Liberal Education, Spring 2006

Current Issue

Spring2006Vol.92No.2

Academic Freedom

Among the articles on the featured topic is an official statement from AAC&U’s board of directors, as well as three responses to it. Also included is a discussion of the relationship between academic advising and liberal learning, a report from two engaged learning experiments, and a look at an institutional change initiative designed to foster "equity-mindedness."

Table of Contents
President's Message

Why "Balance" Is Not Enough

By Carol Geary Schneider

From 1818 R Street NW

From the Editor

By David Tritelli

Featured Topic

Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility

A Statement of the Board of Directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities

Responses to the AAC&U Statement

By David A. Hollinger, Anne D. Neal, and Bruce Robbins
The authors offer three different perspectives on the Statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility.

Politics, Academic Freedom, and the General Counsel’s Office

By Gary Wihl
Because of the conflation of academic freedom and First Amendment freedoms, and because of the escalation of controversy into litigation, university administrators deal less and less with actual political problems and rather more with politicized speech and risk management.

Freedom, Diversity, and Global Citizenship

By Grant H. Cornwell and Eve Walsh Stoddard
Students have to learn both how to think critically about their own positionalities and how to engage various other perspectives on the issues they seek to understand and to judge. This need for multiple perspectives is the grounds of a global epistemology; it is also the most basic argument for diversity in liberal education.

Listening to Understand

By Lee Knefelkamp
This simple exercise helps students treat each other with respect—especially when the topics are controversial. And it helps students begin to understand the intellectual tasks required of them.

Liberal Education and America's Promise

Teachable Moments: Advising as Liberal Learning

By Ned Scott Laff
The advising process offers perhaps the best opportunity for helping students become more intentional about their own educations, as well as for helping them to recognize the value of a liberal education. To make the most of this opportunity, advising must be reconceived as liberal learning.

Perspectives

Engaged Learning across the Curriculum: The Vertical Integration of Food for Thought

By Troy Duster and Alice Waters
Two experiments—one at the K–12 level, in the public school system in Berkeley, California, and the other at the undergraduate level, at Yale University—draw on the pedagogically engaging aspects of cultivating, cooking, and eating food.

Contextual Problem Defining: Learning to Think and Act from the Standpoint of Equity

By Edlyn Vallejo Peña, Estela Mara Bensimon, Julia Colyar
Researchers at the Center for Urban Education have developed and pilot-tested an institutional change intervention designed to increase awareness of the differences in educational outcomes across racial and ethnic groups, and to encourage “equity-mindedness” in campus members who seek to eliminate them.

My View

Milton's "Areopagitica" and Freedom of Speech on Campus

By Daniel F. Sullivan
Has there been anything really new to say about freedom of speech since Milton wrote in defense of it over 350 years ago?

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