In a world of higher education increasingly consumed either with the growth of professional education, particularly in business, or with ârankings,â or âleague tablesâ of research universities and the quest for âworld-classâ institutions, we seek in this volume to talk about undergraduate education of both a traditional and very modern sort: about education, teaching, and the surprisingly enduring and now expanding conceptions of the liberal arts and sciences in a twenty-first-century education.
The global debate on the liberal arts and sciences has moved from its European origin and out of the North American academic landscape to engage many regions and countries, including China, which seeks to gain from this model in terms of global integration and influence. This is illustrated by inspiring examples of experimentation, reform, and international cooperation with liberal arts and sciences models.
This book highlights the visions and experiences of international leaders in the field of liberal arts and sciences education from around the world. The authors discuss regional trends and models, several with a specific focus on why this model seems to respond to twenty-first-century requirements for excellence and âreal worldâ relevance in undergraduate education. Taken together, the essays explore how liberal arts and sciences curricula can be implemented in different national contexts and across a broad range of academic cultures, structures, and traditions. They investigate how teaching and learning experiences may vary in the context of different cultures and values. A variety of international innovations, start-ups, and major international collaborations between American, European, and Asian institutions are explored in order to understand the opportunities and the challenges for China in developing liberal arts and sciences education. The authors have reviewed and evaluated trends with the aim of making impact across whole systems of higher education, with implications also for secondary education before university and the demands of labor markets after graduation.
Let us start with some reflections on what education in the liberal arts and sciences entails. The debate on these issues goes back minimally to those of the nineteenth century between proponents of the Humboldtian ideal of Bildung (the education of the whole person) as distinct from Ăbung (more practical training), differences that are phrased differently across the worldâin China, for example, as the distinction between a broad conception ofeducation (jiaoyu æèČ) and a narrower, repetitive one of training (xunlian èźç»).
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin in 1810, envisioned an education that was broad and deep, rooted in fields in which he was deeply learnedâhistory, classical literature and languages, and linguisticsâgiving citizens the capacity for self-cultivation and individual development in society. He (as notably did also his brother, Alexander) believed also in scientific research, the creation of new knowledge, and he aimed to create an institution in which teaching and research would be integrally connected, with teaching rooted in research, in an institution free from preordained orthodoxies.
The University of Berlin is the ancestor of all modern and contemporary research universities. Humboldtâs ideals have been reflected in the principles of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit (freedom to teach and freedom to learn) that have been at the heart of modern conceptions of academic freedom.
Yet the modern research university today is much larger, much more professionalized, much more focused on research, and much less focused on teaching than any institution that Humboldt could have imagined. In Germany, by the early twentieth century, a process had begun to separate out high-level research institutes from universities (named initially for Kaiser Wilhelm II, now for the physicist Max von Planck). In the USA, which in the twentieth century became home to many of the worldâs leading research universities, the growth of stand-alone or in-house research institutes with little or no formal teaching has been a growing feature of higher education. To give one example that we know well: Harvard University, for example, grew from a provincial college to first a national then international research university, faculty time and energy was inevitably drawn toward graduate education and professional engagement far removed from the undergraduate classroom.
The challenges faced by Harvard and by many of the universities described in this volume have commonalities, but central to them is an overwhelming concern with committing, or re-committing, these institutions and their faculty to the challenges of a broad, undergraduate education in a world seemingly dominated (as Humboldtâs was not) by pure research and by onrushing advances in science and technology.
We see in many of the examples discussed in this volume an international commitment to both general and liberal education in the broadest sense. What is âliberal education?â As Montaigne wrote: âAmong the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.â Montaigne was referring to a process whereby previously unexplored beliefs and values are challenged as well as unsuspected dimensions of the self, discovered and nurtured in order that students may become âwiser and betterâ for themselves and for society. Liberal education presumes that a broad education will liberate the individual by offering opportunities for foundational knowledge, reflection and analysis, artistic creativity, and an appreciation for the precision of scientific concepts and experiments.
The American tradition of liberal arts and sciences education has been most robust in a (until recently) unique institution: the independent college of liberal arts. Institutions such as Oberlin, Williams, Carleton, Reed, and many others have always employed first-class scholars, normally trained at leading research universities, but their institutional focus has been exclusively on undergraduates. Theirs has been the strongest commitment to the idea of liberal education: educating the whole person, and not just training the specialist. They resist pressures for early specialization and professionalization. Professional education may be the proud tradition of many great universities, but it has not been the fundamental mission of the American liberal arts college. While their students will have devoted some significant part of their time to special and concentrated learning, they aim to graduate having developed their intellectual, artistic, moral, civic, and scientific capacities as independent thinkers with a lifetime of learning still before them.
The challenge of leading American research universities is different from that of independent liberal arts colleges. Those that have grown from the foundations of famous undergraduate colleges (e.g. Harvard, Yale) to become large and complex research institutions have the difficult task of trying to keep the undergraduate enterprise at the center of a big university. How do these research-driven universities put the energy of leading scholars back on undergraduates? How do highly selective institutions prepare their students to enter a globalizing world of national conflicts, of scientific advance, of political choice and economic uncertainty, of artistic imagination and cultural repression? There is, of course, no âone-size-fits-allâ educational menu for such alternative futures, but the last decade has been one of debate and renewal of the liberal arts in many such leading American universities.
In the spring of 2007, the Harvard faculty approved a new General Education curriculum for Harvard College, after several years of drafting and seemingly endless discussion. When it passed with near unanimity, the faculty was told about the famous 1924 debate in the Chinese Communist Party about joining the Nationalists in the first United Front. The minutes of that meeting were recorded thus: âThe resolution passed unanimously, even though many comrades were opposed.â Revising entrenched systems of undergraduate education is never easy, and there is no perfect model. The Harvard effort puts greater stress on internationalization, scientific and technological literacy, and new communities of learning in smaller settings than had its predecessor efforts. Above all, it tried (and so far has succeeded) in having a new generation of faculty re-engage in undergraduate education and to create courses and departmental curricula for which they had intellectual ownership and responsibility.
The American reinvestment in the liberal arts and sciences is perhaps not surprising given the long history of institutions based on this concept, even if it is by no means the centerpiece of the large majority of US universities. Much more surprising, in our view, is the resurgence of liberal arts and sciences elsewhere: in Europe and in China in particular.
In recent decades, European universities have adapted some of the formal structures of perceived American models, such as the US baccalaureate. Distinct undergraduate (bachelor) and graduate (master and doctorate) degree cycles were introduced following the Sorbonne (1998) and Bologna (1999) declarations. By reinstituting the bachelor as an educational phase in its own right, these structural reforms facilitated the (re-)emergence of liberal arts and sciences programs in Europe (Van der Wende 2011).
Many of the ideals of what has since become known as the Bologna Process carry with them the promise of making higher education in Europe a continental-wide enterprise, thereby facilitating student, faculty and staff mobility, which has been growing since the introduction of the Erasmus Program in 1987. Such mobility is important in competing, and in cooperating, with continental-sized systems of higher education, such as in the USA and China.
But while there is some emulation of the current American concept of the baccalaureate, until recently, European universities have appeared less interested in the educational values that have defined the Bachelor of Arts degree in many American colleges, which stress a broad undergraduate education in the liberal arts and sciences. If one looks at the documents of the Bologna, Prague, Berlin, Bergen, and other meetings, there is enormous attention paid to research, to funding, and to math, science, and technology, and precious little to teaching, to citizenship, and to valuing the broad and deep education of the next generation of Europeâs citizens. The âkey competenciesâ for lifelong learning recommended by the European Parliament in 2006 quite appropriately include language learning; information and communication technologies; and math, science, and technology. But nearly absent are the humanities, the multidisciplinary study of other cultures and religions, and education in moral reasoning and philosophy. Even the âharderâ social sciences seem short-changed.
It may be that any Europe-wide reform must be limited, given the restricted mandates of European institutions 1 and the sovereignty of European member states in the domain of (higher) education. But it cannot be denied that such EU policies do lean heavily on economic rationales. An underlying human capital approach expects higher education to propel economic growth and spur competitiveness in the global knowledge economy, leading to a utilitarian focus on skills, rather than on values that would underpin European identity and citizenship as a basis for further social and political integration.
Now, however, with the emergence of truly innovative âuniversity colleges,â European universities, led by those in the Netherlands, seek to do the Americans one better by bringing together the separate strengths of the stand-alone liberal arts college and of the large research university.
Driven by the need to overcome the disadvantages of early and overspecialization, to differentiate the massified and overly egalitarian European higher education systems, and to meet employersâ demands for well-rounded graduates, various leading universities went back to their roots. There they recovered the origin of the European university which taught the artes liberales, including the trivium (literary arts; grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (mathematical arts; arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Re-imagined, twenty-first-century-oriented versions of this model now re-enter undergraduate education at the center of large and complex research universities and help to re-balance their teaching and research missions by sheltering undergraduate teaching from the pressures of research performance, rankings, and reputation race. These initiatives draw the energy of leading scholars back to undergraduate teaching, re-committing them to the challenges of a broad education that prepare students for a globalizing and evermore complex world.
Amsterdam University College (AUC) is a prominent example of the Dutch model, which is typically a highly selective honors college that teaches a three-year liberal arts and sciences bachelor and has a radically international ethos and community. The model combines the virtues of a small-scale residential college with the resources and facilities of a large research university. Ten such university colleges have been established, following the first such initiative launched in 1998 by Utrecht University (University Colleges Deans Network [UCDN] 2014). They are all fully owned by a Dutch research university and are granted a privileged status in the higher education legislation allowing for additional funding and more autonomy. The demand for this model is confirmed by the exceptionally strong growth in both domestic and international applications in comparison with other undergraduate programs.
AUC was established in 2009 as an excellence initiative jointly undertaken by the University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam. They joined forces to create a liberal arts and sciences program, based on the vision that the leaders of the future will have to work together across the boundaries of nationalities, cultures, and disciplines, in order to be successful in the globally engaged and culturally diverse society of the twenty-first century.
AUCâs mission, âExcellence and Diversity in a Global City,â reflects the belief that both excel...