Talks to Focus on Liberal Arts, Social Good

Westmont’s Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts hosts its 14th annual conference focusing on how a liberal arts education contributes to contemporary society Feb. 26­-28. The public is welcome to plenary sessions of “Liberal Arts and the Social Good.” A complete schedule is available online at westmont.edu/institute. For more information, please call (805) 565­-6124.

Speakers include Georgia Nugent, former president of Kenyon College, now leading the Council of Independent Colleges’ campaign; Anne Colby and Tom Ehrlich, co­-authors of several books on the importance of liberal education for the professions; Larry Bucciarelli, emeritus professor of engineering at MIT; and Marilyn McEntyre, writer, professor of medical humanities at the UC Berkeley­-UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program, and Gaede Institute fellow.

“Liberal arts education comes in for a lot of criticism these days,” says Christian Hoeckley, director of the Gaede Institute. “But we consider it irreplaceably valuable to American society. A strong economy, essential as it is, is not the only good thing in a society. Important aspects of our civic life are a real mess, and no other model of higher education explicitly seeks to foster engaged, well-­informed, and critical political participation. Our cultural life would be badly impoverished without the liberal arts. And a liberal arts education plays a huge role in economic strength and the job market. The skills that business leaders consistently rank as most important are those that a liberal arts education develops. If we let this model of higher education languish, we do so at our peril.”

The Gaede Institute, created in 2001, promotes the continued vitality of the liberal arts tradition in American higher education. In May 2006, Westmont renamed the institute after its founder, former president Stan Gaede.