Giving oneself over to the liberal arts completely. At our best, it’s what we do as Lewis & Clark’s faculty and students. The payoff from being our best—for us and for our students—is rich and enduring: a lifetime shaped by the ability to see, engage, and uplift our neighbors through multiple critically-examined frames of reference as we meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.
Yet the daunting headwinds American higher education faces tempt liberal arts colleges to compromise their commitment to the liberal arts tradition. Many are chasing after faddish programming and preprofessional tracks doomed to transience by a world changing faster than we can keep up. This talk argues for the necessity of Lewis & Clark holding fiercely to a bold, courageous embodiment of its unique, hard-won and winning identity as a college of the liberal arts.
It’s not just the college’s wellbeing that’s at stake in the perdurance of the liberal arts. It’s also the wellbeing of the world that the liberal arts tradition has served for centuries and can serve for centuries more.
You can view the video of Rob’s lecture here.
