On November 17, 2010, ACTA sent a letter to the chairman of the board of trustees at the University of Arkansas requesting additional information on why the institution is making major cuts to the curriculum of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. We wrote, “Under requirements that stood until recently, a student needed to complete 66 credit hours of core and distributional classes to graduate from the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. These classes ensured that he or she had a sound foundation of knowledge in the disciplines and areas essential for an educated citizen. According to our extensive research, the Fulbright College core curriculum surpassed that of virtually all other colleges in the country; that curriculum placed the University of Arkansas in a league with the United States Military and Air Force Academies, as well as Texas A&M and the University of Texas–Austin. This ranking should have been a point of real pride.”
Brayden Cagle is pursuing an alternative career path after high school. Instead of pondering Plato at a four-year college, he is apprenticing as a heating, ventilation and air conditioning technician.
In this episode of Higher Ed Now, the second of two conversations devoted to core texts, ACTA’s Academic Affairs Fellow Veronica Bryant speaks in Spanish with Clemente Cox, classics and philosophy scholar and the Academic Director of the Center of General Studies at the Universidad de los Andes.
Here’s your task: Make the world better. Determine who needs to be involved, make a plan and execute it. Then devise a means to concretely measure the plan’s societal impact and present the results to stakeholders.
Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.
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