Liberal Education: Summer 2013
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Current Issue

Summer2013Vol.99No.3

The Annual Meeting

This issue features annual meeting presentations on the future of diversity, gender equity, and institutional governance. Also included are articles on social identity and privilege, efforts to teach critical thinking online, promoting student learning across faith lines, use of the VALUE rubrics to build community, and college as an intellectual workout.

Table of Contents
President's Message

Defunding Disciplines Basic to Democracy

By Carol Geary Schneider and David Townsend

From 1818 R Street NW

From the Editor

By David Tritelli

Board Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence

Board of Directors, Association of American Colleges and Universities

Featured Topic

Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward: Must This Be the Future of Diversity?

By Johnnella E. Butler
The notion that diversity is a wicked problem that spawns other wicked problems is familiar to anyone who has been actively involved in advancing diversity in higher education over the years and has attempted to solve the problems this noble cause has spawned.

Gender Equity: Who Needs It?

By Caryn McTighe Musil
What is our role—as faculty members, administrators, student affairs professionals, students, presidents, and leaders of nonprofit organizations—in continuing to advance gender equity?

Governance and Institutional Transformation: Some Lessons Yet to Be Learned

By John T. Casteen III
This has been a jarring year for governance and, more generally, for the concept of personal responsibility in US colleges and universities, with two starkly visible cases that trustees and others everywhere would like to understand.

Perspectives

Unpacking Teachers' Invisible Knapsacks: Social Identity and Privilege in Higher Education

By Pamela E. Barnett
Not all our social identities are obvious, but students and colleagues attribute various identities to us—including identities based on gender, race, class, nationality, ability, and sexual orientation. How they perceive us shapes their expectations of us, their interactions with us, and our experience of academic community.

Cultivating Critique: A (Humanoid) Response to the Online Teaching of Critical Thinking

By Matt Waggoner
If we see the capacity for enlightened critical inquiry diminish in the years to come, it will not be because of computers, which, after all, do what we tell them to do. It will be because we lacked the courage to tell computers at what point they must let humanoids do humanoid things.

Cultivating Student Learning Across Faith Lines

By Marion Larson and Sara Shady
At faith-based institutions, students are encouraged to see how what they believe connects with their academic learning and their social experiences, but students may not have many opportunities on campus to interact directly with persons who practice a religious or spiritual tradition different from their own.

The Value of Community Building: One Center's Story of How the VALUE Rubrics Provided Common Ground

By Sarah Jardeleza, April Cognato, Michael Gottfried, Ryan Kimbirauskas, Julie Libarkin, Rachel Olson, Gabriel Ording, Jennifer Owen, Pamela Rasmussen, Jon Stoltzfus, and Stephen Thomas
How can a large research university help students master the knowledge and skills that will enable them to become informed citizens who are able to contribute effectively to our democratic society, and what metrics can be used to define success?

My view

College Should Be an Intellectual Workout

By Jonathan Malesic
Thinking about how athletes train for competition raises questions central to college and university curricula: How does someone become excellent at a complex activity? Is it by practicing only that one activity, or by practicing many different disciplines?

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