Yale professor Donald Kagan delivers remarks upon accepting the fourth annual Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education with an introduction by the Honorable Jose A. Cabranes. Professor Kagan implored participants to be freshmen—to approach issues from an independent perspective and to open their minds to a broad range of ideas and philosophies. He warned against being a sophomore, which, as its Greek root makes clear, means self-satisfied, opinionated, and know-it-all. The award was presented on October 17, 2008 in New York City.
ACTA presented our 19th annual Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education to Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and the first female president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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.
I am deeply grateful to the Law & Liberty editors for organizing this Forum on my essay urging the restoration of genuinely higher learning in America’s universities, especially liberal education as a civic education. I am indebted to each respondent for seriously engaging with my analysis of the multi-faceted crisis facing higher education, and my remedies for private as well as public institutions.
Six years ago, a faculty committee at Ursinus College near Philadelphia sat down to review its core curriculum. The usual results of such meetings, some critics of higher education say, are minor adjustments in a smorgasbord of courses that don’t really have much to do with each other. At Ursinus, with 1,500 students and a […]
I am upset that my daughter won’t take an economics course, and that her college won’t make her do so. You will be surprised how few of our nation’s finest colleges–I have a list of 50 in front of me–require general economics for graduation. But let’s first consider the broader issue of liberal arts courses […]
College students around the country are returning to school this weekend. What are they going to learn when they get there? Not what they should, according to a recent publication of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, titled “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading […]
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