by Perry Glasser English Department Conversations about the nature and value of the liberal arts grow shrill because the poles of the conversation encompass no middle ground. When no compromise is possible, collaboration is difficult. The best an academic community can hope for is uneasy mutual tolerance. Alas, when money is scarce, tolerance vanishes. The Traditionalist [...]

[Read more →]

By Michael A. Deere Philosophy Department I often joke with my students that the discipline of philosophy is perhaps the only one in which a living is made off of not knowing the answers to the questions that we pose.  Philosophers excel at not knowing.  One need only mark Socrates on this score: The wisdom [...]

[Read more →]

By Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello Department of Interdisciplinary Studies “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” —Albert Einstein “To be liberally educated is to be transformed.” –From statement on “Why Study the [...]

[Read more →]

By Robert E. Brown Communications Department No. Not that L word – the stigmatizing term that has scared many principled people into avoiding being called “liberal,” and rebranding themselves as “progressive.” The liberal that concerns me is the time-honored and endangered institution: a liberal education. In the era of No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, [...]

[Read more →]

By Jude V. Nixon Dean, School of Arts and Sciences The essays appearing in this issue of ASpect, different and distinct as they are, coalesce nicely around the value of the humanities and a liberal arts education. There has been no shortage of essays and books in the last year coming to the defense of [...]

[Read more →]