Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civic, and professional growth. The current generation of technologies that mediate our formal and informal academic interchanges are crystalizing the echo-chamber allegiances that have developed on our politically charged campuses, frustrating the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s leaders. Moreover, as applications such as Teams and Zoom become ensconced within higher learning institutions, universities will inadvertently replicate the existing socioeconomic inequalities that are poisoning America’s civic culture.
 
With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collection of 18 original essays, editors Dyer and Vassiliou hope to deepen our understanding of underappreciated issues in the history of political thought. For the volume, the editors have recruited a remarkable and diverse group of scholars who draw from both their research expertise and personal experience as educators to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of the market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today. The contributing authors’ competing perspectives provide innovative insights into how liberal arts universities might adapt to a post-COVID-19 academic environment by recalibrating their long-standing pedagogic aims of helping students formulate self-understanding and the meaning of thoughtful citizenship.