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Education Dive
4 lessons on 'liberal' education's future
Ben Unglesbee
Jan. 28, 2019
Higher ed leaders spoke about the need to take on critics more directly
while also rethinking how the industry conveys its image to the public.
It should come as no surprise that when nearly 2,000 people in the
business of professional intellectualism get together for a few days,
they do a lot of deep thinking about their place in the world.
At this year's annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges
and Universities (AAC&U), much of that thinking had a dark tint to
it, even if the conclusions were optimistic. Speakers in panel after
panel resoundingly confirmed their work's value to the world — that
work being providing a liberal education.
At the conference, titled perhaps defiantly, "Reclaiming the Narrative
on the Value of Higher Education," the question up for debate was
whether the world at-large saw value in a liberal education, and if
not, what could be done to shift their thinking.
Answers ranged from taking the world "liberal" out of the term to
changing what is taught, and how, in order to meet student needs.
Common threads observed by Education Dive show an industry that is
beginning to realize it needs to take on its critics more directly.
'Words matter'
At the conference's opening plenary, AAC&U President Lynn
Pasquerella invoked the "post-truth" era in which higher ed operates
today, as well as a focus on ROI that reduces college to an exchange of
tuition for employment.
She also referenced increasingly negative public attitudes toward
higher education and their degradation over time, especially among
Republicans. In addressing those attitudes and engaging the public,
"words matter," Pasquerella said.
To Brandon Busteed, president of Kaplan University Partners, the words
college leaders use to talk about what they do need to change.
Specifically, Busteed, also speaking at the plenary, said it is time to
drop the "liberal arts" label as a matter of branding.
"If you took the best marketing minds in the world, locked them in a
room and said, ‘Please emerge with the worst possible words to use to
attract students to higher education,'" they would come back with the
term liberal arts, he said.
Busteed broke the term's meaning down. To the extent that people
understand the possible definitions of the words themselves, they defer
to their general use, he said, citing a survey of students' parents.
That means "liberal," like it or not, has a contemporary political
connotation that affects how people perceive its meaning. Many people
also tie the term "arts" to the visual and other fine arts, he said,
although liberal arts disciplines thread through science, business and
other fields of study.
"We know we have a problem with the term (liberal arts). The problem is
in our own communities. We've spent so much time defending the term
that we're not talking about we're doing." Cass Cliatt, Vice president
for communications, Brown University
Not everyone agrees that higher ed should rebrand its offerings as
something other than "liberal." Cass Cliatt, vice president for
communications at Brown University, said in a separate panel that she
heard from one dean who "took exception" to calling the liberal arts
anything other than that and would therefore hold on with her "bare
knuckles" to the term.
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