategy for Global Leadership: How—and How Well—Does it Work?
When imagining new environments for global learning, we must pay serious attention to trends in higher education in other parts of the world, such as the Bologna Process. The Bologna Process has been driven by two overarching economic concerns—the need for greater mobility of students and workers and the need for all workers to have much higher levels of skills and abilities. What useful lessons can those of us in the United States draw from the Bologna Process as we struggle to reach similar goals--increased student mobility, access, assessment, and transparency? What trouble spots has Bologna illuminated? What is the relationship between the Bologna Process, the fundamental demands of a knowledge economy, and American-style liberal education, with its emphasis on cross-disciplinary learning and democratic citizenship?
Moderator: Holiday Hart McKiernan, Vice President, Operations and General Counsel, Lumina Foundation for Education, Inc.
Speakers: Tim Birtwistle, Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies and Emeritus Professor of the Law and Policy of Higher Education, Leeds Law School; Carolyn Campbell, Head of International Affairs, The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education; Paul Gaston, Trustees Professor of English, Kent State University; Cliff Adelman, Senior Research Analyst, Institute for Higher Education Policy

How Global Engagement is Transforming Liberal Learning
The increasingly global environment of education gives us an opportunity to rethink what liberal education is. How has increased exposure to other cultures reframed the theory and practice of liberal education in the United States? In what ways is the spirit of American liberal education being implemented abroad? To what extent does the spread of liberal education open up a new dialogue between the cultures of east and west, north and south? This panel offers some examples of how the global context of education is changing the practice of liberal education in the United States, together with examples of how programs of liberal education are developing outside of the Unites States—including in the Middle East, Africa, India, and South America.
Moderator: Todd Breyfogle, Director of Seminars, The Aspen Institute
Speakers: John Danner, Professor, Haas Business School, University of California, Berkeley; Herb Killackey, Vice Provost, University of California, Irvine; Jeff Martineau, President, American Academy for Liberal Education

The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal
The Heart of Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2010) is a call to advance integrative teaching and learning in higher education. Authors Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc propose an approach to teaching and learning that honors the whole human being—mind, heart, and spirit—an essential integration if we hope to address the complex issues of our time. The book offers a rich interplay of analysis, theory, and proposals for action from two educators who have contributed to developing the field of integrative education. In this session, Arthur Zajonc will address the relationship between science, the humanities, and the contemplative traditions, offering a practical approach to foster renewal in higher education through collegiality and conversation.
Arthur Zajonc, Professor of Physics, Amherst College, and Director, Center for Contemplative Mind; author of Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, and editor of The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama

Positioning Students for Success: Institutional Responsibilities
At this watershed moment when the country is confronting the global consequences of our flat line graduation rate, most agree that the future of our nation’s economic and civic health requires a re-investment in a broad sweep of people not yet well served by higher education. It also requires that we embrace new approaches to learning in creative ways in order to bring the full resources of student and academic affairs to the task before us. We dare not ignore what evidence and practice have demonstrated accelerates the persistence and college completion for students, especially for underserved students. Join in a session that examines the recommendations of a national task force that could help shift the coordinates to move us in the right direction.
Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, Executive Director, NASPA—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education

Bringing Liberal Education to Diverse World Cultures: What Endures? What Must Adapt?
One of the most interesting challenges for academic leaders is to define the goals of a liberal education in a global climate of pervasive change. As the higher education enterprise becomes more global, internationalized, and interconnected, the need for new analyses arises: Do new contexts for what we most value in liberal education— the opportunity to educate in each student the capacity to be the best he/she could be, and the relevance of that to society— alter values we have considered to be enduring? How are “universal values” understood and acted on within different societal, cultural, ideological, and institutional contexts? Might there be new and different ways to conceptualize the liberal arts and to develop a liberal arts education as the higher education enterprise becomes more global, internationalized, and interconnected? In short, do new conditions require us to think anew about our own goals of liberal education?
Moderator: Tamar March, Senior Fellow, AAC&U
Speakers: Barbara Stauble, Deputy Rector for Academic Affairs, German University of Technology (Oman); Samuel Abraham, President, Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (Slovakia); Marcia Grant, Academic Planning, The Aga Khan University (Pakistan); and Roberto Moreno, Rector, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala