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From the Editor: Liberal Learning
Lawrence Hanley
Traditionally, the necessity of liberal education presupposes a tension between the world within academe and the world without. According to this tradition, the world outside the walls of the university and college is dominated by parochialism, self-interest, competition, and instrumental thinking. Through its inculcation of liberal values such as tolerance, dialogue, reason, and sympathy, academe supplies an important counterweight to the corrosive forces of modern society. Within the academy, however, the real debate is not about these liberal values. Practically and philosophically, our profession couldn't function without them. Instead, the fiercest debates within the academy, like the kind most recently associated with the "culture wars," swirl around the best ways to communicate and instill liberal values. The contributors to this issue of Academe assume the value and values of liberal learning, and each is more concerned with the necessary conditions of liberal learning. Or, they ask, what kinds of structures, tools, and resources most effectively institute liberal education?
One distinctive value of liberal education is its emphasis on coherence and connectedness: individual texts, authors, and ideas belong to larger traditions and wider debates. In her article, Barbara Leigh Smith offers a survey of experiments in "learning communities." Each of these experiments involves an effort to connect knowledge across disciplines and, through collaboration, to draw students and teachers into communities that simulate the liberal ideal of dynamic, fulfilling civic life.
In his essay, Douglas Davis describes how new technologies can strengthen liberal learning by connecting dispersed faculty and students through collaborative projects and cross-cultural dialogues. Technology has, of course, often been cast as a threat to liberal values. But like Davis, Mills Kelly points to the ways in which technology can fortify and amplify liberal learning. As Kelly argues, however, the greatest challenge posed by new technologies might be to remind us how much we don't know about teaching and learning.
Less sanguine still are the two pieces by Jackson Lears and Linda Ray Pratt. Lears demonstrates how the greatest threat to liberal education lies not in battles over canons or ideologies but instead in the emergence of a "market-driven managerial" university. The best defense of liberal learning, he says, is a reassertion of the inherent radicalism of liberal education's core values. Pratt's picture of the current and projected slashes to higher education budgets is not for the faint of heart. These cuts will affect all aspects of our professional and institutional lives and will, Pratt implies, place increasing pressure on the perennially stressed relation within universities and colleges between vocationalism and liberal education.
Finally, two articles are included in this issue for their timeliness rather than their thematic propriety. In his essay on racial equity and higher education, Edward Renner advances two startling, well-researched arguments, one about the current uses of "diversity" in higher education and the other about the currency of "access" in discussions of higher educational opportunity. In a time of rapid alterations to our understanding of civil liberties and freedoms, Jonathan Knight offers a history of the AAUP's censure list and a reminder of the struggles over academic freedom that shaped the Association and its role in the profession.
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