Overview

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.

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Reviews

This is a valuable volume that addresses the importance of liberal education and the challenges to it. From reflections on the classical meaning of liberal education, to the promises and perils of technology and the sciences, to curriculum issues within the modern academy, this book has something important to contribute. --Khalil M. Habib, (Associate Professor of Politics, and Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Politics) Hillsdale College, co-editor of The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom

This is a valuable volume that addresses the importance of liberal education and the challenges to it. From reflections on the classical meaning of liberal education, to the promises and perils of technology and the sciences, to curriculum issues within the modern academy, this book has something important to contribute. --Khalil M. Habib, Hillsdale College, coeditor of The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom

Author Information

Justin Buckley Dyer was, until June 2022, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Last month, Justin took on the roles of Professor of Government and Executive Director of the newly formed Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Among his many authored, co-authored, and edited books are Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning; Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition; and American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence.   Constantine Vassiliou is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. A political theorist who specializes in Enlightenment thought, Vassiliou’s research points to a perennial civic challenge, that of trying to balance commercial considerations with the public interest. His upcoming project, “Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment: Liberty and Honor in the Modern Commercial World,” examines the competing theories of honor of Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson to bring to light a strand of foundational liberal thought that emphasizes the emotional basis of political life.  

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