The Commission on the Liberal Arts

1. The Commission on the Liberal Arts Robyn Fivush, Chair Karen Stolley, Vice-Chair Deborah Bruner, Vice-Chair Liberalartsforwardemory.com

2. Why CoLA? • The Commission on the Liberal Arts has been working to strengthen Emory University as a leader in imagining and implementing a vision for the residential liberal arts research university. 

3. Why now? • The convergence of internal and external forces have brought higher education to a galvanizing moment.  • Financial forces • Rising tuition • Rising financial need • Decreasing grant dollars • Technology forces • Online education • Academic publishing • Social and political forces • Political threats to the value of liberal arts education

4. CoLA’s Vision We envision Emory as a leader in the 21st century liberal arts university. Emory already has so many innovative and integrative programs Our goal is to build on what we already do so well: • Meeting new challenges in higher education • Having flexible and permeable structures that facilitate innovative approaches to teaching and research • Sharing cross disciplines/units core values that affirm the principles of liberal education

5. The principles of a liberal education • Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world • Intellectual and practical skills, including critical and creative thinking, quantitative literacy, inquiry and analysis and collaborative problem-solving • Personal and social responsibility, including civic engagement and ethical reasoning and action • Integrative and applied learning, including the application of knowledge and responsibilities to complex problems

7. Committees have been meeting What do we do well? What do we want to change? What do we want to construct?

8. Outreach Activities • Multiple conversations with multiple stakeholders • Emory Engaged Panel Discussions • Ongoing initiatives in the liberal arts • Mentoring Matters • CoLA lunches • Ongoing survey

9. Would not have been possible without a great deal of help • Shondra May • Corey Georgen • Jill Marshall • Stephanie Pridgeon • And our partners in CFDE: • Pamela Scully and Allison Adams

10. Today we hear reports from each of these committees • Specific “short-term” goals – 1-2 years • Action plan to achieve these goals • Specific pilot projects • Plan to evaluate implementation and success • Long-term goals • Prioritize • Discussion of what needs to be done to realize these goals over time

11. Already under discussion:Infrastructure for teaching • Creating processes to allow faculty to easily teach across units • Creating processes to allow students to easily enroll in courses across units • Development of more coordinated academic calendars • Development of more flexible types of course offerings • Variable credits • Variable time : semesters, mini-semesters, workshops, etc. • Development of a system for allocating teaching credits across units based on contact hours, student enrollment, etc. • Consideration of faculty evaluation/ reward structure for teaching and mentoring.

12. Overarching Themes from the CoLA lunches:twitter feed at #colalunch • Mentoring networks or families rather than one to one matching; mentoring as a set of relationships serving multiple goals • Integration of graduate and professional students into scholarship oriented experiential learning; experiences must be across units, and especially must consider liberal arts/ humanistic inquiry. • Need to develop an intellectual community that students can begin to participate in immediately; using existing programs in campus life, learning communities, Volunteer Emory, to bring students into a scholarly community • Need to align priorities with evaluations, both for evaluating programs and for evaluating faculty

13. Our goal: Increasing flexibility • We envision more faculty opportunities to engage in cross-unit teaching and mentoring for those faculty who are interested • Our recommendations will increase possibilities, not increase requirements.