Daedalus articles from January 1999

Daedalus archives from January 1999

Preface to the issue: "Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges.".(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... We live in an age of celebrity. For most individuals, fame's tenure may last a week, a month, perhaps a season. It rarely survives a year, and almost never a decade. Many of yesterday's supposedly significant men and women do not even figure as...

Foreword.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)(continued importance of residential liberal arts colleges in American society)
January 1, 1999... The Western University tradition began in the medieval learning centers of Europe. The American university tradition began with the founding of the first residential liberal arts colleges of Harvard in 1636 and William and Mary in 1693. As the...

The making of the liberal arts college identity.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... Founded as a normal school and serving later as a teachers college, North Adams State College lobbied successfully in 1997 to be renamed "Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts." The institution's leaders sought inclusion in a well-established...

The threats to liberal arts colleges.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... In 1998, a poll of University officials conducted by U.S. News & World Report ranked the University of Arkansas fifty-third in academic reputation among the fifty-four schools of the nation's five major athletic conferences. Also in 1998, the...

The future economic challenges for the liberal arts colleges.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... Over the last twenty-five years, America's liberal arts colleges have endured a steady shrinkage of their traditional market. The number of high-school graduates declined by 21 percent, from 3.2 million in 1976 to 2.5 million in 1993, promoting...

How the liberal arts college affects students.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... The question of educational efficacy is probably more important to the private liberal arts college than to any other type of institution. Indeed, the fact that so many of these institutions have been able to survive and even prosper during...

Affirmation and adaptation: values and the elite residential college.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... SHAPING THE SPACE IN WHICH WE LIVE Since so many of the American elite residential liberal arts colleges have their origins in the religious imaginations of their founders, to observe such a fact is simply to state a commonplace. In most...

The currents of democracy: the role of small liberal arts colleges.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... As the only remaining superpower the United States has the opportunity and burden of demonstrating the advantages of a free democratic society. It is my belief that small liberal arts colleges will play an important role in the coming global...

Distinctively American: the liberal arts college.(Distinctively American: The Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... Patents on the traditional mission of liberal arts education have expired. Generic versions of that mission are now regularly included in even the most specialized undergraduate curricula. In the marketplace, meanwhile, the undiluted liberal...

The American college as the place for liberal learning.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... NOT BY THE PERCENTAGES In education, as in most facets of present-day life, it is the best of times and the worst of times. We may infer that it is the worst of times from the multitude of jeremiads on the topic as well as from our common...

Generating ideals and transforming lives: a contemporary case for the residential liberal arts college.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... In the foreword to this volume, Steven Koblik states that residential liberal arts colleges "remain the best models of undergraduate education in the country." Can a case be made to support such an audacious claim? I believe so, if the ends of...

Science at liberal arts colleges: a better education?(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... It was the summer of 1970. Carol and I had spent four years at Grinnell College, located in the somnolent farming community of Grinnell, Iowa. Now, newly married, we drove westward, where we would enter the graduate program in chemistry at the...

New approaches to science and mathematics teaching at liberal arts colleges.(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... . . . the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. - Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794(1) INTRODUCTION Recently, high-school students were polled about which...

"Vortex, Clouds, and Tongue": new problems in the humanities?(Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges)
January 1, 1999... My colleagues and I at union college are bemused when we hear humanists at other liberal arts colleges lament the "preprofessionalism" of students, which they perceive as a new phenomenon causing shrinking interest and enrollments in the...

Reassessing research: liberal arts colleges and the social sciences.
January 1, 1999... Observers of the liberal arts colleges have for some time noted their leading role in producing the nation's Ph.D.'s. This pattern occurs in the social sciences as well as the humanities and natural sciences. The question of why these...