Liberal Education Initiative

LEAP Wisconsin is an initiative of the University of Wisconsin System that seeks to increase understanding of the value and purpose of liberal education for UW students and Wisconsin citizens.

Liberal Education:
A Unifying Mission for the 21st Century University

University of Wisconsin System Conference
November 20-21, 2008
Pyle Center

Need for Conference

The modern university has become fragmented in its mission. It serves a number of competing constituencies, all of them understandably seeking their part of the economic pie. As a result, our students are often educated in a piecemeal fashion. They are apt to move from one course to the next with very little sense of continuity in the curriculum, or any awareness of the university’s broader mission. Yeats’ frequently- quoted line from the “Second Coming” seems especially appropriate in this context: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

A liberal education offers a solution for this fragmentation.  With its emphasis on the whole student, liberal education aims to encourage certain universally applicable learning outcomes.  The AAC&U’s LEAP campaign has broadly defined these outcomes as “Knowledge of Human Cultures in the Physical and Natural World,” “Intellectual and Practical Skills,” “Personal and Social Responsibility,” and “Integrative Learning.”

Besides these fundamental learning outcomes, a student with a liberal education should have developed three broader qualities as well: humanistic qualities (the encouragement of introspection, the search for a meaningful life), civic qualities (the encouragement of social responsibility), and economic qualities (the encouragement to be a creative member of the workforce and to adapt to changing workplace demands). 

The title of the conference—“Liberal Education:  A Unifying Mission for the 21st Century University”—refers to a center which can hold, a center defined as the university’s commitment to certain broad learning outcomes as well as the humanistic, civic, and economic qualities that are at the heart of these outcomes.

This conference is intended to celebrate liberal education as an integrative force within the university.

Participants   

The conference is intended to appeal to a broad range of UW-System academic constituencies: members of the Board of Regents, Chancellors, Provosts, Deans, Admissions/Advising representatives, faculty representatives, and student representatives.

Many of the sessions will be designed specifically for these different constituencies, but the intent is for the various constituencies to also get a sense of how a liberal education functions throughout the university.

We hope that attendees will come away from the conference with a heightened appreciation of the value of a liberal education; we also hope that they will go back to their respective campuses with clear ideas about how to reinvigorate liberal education as a unifying mission.

View welcoming remarks by University of Wisconsin System President Kevin P. Reilly