LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University, an early leader in liberal arts education, will host a faculty seminar titled Twenty-first Century Liberal Education: A Contested Concept, July 26-29. The 17 seminar participants were selected from a pool of over 50 applicants from prominent liberal arts colleges throughout the country. They reflect the diversity within the professorate at liberal arts colleges and include faculty members from Pomona College, Hamilton College and Washington & Lee University among others.
Seminar sessions include “Alternate Concepts of Liberal Education,” “Historical Evolution of Liberal Education” and “The Purposes of Liberal Education: Varieties of Individual Development and Social Engagement.” Participants are asked to consider the application of liberal education principles to enhance their own effectiveness as college and university teachers – in the classroom, in the preparation of course offerings and in the construction of curricula at their academic institutions.
Margaret Anderson, professor of biology at Smith College, will give the opening address, “The Sciences Are Also Liberal Arts.” The plenary speaker is John K. Roth, Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. His address is entitled, “What Matters Most? Liberal Arts Education in Perilous Times.”
Through this seminar, Transylvania University and its Bingham Program for Excellence in Teaching, seeks to contribute to a national conversation on the idea of liberal education and the mission of the liberal arts college in twenty-first century America.
For more information, contact the public relations office at (859) 233-8120.