Press Release

Contact: Debra Humphreys
Vice President for Communications
and Public Affairs
202.387-3760 ext. 422
humphreys@aacu.org

Is Liberal Education Making a Comeback?
How Important Will It Be in the 21st Century Academy?

Nearly 1500 College Leaders Gather to Map the Future of the New Academy and a More Practical and Engaged Liberal Education

Washington, DC—January 23, 2004—In recent months, everyone seems to be talking about liberal education. Since last year’s release of AAC&U’s groundbreaking report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, organizations and national education leaders across the country have engaged in lively debate about the vision presented in this report and the future of liberal education in a changing society. Dozens of campuses have hosted discussions of the report with business, educational, and civic leaders in the past year.

Those discussions continued this week at the largest annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities ever held. The Association is the leading voice and force for liberal education in the nation and is entering its 90th year serving American higher education. Demonstrating at once the concern within the academy about the future of liberal education and its importance in today’s society, the meeting drew to Washington, DC nearly 1,500 educational leaders and practitioners from across the entire range of higher education institutions.

“Many people have considered the liberal arts an endangered species,” observed AAC&U president, Carol Geary Schneider. “But AAC&U’s Greater Expectations vision helped them see that we are already reinventing liberal education to embrace 21st century challenges, just as our predecessors redesigned it a century ago. The large number of people who attended this year’s meeting are clearly excited by that discovery and its possibilities.”

Attendees of the meeting participated in sessions and workshops that assessed the central premises of this new vision for college learning and debated and discussed the practical implications of four broad and challenging claims about the future of undergraduate education, including that:

Liberal education is the most appropriate form of education for all of today’s college students and will best prepare them for a complex and rapidly changing world.

Liberal education in the 21st century must look beyond the classroom to the world’s major questions and ask students to apply their developing analytical skills and ethical judgment to significant problems in the world around them.

America’s professional creativity and economic strength depend on the quality of liberal learning in its colleges and universities.

Liberal education must take new responsibility for ethical obligations and civic responsibilities in every field of study.

AAC&U’s vision of a practical and engaged liberal education for the 21st century takes undergraduate education in some new and challenging directions even as it reasserts some core values that many believe have been damaged as college attendance rates have soared and competitive and market forces have become more influential in the academy.

Examining the future of liberal education and the new academy, this year’s AAC&U annual meeting was organized around three themes—deepening knowledge, pursuing justice, taking action.

The meeting’s themes reflect an emerging conviction within higher education that the academy must do a better job of providing all college students with more engaged and substantive learning experiences. The meeting sessions revealed an emerging new academy poised to do just that for more and more college students. New curricula and teaching strategies are helping many students today to develop strong analytical and communication skills, honed “across-the curriculum” and at progressively more sophisticated levels. Students are now being challenged to learn how to make sense of complexity, how to find and use evidence, and how to apply their knowledge to new problems and unscripted questions. The meeting’s theme also reflects, however, the importance of social responsibility and civic engagement as key elements in a 21st century liberal education. Sessions at the meeting revealed the myriad ways in which faculty at every kind of college and university are providing students with real-world experience, rich opportunities to address social problems in cooperation with others, and programs to develop their intercultural skills and commitment to building a genuine democracy marked by equity, diversity, and excellence.

“The question is not whether liberal education matters,” commented Jack Noonan, AAC&U Board chair and former president of Bloomfield College in New Jersey, a campus that serves many low-income students. “The question is whether we can help all our students reap its benefits. Liberal education is now a new frontier for social justice."

Featured Speakers included:

• Alexander Astin, Director, Higher Education Research Institute and the Spirituality in Higher Education project, University of California, Los Angeles
• Paul Boyer, author of College Rankings Exposed: The Art of Getting a Quality Education in the 21st Century
• Nancy Cantor, Chancellor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Tony Chambers, Associate Director, Kellogg Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good
• Anne Colby, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Thomas Ehrlich, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Stanley Fish, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Mary Hartman, Director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership, Douglass College, Rutgers University
• Freeman Hrabowski, President, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• Walter Isaacson, President, The Aspen Institute, former Chairman and CEO, CNN, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
• David Kirp, Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, author of Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
• Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
• Martin Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago
• Azar Nafisi, Visiting Professor, Johns Hopkins University, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Featured sessions addressed such topics as:

• Liberal Education and the Professions
• Liberal Education and the Arts of Democracy
• Liberal Education From An International Perspective
• Civic Engagement and Religious Diversity
• Reaching the Nation’s Unprepared Students
• Purposeful Pathways for Learning from High School to College
• How Higher Education is Failing America
• Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
• College Rankings Exposed
• Rewiring Liberal Education
• The Liberal Arts as Leadership
• Engaging Students in Grassroots Democracy
• Embedding Civic Learning in the Curriculum
• Service Learning, Diversity, and Social Justice
• Diversity and Democracy: The Unfinished Work

Additional conference highlights included a pre-conference symposium, “Journey Toward Democracy: Power, Voice, and The Public Good;” a public forum on “Moral and Civic Education: The Role of Higher Education?” and a college presidents’ forum on “Pluralism, Leadership, and the Arts of Democracy.”

For more information and a full schedule of events, see www.aacu.org/

AAC&U is the leading national association devoted to advancing and strengthening liberal learning for all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Since its founding in 1915, AAC&U’s membership has grown to more than 1000 accredited public and private colleges and universities of every type and size.

AAC&U functions as a catalyst and facilitator, forging links among presidents, administrators, and faculty members who are engaged in institutional and curricular planning. Its mission is to reinforce the collective commitment to liberal education at both the national and local levels and to help individual institutions keep the quality of student learning at the core of their work as they evolve to meet new economic and social challenges.