A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice

A New Model of Undergraduate Teaching

A New Agenda for Higher Education proposes a model of undergraduate teaching that combines the academic with the professionally practical, focusing on the interdependence of liberal education and professional training. At its most effective, say the authors, liberal education provides students with the intellectual capacity to make sense of their environment and reflect on their place in the world. Professional education, by contrast, must provide the knowledge essential to a particular field of endeavor but also ways in which students can engage this knowledge for the common good. This book shows how both liberal arts educators and educators of professionals can collaborate to realize the goals of liberal and professional learning more effectively. It offers faculty a powerful set of examples of teachers who are working to sustain a broader vision of practical reasoning and public responsibility in their respective disciplines and in the lives of their students.

"The issues raised in A New Agenda for Higher Education are important to the shape of teaching, learning, career preparation, and the very values and priorities of the modern university."
—Bobby Fong, president, Butler University

"This is a well-crafted book based on what must have been a fascinating seminar. I felt that in reading the book I was part of an ongoing dialogue stimulated by the seminar. That's high praise coming from someone who is rather burnt out by years of talk, talk, talk in academia and who wants to see action, action, action for a change. But I realize that discourse frames action and this is a very constructive discourse."
—W. Robert Connor, president, The Teagle Foundation