Editor’s Note: In June 2023, Ursinus College is hosting, for the first time, a Colloquium on Liberal Education. Funded by a Teagle Cornerstone Grant, the colloquium brings together some of higher education’s foremost thinkers to discuss a reinvigoration of liberal education in the face of the numerous challenges, theoretical and practical, it currently confronts. This piece lays the groundwork for the discussion that will guide the colloquium.

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America’s insistence on the practical applicability of education has always been discordant with liberal education’s ruminative, searching character. Soon after the nation’s founding, Tocqueville prescribed for us the liberal education that cultivates “a taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness and a love of immaterial pleasures” lest our busy pursuit of material well-being make thoughtful reflection seem a merely useless diversion. The concern he expressed persists and has grown more acute thanks to the explosion in information technology. Those eager for the benefits this technology affords see no reason to preserve the costly and inefficient conditions of an education that apparently yields no economically productive outcome.

The prime target for this challenge is the educational approach in which an instructor and a small group of students, guided by careful study of complicated works, engage in conversation about great but imperfectly resolvable questions concerning humanity, nature and the divine. By preserving such an inefficient and apparently unproductive course of study, advocates of liberal education have resisted the market’s pressure toward vocationalism and the academy’s impetus toward specialization. We do so not because of a stubborn devotion to tradition. Rather, we believe that this education best prepares students for fulfilling lives and careers, as citizens and human beings.

In the spirit of liberal education, we take both challenges as an opportunity to inquire anew into its purpose and the practices that sustain it.

The challenges to liberal education dictate the character of its defense. These come both from the community beyond the academy and from within the academy itself. The former asks about the need for such an education, the latter about its possibility. In the spirit of liberal education, we take both challenges as an opportunity to inquire anew into its purpose and the practices that sustain it. The compelling case that we hope emerges from such an inquiry might persuade more of our academic colleagues to join us in this endeavor. This case, this explanation in concrete terms of the impact liberal education has on students, an impact that benefits every aspect of their lives, might also convince parents and potential students of its worth.

As befits proponents of this type of inquisitive education, our discussions will probe the vexed questions concerning its theory, its practice, and the complicated connections between the two. We will ask of its purpose and possibility, of its bearing on civic and religious life, and on the flourishing of individuals. We will ask, too, how it can be made economically sustainable and how access to it can be increased for populations that may consider it out of reach or irrelevant to their lives—if they consider it at all. Nor will we neglect the question of assessment, of how, given the intrinsic resistance of our purpose to quantification, we can judge, consistent with that purpose, the extent to which we are achieving it.

We will ask of its purpose and possibility, of its bearing on civic and religious life, and on the flourishing of individuals.

Owing to its permanently probing stance, liberal education has, from its inception, required a public defense. We undertake to establish this forum fully aware of the need and difficulty of that defense. Yet this might be a particularly propitious time to initiate such an inquiry; all agree that the pandemic has made us acutely aware of the need for that capacity by which we weigh the competing and only partially reconcilable demands of the goods we seek. Liberal education is education in that capacity, the capacity of judgment. With the Ursinus Colloquium, we offer a venue for the ongoing, systematic exploration of this education’s meaning, its worth, and the practices required to sustain it.