FORUMARCHIVES

		AASU FACULTY FORUM ARCHIVES




		THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY: HERE AND NOW (12:15 on Feb. 21, 2001) An informal follow-up to Erik Nordenhaug's faculty lecture ("Where Is the 'Uni' in University?" on February 19), this faculty forum provided faculty and students an opportunity to consider what meaning may remain in the phrase, "a liberal education"--here at AASU in 2001. Forum Handout now available online.








"Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for." --John Henry Newman "A liberal education is not something any of us ever achieve; it is not a state. Rather, it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusions that our education will ever be complete." --William Cronon "I think I am not alone is fearing that the traditional aims of liberal education, reduced to the ideal of general education or core curriculum, have lost their punch. They are too frequently viewed by students as add-ons, nuisances in the road to specialized learning. They are perceived as mechanical contrivances, intended to correct the tendency of learning to move in the direction of specialization, epicycles in a system which has spun badly out of balance." --Stanley N. Katz "[The purpose of a liberal arts education is to] open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, [and] eloquent expression. . . ." --John Henry Newman "Increasingly the boundaries between general education and the major are becoming blurred. Some institutions are acting on their realization that the broad and ambitious goals of general education cannot be met within a small set of discrete courses and are asking both the majors and the co-curriculum to take on some of those responsibilities. At many other institutions, upper level integrative general education courses are taught in ways that intersect and enrich the advanced learning in the major. The rapid growth of interdisciplinary majors and minors accelerates this integrative trend." --C.G. Schneider & R. Shoenberg		Readings on a Liberal Education updated 13 March 2001 The Aims of Education, excerpt from Chapter One by Alfred North Whitehead, 1929 An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education Report of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education, 1993 The American Way by Alan Ryan, Prospect 1999 <"The British university system is in a mess. To combine successfully mass higher education with elite excellence, it must follow the decentralised US model."> Can Liberal Education Cope? by Stanley N. Katz, October 1997 Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University Contemporary Reflections on the University (a bibliography) Contemporary Understandings of Liberal Education, Carol Geary Schneider and Robert Shoenberg AAC&U, June 1998 <full text of report as PDF file> History of the University (a bibliography) How a Broad Education in the Liberal Arts Prepares Students for Today's Job Market, by Nelson Smith, 1996 National Alliance of Business The Idea of a University, abridged John Henry Newman, 1854 The Idea of a University (after John Henry Newman), by Anne Carson, McGill University Threepenny Review, Summer 1999 The Idea of the University: Take One--On the Genius of This Place by Donald N. Levine (University of Chicago, 2000) Liberal Arts and Liberal Education, by Christopher Flannery, 1998 The Claremont Institute Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century, by W. R. Connor, Director of the National Humanities Center A Liberal Education Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond on the Twin Cities Campus of the University of Minnesota Final Report of the Twin Cities Task Force on Liberal Education, May 1991 Liberal Education and American Schooling, PhD Dissertation by Thomas R. McCambridge UCLA 1997 A Liberal Education and Where to Find It, T. H. Huxley, 1868 Liberal Ideals and Vocational Aims in University Legal Education, by Gerry Johnstone, University of Hull Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 1999 'Only Connect': The Goals of a Liberal Education, by William Cronon, American Scholar, Autumn 1998 On the Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education, by Robert Harris, March 1991 Vanguard University of Southern California On Shadows and Realities in Education The Republic, Book Seven by Plato Philosophy of Liberal Education, a bibliography (with links to online texts) compiled by Andrew Chrucky, University of Chicago Politics, Book Eight by Aristotle The Ultimate Despair of Liberal Education, by Lynn Varco with contributions from W. Joshua Lucas The Chicago Maroon, February 1993 What Is Liberal Education? by Mortimer Adler, Center for the Study of Great Ideas "The University, I will claim, no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture. Such a claim also raises some significant questions of its own: Is this a new age dawning for the University as a project, or does it mark the twilight of the University's critical and social function? And if it is the twilight, then what does that mean?" Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1998) "Today it is necessary to sharpen . . . the polemical point that utilitarianism is a threat to utility, and that therefore a rigid application of the utilitarian criterion could deprive the next generation of the very means it will need for the tasks that it will face, which will not be the tasks that this generation faces and which therefore cannot be dealt with by those particular instrumentalities that this generation has identified as 'useful.'" Jaroslav Pelikan. The Idea of a University: A Reexamination, 1991