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Under the joint sponsorship
of the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trusts and the American
Academy for Liberal Education (AALE), college and university
presidents, provosts and deans from across the country assembled
with leading foundation representatives on May 19-20, 1998, at the
Kenan Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to discuss the future of
liberal arts education in America.
William C. Friday,
executive director of the Kenan Trust, Michael K. Hooker, chancellor
of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Jeffrey D.
Wallin, president of AALE, jointly welcomed the assembly and
expressed concern for the quality, affordability, access to, and
relevance of liberal education in the coming century. Robert Connor,
professor of Classics at Princeton University and director of the
National Humanities Center, delivered the opening keynote address,
"The Role of Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century,"
emphasizing both the history and proven importance of liberal
education in the creation of responsible, reflective citizens for a
democratic society.
Russell Edgerton, director
of Education Programs at The Pew Charitable Trusts and past
president of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE),
emphasized the failure of the current system of accreditation to
address quality assurance, and called for the more rigorous
establishment of benchmark standards of excellence, and a
"community of evidence" to document effective assessment
of quality in higher education. Richard Ekman, secretary of the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, emphasized both the increasing
relevance of the core values of liberal education to a healthy
society, and the growing public distrust of the higher education
"delivery system" in assuring reliable and affordable
access to such education for coming generations. Both Edgerton and
Ekman emphasized the importance of recognizing and rewarding high
quality undergraduate teaching as pivotal to quality assurance, and
as a traditional strength of liberal arts institutions.
Lee Fritschler, president
of Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA), led a summit roundtable
discussion of presidents and chief academic officers from Bard,
Birmingham Southern, Bryn Mawr, Claremont McKenna, Gettysburg,
Goucher, Hollins, Hood, Lewis and Clark, Middlebury, Reed, St.
John's, Washington and Jefferson, William & Mary and Wofford
colleges, together with Furman, Michigan State, North Carolina,
Samford, and Wake Forest universities. Gordon Haaland, president of
Gettysburg College and incoming chairman of the Council of Higher
Education Accreditation (CHEA), and Thomas Corts, president of
Samford University and past chairman of SACS, spoke of the
importance of promoting the quality and advocating the importance of
liberal education to an increasingly disillusioned and skeptical
public, but questioned whether accreditation itself was the proper
venue for carrying out such measures. Following a lively and
well-informed discussion of these issues, several of the assembled
college and university officials concluded that AALE could and
should play an important role within the existing system of
accreditation without increasing the already onerous bureaucratic
burden of accreditation. As a national association, AALE would
simultaneously be in an advantageous position to educate the general
public on the value and importance of liberal education.
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