Despite generations of evidence that a liberal education is one of the most powerful engines of progress, for individuals and for our society, there is growing dismissal and even distrust of what liberal arts colleges do. Recent survey data from the American Council on Education show that the public's perception of the value and quality of a…

Few subjects have suffered as much as the liberal arts from the power of stale rhetoric, hollow appeals to tradition, and journalistic misrepresentation. Leon Botstein, begins this article by saying that together, these three factors have generated and legitimated public skepticism about the liberal arts. A liberal arts education (which is rarely…

Bobby Fong, was president of Ursinus College until his death in September 2014 and is the only person to have served twice as chair of the AAC&U Board of Directors. In this article, his son Collin presents remarks made at the memorial service for his father. Collin describes his father as a man with a mission, and that mission was to make the…

The Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching is a grassroots assessment project designed to promote students' conscious understanding of how they learn and to enable faculty to gather, share, and promptly benefit from data about students' learning by coordinating their efforts across disciplines, institutions, and countries.…

Liberal Education and America's Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College (LEAP), the decade-long campaign launched earlier this year by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), rests on two fundamental premises. The first holds that there is an emerging, if hidden, consensus among business and civic…

The American concept of religion as privileged and private acknowledges that religion can be culturally significant but suppresses informed public discourse about it. The issue of religion polarizes American education, and its study is skewed at all levels of learning. Religion should be taught as a subject, not a method. (MSE)

The American undergraduate arts and sciences curriculum is a great accomplishment, but is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own successes, to its own detriment and society's. Its cultural and intellectual foundations are crumbling and must be reestablished. (MSE)

Keynesian pedagogy, in which the principle of reciprocal causation is coupled with the imperative of increasing personal self-esteem through education, is unworkable and unproductive even after two decades of use. (MSE)

Two generally unexamined premises about education that have contributed to recent disappointment in the outcomes of education are examined: (1) that learning is always pleasurable; and (2) that no difference exists between formal and experiential learning. (MSE)

Despite its relatively recent introduction as part of a liberal arts curriculum, dance education is beginning to be recognized as a serious discipline that fosters a more diversely developed mind and the ability to look critically at cultural symbols. (MSE)