This article is an exchange of ideas between Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and Tom Klingerstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute and NAS Board Director, on the study "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students" (by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano). This…

The author believes there are three conceptual and somatic (from the Greek, meaning "of the body") changes that could be made in order to better educate the student body and, thereby, help sustain the intellectual and social relevance of the liberal arts as a program of study. First, the commitment to what Sir Ken Robinson has called "the…

Liberal knowledge is indispensable, and expert knowledge alone can be, and often is, dangerously impractical. To make it practical, expertise should always be explicitly related to the real-world political and cultural context that only liberal knowledge can provide. (MSE)

Three faculty members of Concordia University in Montreal, who played integral roles in the formation of a highly successful core curriculum as part of their institution, discuss the logistics, the politics, and the philosophy behind the founding and growth of their Liberal Arts College. For Frederick Krantz, their program is Platonic. The author…

The study of leadership must be multidisciplinary, and the examination of the link between family and leadership should be a primary concern. (MSE)

The historical and potential modern role of rhetoric in a liberal arts education is examined, and it is concluded that the cultivation of the liberal arts is crucial to the courage to be and to become. (MSE)

This paper discusses vocationalism versus a utilitarian view of the university in the context of funding and inclusion of pre-professional writing courses in a liberal arts education. It begins by describing a situation in which pre-professional writing courses for medicine, law, and business might be eliminated, based on their vocational…

For perspective on the interdisciplinary challenge in higher education, it is important to understand the concept and origins of the "discipline." Disciplines are convenient but artificial constructs, and while academia may be divided into them, the world is not. A sense of the balance and connection between them is vital. (MSE)

Becoming an anthropologist illustrates on a large scale how valuable examining other cultures is. Anthropology should be incorporated into the college liberal arts curriculum to help eliminate the ethnocentrism of educated people in our own society but should focus on great civilizations nearly matching ours in complexity, historical depth, and…

College education is essentially concerned with argumentation about interpretations. It depends on and trains for the capacity to assume different points of view simultaneously in order to interpret and predict, and it should celebrate playful acts of imagination. (MSE)

Philosophy should teach respect for reason, respect for the classics, and respect for the radical criticisms of the twentieth century. It is the only university discipline that takes the development of informed discretion as its primary pedagogical task. (MSE)

A curriculum design that focuses on the human sciences, the disciplines that concern themselves with the social and individual activities that are distinctively human, would be a better approach than the current separation of the humanities and social sciences. (MSE)

Cites the Rockefeller Commission's findings regarding humanistic studies. Outlines steps for bringing humanism back to the humanities, e.g., by clarifying the humanities' substance and identity, elucidating a cogent and persuasive rationale for their study, and underscoring the importance of a cultural/humanistic context for vocational training.…

The next generation of Americans will need to understand technology, including the modeling techniques and problem-solving modes developed by technological decision makers. Courses in technological literacy, developed at several institutions (SUNY Stony Brook, University of Central Florida, Lehigh, Penn State, MIT, UCLA) to demystify the applied…

The historical development of the liberal arts college in the United States and its status in the 1980s are discussed. Although for nearly 300 years, liberal arts colleges have been a dominant force in North American higher education, in the 1980s they have come to constitute a small and decreasing portion of postsecondary education. The position…