This multi-year study of undergraduate engineering education in the United States initiated questions about the alignment of engineering programs with the demands of current professional engineering practice. While describing engineering education from within the classroom and the lab, the report on the study offers new possibilities for teaching…

As one means to combat the dis-integration of the undergraduate experience, the authors make a case for the kinds of integrated education needed to prepare students to respond creatively and with commitment to our society's most critical challenges.

This paper, highlights the forthcoming book "Educating for Democracy." The book articulates the conditions under which political teaching and learning in college is and is not legitimate, making the case that education for political development can and should be conducted in a manner that is consistent with the core values of higher education…

The committee charged with reforming the current Core Curriculum of Harvard University has instead recommended a minimum distribution requirement for undergraduates: three courses in each of three fields. The Core Curriculum was adopted by Harvard in the 1970s with a view to ensuring that undergraduates be broadly educated in seven approaches to…

The authors propose an alternative course for faculty and campus leaders to navigate through the politicized Academic Bill of Rights debate. Liberal education and the values of the academy are about the need to seek and consider alternative conceptions, stances, and views and to consider them respectfully. If a campus is to commit itself to open…

The author asks whether higher education reform has run out of new things to say. The final two decades of the twentieth century were a remarkable period for innovation in undergraduate education. Many of higher education's earlier waves of reform had focused on curricular issues, on what should be taught. The new reformers by and large ignored…

The Carnegie Foundation has developed a new set of lenses for viewing American higher education that broadens description of U.S. colleges and universities. By expanding the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education from a single typology to a set of distinct classifications representing several ways to think about how colleges…

Reflecting upon the previous decade, an advocate for service-learning continues his call for institutional responsibility while taking a look at the progress made. Ehrlich writes that service learning has come of age and suggests three major directions for continued advancement. The first stresses service-learning's value for enhancing academic…

The writer examines the goals, methods, contexts, and outcomes of liberal education, as seen through the lens of the seminar experience. Originally a forum for advanced graduate students, the seminar has become a central feature of undergraduate education and signature pedagogy of liberal learning. Sometimes described in terms of size,…

The authors discuss the responsibility of colleges and universities to make moral and civic learning an integral part of the undergraduate experience. Citing Judge Learned Hand's 1944 comment that "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of…