Liberal Education

When the Antioch University Board of Trustees announced in June of 2007 that it was closing the historic Antioch College, we all mourned. Then, as Mother Jones recommended, we began to organize. Our goal was to reclaim the college from decades of dysfunctional government that had resulted in the loss of its institutional autonomy and ultimately its closure. This is the story of Antioch College in Exile, the project which became the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, an unusual one-year experiment in higher education and one of several strategies employed to save Antioch College from extinction—strategies which, as of this writing, appear to have been successful.

When, in response to a call for papers for the 2008 conference of the Modern Language Association, I began to formulate an argument concerning the relationship between assessment and the corporate university, I assumed that writing such an analysis would be (and I hope I will be forgiven this admittedly masculinist simile) like “shooting fish in a barrel.” My intention was in fact to concentrate on something less obvious: assessment as a labor issue, and the ways the drive toward assessment is both explicitly and implicitly an attack on academic freedom. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the spring 2008 President’s Column of the MLA Newsletter, with its defense of assessment (Graff 2008).

Like C.P. Snow's two cultures of the humanities and the sciences, a new bimodal view of higher education is becoming increasingly important at the start of the twenty-first century: one that sees the goal of universities as developing "the whole person" and another that sees it as largely or even exclusively in terms of job training.