This issue is devoted to the curriculum guidelines from the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. These guidelines provide a coherent and important model for computing education within a liberal arts context, giving primacy to critical reason, rigorous methods, and student engagement in the research process. In this regard, they are at the same time both conservative, by giving low priority to the latest technologies, and radical by resisting the managerial impulse that at its worst commodifies and devalues higher education.