Press Release

CONTACT: Debra Humphreys
(202) 387-3760
Email: humphreys@aacu.org

Major Carnegie Corporation Grant Supports Center for 21st Century Liberal Arts Education

New Center Expands Scope of AAC&U's Greater Expectations Project

Washington, DC—June 9, 2000—The Carnegie Corporation of New York has awarded the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) a $1 million dollar, multiyear grant to create a Center for 21st Century Liberal Arts Education. The Center will serve as a core component of AAC&U's Greater Expectations initiative to advance the 21st century aims and purposes for undergraduate liberal education.

Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College is a far-reaching, multiyear initiative that will systematically define outcomes and discover strategies to improve undergraduate student learning.

The center will create the campus-based action agenda for the initiative. Focusing on pedagogical practices, curricular design, and institutional praxis, the center's work will improve student achievement of essential outcomes across consecutive levels of study, from high school, through general education, to advanced study in a major field.

"We're delighted that the Carnegie Corporation is supporting us in this ambitious enterprise on behalf of liberal arts education," said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. The center will be an essential element of the association's work in setting greater expectations for college level learning, and a major resource for campuses and communities engaged in improving educational quality for all students.

AAC&U will launch the center with the selection of 20 leadership institutions. These 20 educationally distinctive campuses will form a Consortium on Quality Education and reflect a wide range of institutional types and serve as exemplars of comprehensive innovation in undergraduate education. In academic year 2000-2001, consortium members will host a series of best practice seminars under the heading the Forum on 21st Century Liberal Arts Education Practice. The seminars will include both college faculty and high school teachers, who will identify successful practices that help students achieve important learning outcomes, such as the capacity to integrate knowledge and solve new, unscripted problems.

Finally, the grant will enable AAC&U to launch an annual Summer Institute on Sustainable Innovation in the Liberal Arts. Campus teams selected to attend the institute will work on building institutional culture and infrastructure supportive of higher student expectations and performance.

Andrea Leskes, AAC&U's vice president for education and quality initiatives, will lead the Greater Expectations initiative with support from President Schneider and a team of AAC&U colleagues representing complementary initiatives. AAC&U colleagues include Jerry Gaff, vice president for education and institutional renewal and director of Preparing Future Faculty (PFF); Alma Clayton-Pedersen, assistant to the president and senior policy director in AAC&U's Office of Diversity, Equity and Global Initiatives; Ross Miller, director of programs, Greater Expectations; Debra Humphreys, director of programs, AAC&U's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives, and editor of Diversity Digest; Debbie Yarrow, program associate, Greater Expectations; and Robert Shoenberg, AAC&U senior fellow and director of AAC&U's General Education and Transfer Initiative.