Engaged Liberal Learning:
The Plan for Skidmore College, 2005-2015

Skidmore's Distinctive Identity — Engaged Liberal Learning

Although we share many ideals with other schools, Skidmore has claimed its place among the ranks of first-tier national liberal arts colleges not by emulating others but rather by expressing a unique combination of values that define a distinctive conception of educational excellence. We comprehend those principles today under the heading "engaged liberal learning," reflecting our belief that engagement is prerequisite to achievement. Though we must be prepared to embrace good ideas wherever we encounter them, we must resist any temptation to imitate others for imitation's sake. Rather, we must devise new ways to express our own core values and, in so doing, strengthen our unique identity.

Liberal education and autonomy

Liberal education is not a destination but a life-long journey — a continuing transformative process modeled by our faculty members in their engagement with their disciplines in their research, creative activity, and teaching. Through their work as teacher-scholars — in the classroom, the laboratory, the studio, and beyond — they invite our students into the ongoing conversations in and among their disciplines, involving them in the process of inquiry not as passive spectators but as active participants. By exploring the various ways of interrogating the world, making meaning, and constructing knowledge that are embodied in the various academic disciplines and art forms represented across Skidmore's curriculum, our students extend their powers of inquiry and discernment. The purpose of liberal education is to free individuals from the grip of received opinion, unchallenged assumptions, and prejudices through the development of critical and self-critical faculties. It embraces individual and collaborative methods and processes of learning and knowing within a disciplinary and interdisciplinary context. In short, the liberal education necessarily and fundamentally transforms the students' relation to themselves and broadens the ways they engage the world.

Historically, knowledge has been constructed, formalized, and structured primarily through the medium of text. Accordingly, text-based organizational structures — e.g., book, chapter, essay, and index — have dominated teaching, learning, and the demonstration of knowledge gained. These organizing structures and the linear reasoning that they support have been crucial to the advance of knowledge, and we must continue to nurture our students' capacity for logical thought, critical analysis, and argument. In recent years, however, methods of creating and communicating meaning have evolved to include rich media and multimedia built around linear and non-linear access to text and employing auditory and visual imagery. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, these forms of communication can be integrated not just to express knowledge but also to develop and organize it — employing structures that are hyper-linked (not just hierarchical), multi-dimensional (not just linear), constructed, not just displayed, and capable of dynamic, not just static access. Today's students need to be sophisticated consumers of information conveyed through electronic media, and increasingly they need to be accomplished creators of such resources.

Ultimately, we want our students to develop the capacity to appraise, for themselves, the worth of an idea, an argument, or a work of art independently of the identity of its author and no matter how it is presented to them. This capacity to determine one's own beliefs and so direct one's actions is foundational to the personal freedom promised in the concept of liberal learning. We expect our students to practice this freedom at once by taking charge of their own academic odysseys, beginning with their matriculation at Skidmore. Through systematic and effective mentoring (the responsibility of every full-time faculty member), we empower them to develop their own pathways through the myriad possibilities within our academic programs. In response, our students elect both traditional and quite unexpected combinations of majors and minors that they pursue with purpose and passion — making choices that reflect not the expectations of others but rather their own highest aspirations for themselves.

Creative thought matters

The historical and continuing prominence of the arts at Skidmore within a broad liberal arts curriculum has long set us apart from our peers.⁹ Where others have talked about the value of integrating the arts as an essential component of liberal education, Skidmore has created a vibrant culture that is enriched throughout by the fine and performing arts.¹⁰ This key dimension of our heritage led naturally to the phrase creative thought matters. The implications of this idea, however, extend far beyond the arts. It is a motif interwoven throughout the fabric of the College, touching all that we do. For the importance of creativity is manifested not solely in the arts but rather in all areas of human endeavor, certainly in every region of the Skidmore curriculum. As evidenced across the research and artistic work of our faculty of teacher-scholars, creative thought matters just as much in science or mathematics or government or management as it does in theatre, dance, or sculpture. It is linked inescapably with the independence of mind required to formulate a new approach to a particular problem or to rethink an entire domain of knowledge. Genuine creativity does not come easily; it requires a rigor of thought and practice that conjoins knowledge and imagination with discipline.

Skidmore's insistence that creative thought matters takes on added significance in light of the world our graduates will encounter: a world marked by conflict, unpredictability, insecurity, and an accelerating pace of change. At the same time, it is a world of unprecedented opportunity for both personal and collective achievement. To comprehend this increasingly complex environment, our graduates must be intellectually nimble, self-directed, lifelong learners, with the flexibility of mind required to master new fields of inquiry, learning and un-learning on their own. To prevail over multi-dimensional problems that defy one-dimensional thinking, they must combine analogies and insights from disparate sources. Interdisciplinary programs represent one important way to gain such facility, and our faculty has long affirmed the value of such work. Twenty years ago, we implemented an innovative Liberal Studies curriculum emphasizing the capacity to make cross-disciplinary connections as an essential component of the knowledge most worth having. We also developed concentrations, majors, and minors and, in the process, infused a spirit of interdisciplinarity throughout our curriculum. This emphasis continues in our new First-Year Studies Program designed to meet the needs of today's students while preserving the spirit of Liberal Studies.

In the end, creative thought matters only to the extent that thought itself matters. At its deepest level therefore, Skidmore's commitment to liberal education affirms the value of ideas — especially the power of innovative thought — in human affairs. In short, the concept of engaged liberal learning means, first and foremost, active engagement with ideas. Liberal education initiates students into that fraternity and sorority of the human community, unbounded by time and space, whose members have experienced the power of ideas in their own lives and who, on occasion, have given their lives in service of their beliefs. In support of this ideal of intellectual engagement, we strive to be an academic community for whom ideas matter consistently and pervasively in all that we do: in every classroom, lab, and studio, across our campus, in our publications, within our alumni community, and through our contributions to the larger world.

Mind and hand

Merely to value ideas, however, is not enough. For the project of liberal education itself is grounded in an ethic of concern that aims not just to transform the lives of individual students but to empower them, ultimately, to transform the world: increasing the store of human knowledge, attacking social problems, creating works of art that lift the human spirit or reveal previously unseen aspects of the human condition, parenting well, increasing our collective wealth, helping to realize the promise of democracy, and through service giving back to the human community more than they take for themselves. If this is to occur, our students must learn how to put their ideas into effect: to make their creative thoughts material. For the un-embodied thought — the building that is designed but never built, the novel envisioned but never written, the peace plan proposed but never implemented — remains decidedly unreal, a mere chimera, an illusion. Thus the very notion that creative thought matters is grounded in Skidmore's dual legacy of mind and hand, episteme and praxis.

We began in 1903 as an "industrial club" that fostered personal independence for young women of modest means by offering practical instruction in business and other "industrial arts" leading to gainful employment, along with the "cultivation of such knowledge and arts as may promote their well-being, physical, mental, spiritual."¹¹ That early "club" soon evolved into a school for the arts (1912) and then into a four-year college (1922) dedicated to a unique approach to liberal education — one that retained selected elements of professional preparation — as representing the most promising path to the original goal: independence for our students. Throughout the intervening years, Skidmore has preserved its linkage of theoretical and applied learning. This heritage remains apparent today in our complex curriculum that includes selected pre-professional programs (in management, exercise science, social work, and education). Episteme and praxis come together pedagogically in opportunities for service learning, internships, and study abroad, as well as in our many courses that involve laboratories and studios. The span of Skidmore's curriculum signifies a broader concept of liberal education than typically is found at peer institutions: providing multiple dimensions of engagement for our students, further enriching intellectual life within the Skidmore community itself, and presenting opportunities to acquire skills that relate directly to our students' post-Skidmore lives.

Education for the multi-cultural, interconnected world of the 21^st Century

Everyone who lives in the increasingly interconnected world of the 21^st Century — from the young person just attaining adulthood to those with a bit more life experience — needs to become an adept traveler in a complex multi-national, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural milieu that scarcely could have been imagined just decades ago. To do so requires that we all develop the intercultural skills necessary to affirm one another's humanity, no matter how different we might at first appear, with the ultimate goal of living and working successfully together.¹² In fact, the concept of diversity stands as an essential element within the larger framework of Skidmore's most fundamental and longstanding¹³ institutional commitments. Liberal education requires the interplay of a full spectrum of ideas, viewpoints, and perspectives. Persons from different backgrounds frequently can draw upon distinct personal histories, expanding the range of ideas and insights brought to the table. Diversity, likewise, links directly with creativity: interactions between disparate perspectives frequently strike the intellectual sparks that herald the emergence of a new idea.

Complementing the importance of diversity in our thinking is our determination that students leave Skidmore with a global perspective upon the political, social, environmental, and cultural issues facing humanity today. Former Chair of the Board Josephine Case concluded her "Charge to the Architects" by insisting: "One thing we do not want for our new campus and that is walls or gates. For we want the world to enter."¹⁴ We still want the world to enter Skidmore: through the scholarship of our faculty, throughout our curriculum and courses, in the person of invited speakers and students who have returned from studying abroad, and through increased international representation within our community itself — most especially among our students and professors — so that Skidmore better reflects and more deeply interrogates the world our graduates will enter. Similarly, we want more of our students to encounter their world directly through study abroad, service learning, internships, and volunteerism. To accomplish this goal, we must replace the outdated image of Skidmore as a protected enclave with that of an active portal through which our students engage the world in full.

Informed, responsible citizenship

Although liberal arts colleges collectively educate only a small proportion of the nation's students, our graduates are represented disproportionately in the leadership ranks of business, the professions, and government. This reality imposes upon these institutions, in general, and upon Skidmore College, as a case in point, a substantial social imperative. Our Mission Statement recognizes this obligation as the commitment to "prepare liberally educated graduates ... [who will] make the choices required of informed, responsible citizens" — an objective that speaks to the basic social requirements of democracy itself. Democracies stand on the political assertion that every citizen possesses the right — and, indeed, the obligation — to participate in collective social decision-making. But they rely equally on the notion that persons, on balance, possess greater wisdom collectively than individually and on its corollary that better public decisions tend to result from broader — as opposed to more limited — participation by an educated, thoughtful citizenry in the public conversation. The requirements of effective participation in civic discourse itself¹⁵ therefore shape our understanding of the attributes that education for responsible citizenship therefore must instill: attributes that are central to liberal learning itself.

Effective civic discourse first of all needs to be informed by the idea that truth matters, as well as by cogent argument and the best available information. It thus requires citizens (and especially leaders) who can evaluate knowledge claims and participate in genuine conversation, as opposed to mere ideological polemic. To do so, our students must acquire the knowledge and hone the conceptual skills required to articulate, examine, reflect upon, and question their own beliefs as well as those of others. This learning begins with attention to the various dimensions of language, to an awareness that words have meanings that are not fixed in time but still transcend the intentions of particular speakers, that arguments can be sound or fallacious on logical or empirical grounds, and that metaphor plays an integral role not just in the elaboration but in the very creation of significance. Thus our Academic Vision Statement stresses the importance of writing throughout our curriculum, as a means of expressing one's viewpoint effectively and, more importantly, as a crucial step in bringing one's ideas into focus.¹⁶

Meaningful civil discourse also requires the attitude of openness to the ideas of others that enables a genuine exchange of views. Such openness is best acquired through an appreciation of our inherent limitations as knowers. This awareness begins with the realization that we have been mistaken on numerous occasions — indeed, that whole societies and ages have held beliefs to be obviously true that we today regard not just as false but as pernicious. This understanding that we human beings, both individually and collectively, are highly fallible knowers opens one to the possibility that on any given occasion someone else — a person, a different political group, a foreign religion or culture, even another era — might possess a better idea than oneself. As noted by Bertrand Russell, acquiring such a sense of humility with regard to one's own beliefs provides an antidote to "the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt."¹⁷ When it succeeds, liberal education guides students into that disquieting region and challenges them not to remain in doubt but rather to develop personal certainties that they can affirm without falling into dogmatism.

We cultivate such virtues in our students first of all by modeling them in ourselves. It is not enough that our professors demonstrate the assurance conferred by their hard-won disciplinary expertise. They also are called upon to acknowledge both the existence and the legitimacy of alternative views (or, at least, their possible legitimacy). By creating instructional contexts that value a diversity of viewpoints in which opposing positions are not ridiculed but rather are seriously engaged, they encourage students to explore alternative perspectives for themselves. Just as we challenge our students to be creative in their thinking, so too must we challenge them to understand the complexity of difficult questions and reward them for doing so. In further support of these ideals, we strive to be a community of discourse in which ideas matter consistently and pervasively in all that we do and that reflects a genuine diversity of viewpoints on complex issues.

The challenge to live as a responsible citizen also invokes the value of concern for others, for a greater social good, that extends beyond one's narrow self-interest. In expecting our students to become responsible citizens, we challenge them to live what Robert Coles¹⁸ has termed "lives of moral leadership" professionally, civically, and personally. To do so, our students must understand that all persons encounter situations that call upon them to invoke moral categories and stand behind the ethical judgments they make. Accordingly, we must demonstrate for our students the need for moral decision-making, help them critically explore available ethical frameworks, equip them to make responsible choices among those frameworks or create new ones, and thereby enable them to calibrate their own moral compasses.

Balance and sustainability

A liberal education provides the best possible preparation for a life of professional achievement; it also provides the foundation for a life of satisfaction in the deepest sense of that term — a life of human flourishing, Aristotle's eudaimonia. Such a life certainly requires some measure of material success. But even more importantly it entails continuing intellectual and personal growth, the cultivation of mature friendships and loving family relationships, professional, civic, other forms of community involvement, attention to the arts and other sources of spiritual renewal, and a commitment to health and wellness. As we consider the College we are today and plan for the College we will be tomorrow, we must keep in mind these constituents of a sustainable life and ask how we might do more to promote them — not only for our students but also for those who work at the College and for our alumni. A key element in this equation is balance: the ability to handle the competing — and frequently conflicting — demands on our time and attention. We ask our faculty members to model this characteristic for our students as well: That is, we expect them to balance the competing demands of being a teacher-scholar-citizen, the three major components of the faculty role at Skidmore. It is certainly easier to achieve excellence by emphasizing just one component of one's life; it requires much more agility to shift among different roles. By attending more intentionally to this aspect of our humanity we may be able to address one of the most significant challenges our graduates will face in their post-Skidmore years, that of finding balance in their lives.

Individuality within community

Skidmore historically has expressed its commitment to excellence in terms of yet another dimension of engagement by fostering individual achievement within the context of a caring, supportive academic community. Indeed, throughout our history we have realized the complementarity of individuality and community — that human beings are dependent upon their social context for their very existence as individuals, and that any one person's achievement is made possible only through the contributions and support of many others. Students, faculty members, and staff members new to Skidmore quickly learn that they have joined a close-knit community that fosters individual excellence without at the same time generating destructive forms of zero-sum competition in which some necessarily must fail if others are to succeed.¹⁹ This unique community unites our alumni from the 1930's to our most recent graduates. More broadly, even as we honor the differences of color, cultural background, sexual orientation, religious heritage, and other factors that add richness to the human family, we also honor the even deeper affinities we all share as human beings. Such affinities influence us far more profoundly than do our sometimes more obvious differences. Our understanding of our human identity remains incomplete without an appreciation of these profound commonalities. This understanding is echoed in Skidmore's emphasis on community that we continue to affirm today.

Skidmore's distinctive identity

This constellation of institutional history, mission, and values delineates a unique institutional identity that is immediately recognizable within the extended Skidmore community and that forms the core of the story that we need to communicate to external audiences. Since our founding, Skidmore College has prepared generations of young women and, more recently, young women and men, to become both successful, productive citizens and personally fulfilled human beings. We also have embraced the education of a smaller cohort of non-traditional students who affirm the power of liberal learning to illuminate both their professional and personal lives. We attract students who are sophisticated, eclectic, collaborative, creative, and adventurous. We offer them a cosmopolitan and challenging institutional culture, one infused with opportunities to participate in and appreciate the visual and performing arts. We encourage them to experiment, to explore multiple areas of inquiry, and to pursue their individual passions. Traditional and non-traditional students alike report that Skidmore has enabled them to accomplish objectives and grow personally to an extent impossible to predict when they entered the College. Indeed, one of our historic strengths has been to awaken previously unrecognized interests and talents, suggesting new possibilities to students who have not yet appreciated — much less risen to — their potential.

The members of the Skidmore faculty take justifiable pride in cultivating our students' intellectual and personal excellence and curiosity; others within the extended Skidmore community take similar pride in their contributions to students' success. We hear in the testimony of our alumni, from the observations of appreciative parents, and through our own experience that our best students — those who take full advantage of what they find at Skidmore today — receive an educational experience second to none. A Skidmore education provides the foundation in both the cognitive skills and the personal maturity required to excel in both the workplace and in the polity of the 21^st Century. Most importantly, it offers the resources for composing a sustainable life as a moral being in a world where the ethical signposts periodically seem to have been knocked flat.

9. There is evidence that we attract a student body qualitatively different from those of both a group of peer schools and a national sample of liberal arts colleges represented in the 2003 Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Survey of entering students (class of 2007). For example, 54% of Skidmore's entering first-year students rated themselves as "above average" or in the "highest 10%" in terms of artistic ability (compared to 35% of students in a peer group), and 79% rated themselves similarly in regard to creativity (vs. 63% in the peer group). At any given time, more than 40% of all Skidmore students are taking a course in the Art Department, and this number grows considerably when the performing arts are included.

10. In the Tang Museum, to choose just one example, we are exploring the power of artifact exhibition not merely to display information but to create new ways of knowing — a project that will become an increasingly important aspect of the Skidmore pedagogy.

11. "Constitution of the Young Women's Industrial Club," quoted by Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. in "'Such Growth Bespeaks the Work of Many Hands': The Story of Skidmore College," address to the Newcomen Society, 1976, p. 10.

12. A Skidmore graduate who works in the banking industry commented on her company's multi-national work force by saying, "I don't manage people: I mange cultures."

13. Skidmore's present-day commitment to diversity has its historical origins in Lucy Scribner's Young Women's Industrial Club, whose directors enacted a policy, in 1903, offering admission to students of color. Even though the Club was affiliated with a single Saratoga Springs church, its directors also stipulated that the organization was open to members of other denominations. These policies were reflected on early application forms. See Make No Small Plans: A History of Skidmore College, Mary C. Lynn (Saratoga Springs , NY : Skidmore College , 2000), p. 17.

14. Quoted in Lynn, p. 246.

15. The current highly polarized political climate of our nation and the widely remarked erosion of our public conversation during the recent presidential election (in which genuine dialog has too often been replaced by invective) shows how easily and how pervasively civic discourse can be undermined.

16. The Academic Vision Statement was authored by the Committee on Educational Policy and Planning (CEPP).

17. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 157.

18. Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership (New York: Random House, 2001).

19. Not surprisingly, the Academic Vision Statement emphasizes the importance of collaborative learning, a value that takes on added significance today as we prepare our graduates for a professional world that increasingly respects and, indeed, demands the ability to work effectively with others.