NATIONAL
FELLOWSHIP
ON THE
FUTURE OF
LIBERAL
EDUCATION
— NAFFLE —
The National Fellowship on the Future of Liberal Education identifies the next generation of faculty leaders and equips them to think boldly about the fundamental challenges facing liberal education in the United States.
NEWS
News, essays, and research from the fellowship will appear here — including work emerging from the sessions as Fellows begin writing, convening, and publishing over the next two years.
CLASSROOM AND CURRICULA
What do our individual classrooms have to do with the ideal of a liberal education and the fate and future of our institutions? Modern research universities have shied away from this question—especially since upheavals of the 1960s, when consensus about what should ground an undergraduate education in the liberal arts was harder to locate and more politically charged.
REINVIGORATING
LIBERAL EDUCATION
Sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, the National Fellowship on the Future of Liberal Education (NAFFLE) brings together two dozen faculty members from public and private universities across the country for a set of multi-day sessions over two years. The fellowship is designed for faculty members who have shown sincere interest in reinvigorating liberal education and undergraduate teaching beyond their own research agendas and classrooms. NAFFLE encourages talented faculty members to consider how their own teaching, research, and university service fit into the larger context of higher education.
PURPOSE AND PROFESSION
Do we have a shared sense in higher education at present of who and what “the faculty” is? Have tenured faculty become too specialized in their scholarship, and too distant from the work of classroom teaching and the governance of their institutions? How is the identity of the faculty changing from the model we inherited from the postwar academy? How should it change?
HISTORY AND STRUCTURE
Why are universities organized the way they are? The American university reflects a fusion of multiple traditions, each of which has its own history and purpose. What are the tensions among them? When do they work well together, and when do they not? What are the virtues and liabilities of the current American university system as compared with other institutional arrangements for organizing teaching and research historically and around the world?
