Does Liberal Education Need Saving?

The 2016 Annual Weissbourd Conference

Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
The University of Chicago

May 1920, 2016

Ida Noyes Hall
Third floor theater
1212 East 59th Street

The conference organizers would like to

thank Deborah Neibel for her unstinting
support and assistance.

oes liberal education need saving? Some

would consider an affirmative reply obvious.
Under pressure from academic professionalization,
corporatized universities, and a society obsessed with
practical outcomes, liberal education must be championed
anew or risk disappearing. Others argue that liberal
education is at best a luxury that our society can no
longer afford, at worst an elitist agent that reinforces
social inequalities. To such minds, shifts away from
liberal education are no reason to lament. And then
there are those who dismiss the prophets of doom,
arguing that liberal education remains alive and well
on college campuses today. Articles debating these
issues regularly appear in the popular press and the
last years have seen numerous books published on the
subject. And yet, for all the talk much confusion persists
and certain fundamental questions remain ill-explored.
This conference brings together historians, theorists,
administrators, and educators to discuss the meaning
of liberal education, the roles it has played through
history, and its purposes and prospects for the future.

Conference Schedule

May 19

/ Keynote Addresses

4:306:00
Martha Nussbaum
Talbot Brewer
Gabriel Richardson Lear, moderator
6:007:00

Light Refreshments

7:30
Dinner for Conference Participants at
Nana Organic, 3267 S. Halsted Avenue

May 20

/ Panel Discussions

9:4510:00

Welcome from conference organizers

Aviva Rothman & Aaron Tugendhaft

10:0011:30

The History of Liberal Education

Carlos Fraenkel
Anthony Grafton
Lorraine Daston
Haun Saussy
Ada Palmer, moderator

12:001:30

Liberal Education in the Modern University

Julie A. Reuben
Alison Byerly
Theodore ONeill
Eugene Lowe

Nina Valiquette Moreau, moderator
1:302:30 Lunch
2:304:00

Education, Democracy, and Social Justice

Bryan Garsten
Micere Keels

Rana Saadi Liebert
Sara Goldrick-Rab

Stacie Kent, moderator
4:306:00

The Task of the Liberal Educator

Roosevelt Monts
Karim-Yassin Goessinger
Daniel Doneson
Susan Henking

Ian Desai, moderator
6:007:30
Wine & Cheese Reception at the

Seminary Co-op Bookstore,
5751 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Conference Participants
Talbot Brewer is Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Virginia. His 2014 article
The Coup That Failed: How the Near-Sacking of a
University President Exposed the Fault Lines of American
Higher Education tackles the question of how liberal
education is to be best defended.
Alison Byerly is President of Lafayette College in Easton,
Pennsylvania. She has served as a member of the Coordinating
Committee of the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges
and has published essays in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle
of Higher Education.
Lorraine Daston is a Director at the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science in Berlin and a regular Visiting
Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago. She is currently studying the
emergence of Big Science and Big Humanities in the
nineteenth century.
Daniel Doneson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Engineering at MIT, where he co-coordinates and teaches
for the Ben Franklin Project and the concentration in
Society, Engineering and Ethics (S.E.E.).
Carlos Fraenkel is James McGill Professor in the
Departments of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at McGill
University. He is the author of Teaching Plato in Palestine:
Philosophy in a Divided World.
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and the
Humanities, and Chair of the Humanities Program at Yale
University. Garsten was a Fellow of the National Forum on
the Future of Liberal Education and served as Chair of a
committee overseeing the development of a common curriculum
in the liberal arts for Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is Professor of Educational Policy Studies

and Sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison. She
founded the Wisconsin Harvesting Opportunities for Postsecondary Education (HOPE) Lab in 2014 and received the
American Educational Research Association (AERA) Early
Career Award in the same year.
Karim-Yassin Goessinger founded the Cairo Institute of
Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) in 2013. He currently
serves as Program Director and Chairman of the Board of
Trustees. In addition to his interests in social and political
theory, Goessinger is concerned with the intersection of
post-secondary education and development work.
Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam Professor in the
Department of History at Princeton University. He has
written numerous books about liberal education in Europe
from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.
Grafton also regularly engages in broader public debates on
the status of the humanities, the problems facing new career
scholars, and the importance of scholarly collaboration.
Susan Henking is President of Shimer College in Chicago.
She has published widely on leadership in higher education
and is founding series editor of the Teaching Religious
Studies Series for Oxford University Press.
Micere Keels is Associate Professor in the Department of
Comparative Human Development and a Faculty Affiliate
with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on the
intersection of liberal education, gender, and race.
Rana Saadi Liebert is a site director and faculty member
of the Bard Prison Initiative, an innovative college-in-prison
program sponsored by Bard College. She has taught in the
Classics Department at the University of Chicago, and in

the Classical Studies Program, the Language and Thinking

Program, and First-Year Seminar at Bard College.
Eugene Lowe is Assistant to the President at Northwestern
University. He has written on racial diversity and higher
education, and has chaired university-wide committees on
the status of underrepresented minorities and integrity in
intercollegiate athletics.
Roosevelt Monts is Director of the Center for the Core
Curriculum at Columbia University. He regularly lectures
and writes about the history and future of liberal education.
Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service
Professor of Law and Ethics in the Law School and the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Nussbaums work spans widely across philosophy, literature,
and law. She is the author of Cultivating Humanity: A
Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Educationand Not For
Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Theodore ONeill worked for twenty-seven years in the
admissions office at the University of Chicago, twenty of
them as Dean of College admissions. He currently teaches in
the University of Chicagos Humanities Core Curriculum.
Julie A. Reuben is Charles Warren Professor of the History
of American Education at Harvard University. She is the
author of Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality and
has written articles related to campus activism, access to
higher education, curriculum changes, and citizenship
education in the public schools.
Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Department
of Comparative Literature and in the Committee on Social
Thought at University of Chicago. Saussy is a leading scholar
of Chinese and comparative literature.

The Weissbourd Fund

Bernard (Barney) Weissbourd enjoyed a life-long
connection with the University of Chicago, beginning
at age 15 when he received a full scholarship to attend
the College. In these first years, Weissbourd was captivated
by the Universitys intellectual life, his concentration in
chemistry, and especially his study of the classics, a staple
of the curriculum in the Hutchins era. When he graduated
in 1941, he entered the law school. WWII interrupted his
studies, but he remained at the University, having been
assigned to work on the Manhattan Project, where he
contributed to the discovery of an element. At the wars
end, he returned to the law school and became an editor
of the Law Review before graduating in 1948. He served
the University as an active member of the Board of Trustees
and as Trustee Emeritus until his death in 2000 at the
age of 78.
Weissbourd was a scientist, attorney, urban planner,
and a developer who had a dramatic impact on the skyline
and the life of Chicago. He maintained a lifelong interest
in civic affairs, working on issues ranging from race and
poverty to nuclear arms. His interest in the relationship
between human psychology and social institutions led
him to found the Center for Psycho-Social Studies in the
early 1970s. The Center became an important location for
interdisciplinary dialogue, intellectual exploration, and the
nurturing of promising young scholars.
The Bernard Weissbourd Memorial Fund for the
Society of Fellows pays tribute to Barney Weissbourds
history of involvement with the University. The Fund
reflects his abiding commitments to spirited inquiry,
the excitement of learning, the power of discourse, and
through all of these, the pursuit of a more just and humane
society. In addition to the annual spring conference, the
Fund supports a Fall Symposium, and Society meetings
and seminars throughout the year.

Made possible by

The Society of Fellows

The Bernard Weissbourd Memorial Fund
The College
The Franke Institute for the Humanities
UChicagoGRAD
The John U. Nef
Committee on Social Thought
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies
The Craft of Teaching in the
Academic Study of Religion
3CT
The Departments of Classics
The Department of East Asian Studies
The Department of History
The Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations
The Department of Philosophy

5751 S. Woodlawn Ave.

Chicago, IL 60637
t: 773.752.4381
e: info@semcoop.com
mf: 8:30 am8 pm
sat: 10 am6 pm / sun: 12 pm6 pm
Select titles on liberal education currently on display
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Co-op Bookstore is now widely regarded as one of the best academic
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titles with a focus on the humanities and social sciences.
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