Liberal Arts Education
What is a Liberal Arts Education
In Chadbourne Residential College we partner with faculty, staff, and students to create a living-learning environment that allows students to be part of a community that values the liberal arts while still receiving the benefits that a great research institution such as UW-Madison can provide.
The commitment to integrate residential living and liberal education at UW-Madison originated in 1927 with the “Experimental College” founded by Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn. His educational philosophy was based on the notion that the purpose of education was to create persons capable of intelligent and effective citizenship in the broadest sense. According to Meiklejohn a person “…has a liberal education when he has tried with some success to understand what is going on in the civilization to which he belongs.”
Over 10 years ago, CRC Founding Faculty Director Bill Cronon carried on this idea and led a group of students, faculty, and staff in creating a residential community of people who were committed to becoming liberally educated, regardless of major or chosen profession. It is this vision that remains the basis for the Chadbourne Residential College program. Cronon (1996) described 10 qualities of the liberally educated person summarized below and found in his article, “Only Connect…”
According to Cronon (1996), the liberally educated person can:
- Listen and hear
- Read and understand
- Can talk with anyone
- Write clearly and persuasively and movingly
- Solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems
- Respect rigor as a way of seeing truth
- Practice respect and humility, tolerance and self-criticism
- Understand how to get things done in the world
- Nurture and empower the people around them
- Follows E. M. Forster's injunction in the novel Howard’s End: "Only Connect"
The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College theorized three "factors" or conditions that must co-exist to support liberal arts education. They are:
- An institutional ethos and tradition which places a greater value on developing a set of intellectual arts, than professional or vocational skills.
- Curricular and environmental structures that work in combination to create coherence and integrity in students' intellectual experiences.
- An institutional ethos and tradition which places a strong value on student-student and student-faculty interactions both in and out of the classroom.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities states it this way: "…liberal education has been a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with core knowledge and transferable skills and cultivates social responsibility and a strong sense of ethics and values. Characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, a liberal education prepares graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society…. By its nature, liberal education is global and pluralistic. It embraces the diversity of ideas and experiences that characterize the social, natural, and intellectual world. To acknowledge such diversity in all its forms is both an intellectual commitment and a social responsibility, for nothing less will equip us to understand our world and to pursue fruitful lives."(AAC & U website)
