PROFESSION and PURPOSE
What role should faculty play in leading—and reforming—universities today?
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? Faculty at research universities often know little of the workings of their campuses outside their own fields and departments. We are often ignorant about budgets, endowments, admissions, advising, and athletics, for example. What are the costs of this inattention to the larger picture? How does university stewardship matter from a faculty perspective? What frameworks can we develop for better mapping and conceptualizing (and then intervening in) our own institutions? Who sits in key leadership roles in our universities? What paths did they take to those roles? Is the nature of these positions changing? What kinds of skills, aptitudes, and imaginations do they require? What does wise stewardship of our institutions mean? How does the experience rising through the ranks of scholarship to tenure prepare us for this sort of institutional leadership? How does it fail to prepare us? Where are the possibilities to lead right now? Where, when and how does genuine innovation happen in universities? What hampers the uptake of good ideas and necessary changes? How can good leadership act as a catalyst? What can we learn from bold experiments that did (and didn’t) work?
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History AND STRUCTURE
How does the history of the university inform—and constrain or enhance—its present?
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? Where does the idea of liberal education come from? Is a liberal education for the cultivation of the mind or the production of civic leaders? Can it be both? Which ideas from the history of liberal education might still guide us today? Are classical values and vocabulary relevant to today’s debates? If so, how might we persuade doubters? Liberal education has been shown to be useful in many ways, but it does not prioritize utility in any narrow sense; it is not vocational, but it can help students discover their vocations. Does this remain a persuasive argument for our students and the larger public? Where are the fault lines in liberal education today? What are the most salient challenges facing liberal education at the current moment? At what level are they best addressed—the classroom, the curriculum, the disciplines, or the university at large? To what extent were these challenges foreseeable? What strategies are being employed to revive faith in higher education? Are they working? What approaches deserve more exploration? Where are faculty voices in these discussions?
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UNIVERSITY AND SOCIETY
What is—or should be—the relationship between the liberal arts and democratic society?
What is higher education’s duty to civics, morality, ethics, justice, and democracy? To what extent does that duty conflict with the search for truth? Can we see new political attention to these questions as not just a threat but a wake-up call? What possibilities open up when we reexamine the university—and specifically liberal education—from the viewpoint of its critics? Which criticisms are justified and which are exaggerated? Which can be addressed within our existing institutions and which require new schools or even fundamentally new approaches to higher education? How should the university reimagine its social contract with future publics and their moral life? How is higher education depicted in the news media? How do other sectors perceive us? Have universities lost control of the narrative? If so, how might they regain it? Why have we lost the trust of so many Americans? And what stories about higher education deserve a wider hearing? How should universities understand their relationship with other parts of the higher ed ecosystem (e.g. liberal arts colleges, regional publics, community colleges), as well as their home communities? How should they work with other institutions and spheres: hospitals, the public sector, and K-12 education, for example? What can these other institutions teach us about how to sharpen our institutional mission and clarify the kind of leadership we need at the current moment?
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CLASSROOM AND CURRICULA
How and what should we teach—and why does it matter?
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. In that era, many institutions moved away from shared curricula and Great Books programs in favor of distribution requirements that maximized student choice and faculty discretion. We are now in an era of rethinking, with curricular experiments blossoming and new interest in common intellectual experiences and general education reform. Simultaneously, technological and social changes are rapidly altering the conditions of the classroom and academic work. How can we meet this moment, channeling pedagogical energies and challenges in ways that enlighten our students, inspire our faculties, and serve the public interest? What is the role and place of general education in our institutions today? How might it ground us in, and refocus us on, the core purpose of our colleges and universities? What needs to change—in classrooms, in graduate training, in our relations to the rest of the university—if general education is to be prioritized? What are the perils and promises of AI for our students, for scholarship, for the liberal arts, and for our institutional mission? How can the university respond to generative AI and the new world of moral and political visions that are today born and circulate rapidly, often outside the realms of conventional specializations, and beyond the protocols of conventional disciplinarity? Does the professoriate need to make a concerted effort to develop and institutionalize the use of these new technologies and media?
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