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President Shirley Mullen Joins New “Presidents’ Trust” to Advance Liberal Arts Education as Source of American Civic Vitality and Economic Innovation and Growth
82 College and University Leaders To Work Together To Build Public Understanding of the Value of Liberal Arts Education Outcomes for Students and American Society
HOUGHTON, N.Y. – President Shirley A. Mullen of Houghton College announced today that she has joined a new Presidents’ Trust formed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. President Mullen and an esteemed national group of 81 other college and university leaders from around the country are forming this Trust to strongly and collectively make the case for liberal arts education and its value in today’s world. The Presidents’ Trust is a leadership group within AAC&U’s national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP): Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes To College.
“A liberal arts education is truly the best education for our uncertain economy. It is a hedge against the pain of change--which is about the only certain thing in our time. A liberal arts education prepares us with a broad base of knowledge in the arts and sciences, but it also teaches us how to learn, enlarges our imagination, enhances our curiosity and creativity, teaches us how to think systematically, how to write and speak clearly, and how to understand ourselves and others. Most important of all, it invites us to link all our learning to our most fundamental moral and spiritual values. In short, it is an education large enough for the whole person,” said President Mullen.
Members of the LEAP Presidents’ Trust are leaders from all sectors of higher education and are committed to advocating for the vision, values, and practices that connect liberal arts education with the individual and societal needs of the twenty-first-century. Through regional and national meetings and their own advocacy efforts, Trust members will engage with campus members and those outside of higher education about the core purposes and practices of liberal arts education. They are all also providing leadership for advancing reforms in the practice of liberal arts education both on campus and with other groups and organizations with which they are affiliated.
In 2009-10, the core priority areas for the Presidents Trust
include:
- Making the economic case for liberal arts education
- Making—and fulfilling—the civic case for liberal arts
education
- Engaging first-generation families and new Americans with the
meaning and value of
liberal arts education
- Integrating liberal arts and professional preparation on
campus
- Charting a new direction for assessment and accountability
“President Mullen is already providing valuable leadership speaking out and ensuring that Houghton College students are receiving the kind of college education that will best prepare them for success in today’s competitive global economy—an engaged and practical liberal arts education,” said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider.
The Presidents’ Trust advocates for a twenty-first-century vision of liberal arts education that combines the best of that philosophy of education’s traditional focus on broad knowledge, analytic reasoning, and rigorous contextual study with newer approaches to helping students integrate and apply their learning in new settings. The Trust believes that a twenty-first-century liberal arts education 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 arts education prepares graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society.
Houghton College, founded in 1883, provides an academically challenging, Christ-centered education in the liberal arts and sciences to students from diverse traditions and economic backgrounds and equips them to lead and labor as scholar-servants in a changing world. The college of 1,200 students is located in western New York, just 65 miles from Rochester and Buffalo. For more information, please visit www.houghton.edu.
See www.aacu.org/leap for full list of Presidents’ Trust members.
