Michael Berube’s seminal AHHE article ‘The Utility of the Arts and Humanities’

In 2003 in AHHE vol 2 (1) Michael Bérubé challenged us all to think about ‘The Utility of the Arts and Humanities’: http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/2/1/23.abstract

So, as we meet the current Special Issue’s challenges about and advocacy for

AHHE 14 1 NEW ISSUE: FORUM ON THE PUBLIC VALUE OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH

 Open Access for a Limited Time only!

we look back to Michael Bérubé’s seminal AHHE article:

‘The Utility of the Arts and Humanities’

Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and self justifying endeavors that no one need bother explaining why such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disciplines devoted to the varieties of human cultural expression rather than to the research and development of patentable forms of knowledge. This essay explores this ambivalence and suggests an alternative way of thinking about the ‘utility’ of cultural work.

http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/2/1/23.abstract

 

The LEAP Challenge What part should Humanities and Arts Play?

aacu-logoWashington, DC—January 22, 2015—The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) opened its Centennial Annual Meeting looking to the future.

Marking its 100th year of leadership for liberal education and ten years of educational reform and advocacy through its groundbreaking national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), AAC&U today launched the next phase of LEAP with a bold national challenge to higher education to prepare all college students to produce “Signature Work”—a project related to a problem important to the student and to society.

AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider told the 2,000 educational leaders who gathered for AAC&U’s Centennial Annual Meeting that the “challenge of our time is to ensure that all college students are well-prepared to tackle unscripted problems with the broad knowledge and cross-cutting skills that will help them flourish in today’s world.  We need to redesign our curricular pathways so that all students—at two and four-year colleges alike—experience multiple, high-impact assignments and projects that prepare them to integrate and apply their learning to complex questions and problems. Students’ “Signature Work” should become the new marker of quality in higher education.”

As it issues its LEAP Challenge, AAC&U also premiered today a Centennial Video featuring the power of an engaged, public-spirited liberal education to transform students’ lives and address the “big questions.”  Featuring the voices of educators, business leaders, and students at AAC&U member institutions, the video shines a spotlight on a 21st-century liberal education and how “signature work” can help all students develop the capacities they need for future success and leadership.  Go to www.aacu.org/centennial/video to view AAC&U’s Centennial Video.

George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington and member of the LEAP National Leadership Council declared: “The point of a liberating education is to prepare students to deal effectively with complexity, diversity, and dynamic change.  Given economic and global trends and challenges, postsecondary institutions must equip students to analyze and use evidence to tackle complex questions in an ethical manner to reach their own positions on those questions.”

Oh, Yes. But/and, please consider the Liberal Arts’ unique contribution, as our ‘European Charter’ declared:

AHHEcrop `What have the Humanities to Offer 21st-Century Europe?’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education vol. 7 no. 1 83-96 2008     http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/7/1/83.abstract

The Humanities have much to offer 21st-century Europe, in terms of both method and issues which may complement and correct those of Science and Social Science. These include, for instance, humanities’ generation of plural narratives and plural explanations, of attention to singularity and complexity, and to others’ sensibilities and ways of knowing. Our disciplines provide higher order skills needed to engage and engage with the New Europe — rhetorical and communication skills, networked knowledge sharing, responsive and responsible citizenship. In interdisciplinary partnership with `hard’ science research, the Humanities can offer ways of dealing with particularity and imagination, with issues of identity and sensibility, with encountering the other. At the same time, the humanities’ own complex interpretative narratives and ability to generate and cope with complexity are vitalizing and enabling in a fearful and supercomplex world.

[How] Are the Arts and Humanities ‘liberal’?

• What does ‘liberal’ mean to us in Arts and Humanities HE?
• [How] Are the Arts and Humanities ‘liberal’/’liberalising’/’liberating’?
• Does ‘liberal education’ translate?

This month we’re featuring contributions to the discussion around Liberal Education with and from the Association of American Colleges and Universities Centennial meeting “Liberal Education, Global Flourishing, and the Equity Imperative” and with its President, Senior Scholars and the winners of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award.

The US with its tradition of Liberal Arts colleges has a live concern with and debate around the ideas and ideals of ‘liberal’ university education. How does this translate in other countries and other systems?
We would value responses from the community of Arts and Humanities teachers and researchers: from countries with distinct traditions of liberalism and liberal arts education, concerned as we are with higher education as transformative, with the Humanities and Arts as disciplines teaching and developing as well as theorising and practising ‘liberal values’.

AAC&U’s definition
http://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education:
Liberal Education: An approach to college learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. This approach emphasizes broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g., science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth achievement in a specific field of interest. It helps students develop a sense of social responsibility; strong intellectual and practical skills that span all major fields of study, such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills; and the demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.

AACU to launch LEAP: Liberal Education and America’s Promise

Our friends at AACU (Association of American Colleges & Universities) are celebrating their centenary this month with a major event in Washington, DC. The Association is taking this opportunity to champion the benefits of liberal education, and are issuing a new scheme known as LEAP:

Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) is a national advocacy, campus action, and research initiative that champions the importance of a twenty-first-century liberal education—for individuals and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality.

LEAP responds to the changing demands of the twenty-first century—demands for more college-educated workers and more engaged and informed citizens. Today, and in the years to come, college graduates need higher levels of learning and knowledge as well as strong intellectual and practical skills to navigate this more demanding environment successfully and responsibly.

The LEAP goals are to:

  • Spark public debate about the quality of college learning for the twenty-first century and the learning outcomes that are essential for all students;
  • Help all students—including those traditionally underserved by higher education—understand, prepare for, and achieve Essential Learning
    Outcomes in college;
  • Challenge the belief that students must choose either a liberal education or a practical education by advancing reforms that provide both;
    • Highlight and counter current practices that steer some students to narrow educational tracks while the most advantaged students reap the
    full benefits of a broad liberal education;
  • Generate more informed public support for policies that improve the quality of college-level learning;
  • Document national, state, and institutional progress in student achievement of Essential Learning Outcomes.

Find out more at the ACCU website, and their new microsite devoted to LEAP.

Slow learning

Slow learning

Slow food, slow reading, slow thinking… In this age of hectic information and shifting metrics, we long for slowness. For space and time to think. Every college teacher has faced an administrator asking her to log her research and preparation hours as slots on the diary.What about our students, who increasingly also log into a school type hourly timetable?

Is this nostalgia or a spur for another model? What could slow Higher Education look like?