Exploration of the breadth of the Arts and Sciences lies at the core of liberal arts education and gets prominently featured in most undergraduate general education programs. The authors of this study investigated student perceptions of the three branches of the Arts and Sciences using cohorts of high-achieving first-year college students enrolled…

This study highlights the efforts of Indiana University East to make substantive changes to its general education program, resulting primarily from state mandates and legislation, on an extremely aggressive timeline. While fraught with challenges, these legislative mandates also presented opportunities for the institution to make necessary and…

This article examines the relationship between academic specialization and student exposure to a range of academic domains of knowledge. It uses a concentration measure--the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index--to investigate whether students who choose single majors or double major are more or less concentrated in nine domains of knowledge most…

Are the humanities relevant enough to the average undergraduate to be included as a required part of a general education program? The University of Idaho (UI) is currently ten years into the challenge of implementing a cross-disciplinary, university-wide general education program--the UI Core--that has the attention, if not always the support, of…

A liberal arts environment invites the expansion of one's understanding of himself/herself and the world by exposing him/her to multiple disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. For its part, the topic of "narrative" is intrinsically interdisciplinary and, as such, can be explored to particular advantage within a liberal arts…

A critical stage of the assessment process is the development of learning objectives. In this study, learning outcomes for general education in the arts and humanities were identified through content analysis with thematic networks. The findings provide additional support for qualitative approaches in developing program-level learning objectives.…

The original grounded theory was derived from a sample of junior and senior science and engineering majors. The current study tested the original grounded theory with a new set of juniors and seniors who were, in contrast to the original sample, primarily studying the liberal arts. In this qualitative analysis, the authors sought to determine if…

After describing our interdisciplinary humanities course and its history, we identify challenges these courses face and strategies for keeping them vigorous. We argue that course longevity depends on effective translation of vision and content into explicit goals bridging the gaps between faculty members and between faculty and students. (Contains…

In this article, the author describes a project designed to take the dread out of discussion in a first-year interdisciplinary humanities course at Sewanee: The University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Tennessee. The Responsible Intellectual Discussion project, known as RID, was created in conjunction with the college's Eloquence…

Addresses the epistemological questions that undergird curriculum debates in higher education over the value and vitality of a canon, a need for intellectual and cultural homogeneity, and the articulation of norms for scholarly inquiry. Challenges general education to communicate the value-ladenness of allegedly objective curricula, events, and…

Examines attempts to save humanities education by making it instrumental to other ends. Argues that, rather than finding ways to appease an unsympathetic audience, humanities programs must act without apology and accentuate the role the humanities plays in humanizing and liberating students through self-criticism and self-revision. (Contains 16…

Traces the roots of the concepts of the humanities and liberal arts education to the ancient Greeks, describing how their customs, language, philosophy, and literature have contributed to current concepts of education. Suggests that the Greek idea of education stressed the arts and mathematics but was opposed to all professionalism. (MAB)

Argues that a society without reverence for myths and history inevitably falls prone to chaos and evil, pointing to abortion, Andy Warhol's celebrity, and Woodstock as evidence of this disintegration of society. Proposes that humanities education expose students to human experience based on some awesome and fixed moral order. (AYC)

Discusses the sorts of knowledge that the humanities provide, identifying the humanities with moral knowledge rather than practical benefits. Sees the humanities as domains of free intellectual inquiry, providing a training ground for moral decision making. (DMM)

Identifies certain strategies applicable to the teaching of "every masterpiece of world literature", regardless of its genre, so as to make literature, as a liberal art, contribute to the student's ability to organize and interpret and communicate experience. (Editor/RK)