About this item
Contentious debates over the benefitsor drawbacksof a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitismoften calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a students capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in Americas long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education. Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history W. E. B. DuBoiss humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T.
About the Author
A graduate of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth became its 16th president in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts. At Wesleyan, Roth has overseen the most successful fundraising campaign in its history--emphasizing financial aid--as well as the launch of such academic programs as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, the College of the Environment, the College of Film and the Moving Image, the College of East Asian Studies and the College of Integrative Sciences. Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998) , Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on "how people make sense of the past," and he regularly teaches classes online and on campus in this area. His sixth and most recent book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, won the Association of American Colleges & Universities' Frederic W. Ness award for a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education; and since then Roth has continued to write about Higher Education. His latest book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses, will be published by Yale this summer.
