Kimball begins this essay by comparing the start of the "golden age" of liberal arts education as the period between about 1950 and 1975 when American higher education's revenue and enrollments of colleges and universities grew enormously. During the subsequent silver age of academe, ending in the Great Recession of 2008-2009,…

This article examines the prominent narrative asserting that liberal arts colleges have continuously declined in number and status over the past 130 years. Bruce A. Kimball identifies problems in this declension narrative and proposes a revision positing that the decline of liberal arts colleges began only after 1970. Further, he maintains that…

In order to explain the rising cost of higher education, economist Howard Bowen in 1980 proposed his "famous law" of institutional finance. Bowen based his "revenue theory of cost" on a study of aggregate quantitative data extending from 1929 to 1979. Neither he nor subsequent economists asked whether or how that…

Background/Context: Endowments of institutions of higher education in the United States have attracted widespread attention in recent decades due to their meteoric rise in value and their precipitous decline during the recent recession. But there has been little research on the beginnings of the significant interest in and importance of…

Rather than banking enormous gifts, Harvard University built its wealth by adhering to a coherent strategy that gradually became the common sense--the prevailing ideology--of how to build and maintain the wealth of private universities. President Charles W. Eliot formulated this "free money" strategy over the course of his administration from 1869…

A review is presented of the differences between Matthew Arnold's and Thomas Huxley's views on liberal education. (CB)

Case method teaching was first introduced into American higher education in 1870 by Christopher C. Langdell (1826-1906) of Harvard Law School (HLS), where it became closely associated with a complex of academic meritocratic reforms. "Mr. Langdell's method" became, in fact, emblematic, "creating and embodying cultural values and…

Examines the content of THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Wagner, 1983); FROM HUMANISM TO THE HUMANITIES (Grafton & Jardine, 1986); and CLASSICA AMERICANA: THE GREEK AND ROMAN HERITAGE IN THE UNITED STATES (Reinhold, 1984) to illustrate how the historiography of liberal education links debate about the undergraduate curriculum. (GEA)

The rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of liberal education continue to stand in tension as they have since antiquity. The tension arises from the inherent difficulty of reconciling reason and language, the two poles of the Greek concept "logos". (MSE)

Reviews of two histories of American legal and medical education are presented. The books are: "Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s" (Robert Stevens) and "Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education" (Kenneth M. Ludmerer). (MLW)

In a long-standing debate, those who argue that "useful" studies are liberal have often appealed to Franklin, while those who oppose this have usually appealed to Aristotle. Both of these historical appeals are flawed, however, a fact revealing deeper misunderstanding in the contemporary debate. (Author/MSE)

This book provides a study of the historical evolution of the idea of liberal education. The volume portrays this evolution as a struggle between two contending points of view--one oratorical and the other philosophical--that have interacted, often controversially, from antiquity to present. The study attempts to shed light on the meaning of the…

Reviews the influence of liberal education upon legal education, studying the historical process according to which changes of emphasis within liberal education (from rhetoric to dialectic or the reverse) have been reflected in related changes in legal education. (AYC)

Identifies common points in recent research reports on undergraduate liberal arts education and relates them to traditions in the history of education. Concludes that the recommendations of these reports contain important and basic contradictions. (FMW)