FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Kathryn Mohrman, Chair, Annapolis Group President, Colorado College, 719-389-6700
PR Contact: Todd Wilson, 719-389-6602
Alfred H. Bloom, President, Swarthmore College, 610-328-8314
PR Contact: Tom Krattenmaker, 610-328-8534
Richard H. Hersh, President, Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges, 315-781-3309
PR Contact: Kathy Meyer, 315-781-3540
Steven S. Koblik, President Reed College, 503-777-7500
PR Contact: Harriet Watson, 503-777-7594
Annapolis Group Colleges Collaborate with Daedalus To Examine Residential Liberal Arts Colleges in America
Residential liberal arts colleges make a vital contribution to American intellectual life and many argue are the best model for educating undergraduate students. These are a few conclusions reached by authors in an examination of liberal arts colleges in the Winter 1999 issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Annapolis Group, an association of America's leading liberal arts colleges, collaborated with Daedalus, to help produce "Distinctly American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges," a series of 14 essays from college presidents, scholars and historians of American higher education, and notable alumni of these institutions.
The Annapolis Group comprises more than 100 colleges that work cooperatively to assert the perspective of residential liberal arts colleges in effectively providing a transforming undergraduate education of the highest quality for young men and women.
Kathryn Mohrman, chair of the Annapolis Group and president of Colorado College, described a transformative liberal arts education as preparation for an ever-changing and increasingly global future. "Residential liberal arts colleges offer a unique educational environment marked by a focus on undergraduate students, intimate scale, community responsibility, and the availability of faculty committed to teaching as well as to research," she said.
In the preface to the issue, Editor Stephen R. Graubard writes that liberal arts colleges have helped American higher education by recognizing the value of learning and the exchange of ideas, not "credentialing" designed to guarantee employment.
Steven Koblik, president of Reed College, writes in the foreword to the volume that for most Americans, residential liberal arts colleges are invisible because they have neither famous athletic programs nor large numbers of alumni. He indicates that they are virtually ignored by the media and find themselves caught in the cross currents of American higher education marked by the dominance of the large public and private universities.
In describing the Winter 1999 Daedalus, Editor Graubard wrote, "If America's universities have transformed themselves in this century, so have the liberal arts colleges of the country...In what these colleges teach, but also in the opportunities they provide students and faculties, offering programs and modes of instruction largely unknown in much of the rest of the world, they show their quality and indeed their distinctiveness. Many critics who have so assiduously propagated the notion that the country's 'cultural wars' have served to create conditions where teachers do not teach and students do not learn are unaware of what is going on in the best of America's liberal arts colleges today."
The Winter 1999 issue of Daedalus is available at select bookstores or may be ordered directly from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at their website, http://daedalus.amacad.org/daehome.html, which also provides excerpts from many of the distinguished essays on residential liberal arts education in America.
More information about the Annapolis Group is available at its website, http://www.annapolisgroup.org.
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