Liberal Arts for the Twenty-First Century.
Tortured by vocationalism, charges of irrelevance, erosion of standards, declining enrollments, calcified faculty, and lack of coordination, the current liberal arts paradigm seems to be disintegrating. And truly, our students, who will be asked to manage the most complex century in history, are not well served by what we now offer. Our current degree was predicated on a specialized social state, an expanding industrial base, and the belief that plentiful resources existed to create a materialist state. Technologists and scientists would create the material means, social scientists would manage society, and humanists would handle the community's spiritual matters. We still organize liberal arts programs as though this specialized world existed or could exist. It does not and cannot.