Meeting new challenges at home and abroad: liberal education's new premium

Liberal Education, Summer, 2006 by Barbara Lawton

I am confident we will recapture the public's imagination and re-center liberal education in our plans for Wisconsin's future. Campus-community dialogues on this very topic are happening across the state. The faculty has been engaged to anchor their courses in the context of a liberal education right in the class syllabus. President Kevin Reilly will soon announce his Council on Diversity, and our state's PK-16 Leadership Council is a natural vehicle through which we could set up a seamless way of thinking about what constitutes adequate preparation to contribute in a knowledge economy.

The LEAP campaign in Wisconsin

LEAP gives us a powerful controlling metaphor to turn all public discourse related to the university into a conversation about how our investment in education connects to our economic outlook. What would success look like?

* PK-12 education will drive more, and more diverse, well-prepared students to pursue a liberal education.

* There will be integrity to our campaign: even as we aspire to determined inclusion to ensure access for a diverse student body, each institution of higher learning must examine its own practices related to equal opportunity for women and minorities in its employ, and bring them into alignment with its goals for students.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

* Undergraduate programs will follow the lead of top business schools, and introduce more interdisciplinary work to foster more creative problem solving in an increasingly complex world.

* Expanded undergraduate research opportunities will underscore and strengthen the relationship between scholarly work, creativity, multiple disciplines, and the community.

* The state will create a visible matrix of opportunity to help students connect the dots between a liberal arts degree and their career aspirations.

* Institutions of higher education will collaborate with the state to define and collect the data necessary to drive effective advocacy with vivid, convincing narratives.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

* The argument for public investment to make a liberal education broadly accessible and affordable will be data-driven and advanced in economic terms. And the metrics to gauge return on that investment will measure progress of both students and of the community and state, and will be checked annually to ensure that we stay on course.

* That argument for investment in a liberal education will emphasize the importance of preserving the independence of our great universities if they are to both rise above and serve the competing interests of those in the private sector.

* There will be a statewide echo of public testimony as to the value of a liberal education, led by the business community, recorded by the media, and repeated in a wide variety of settings by unexpected voices.

* The media will provide ongoing coverage of the campaign as a project of civic journalism.

* We will be strategic: instead of just lobbying legislative leaders, we will create for them a constituency for reinvestment in liberal education, one characterized by a sense of joint ownership, across sectors, for success.