Summer 2009, Vol. 95, No. 3

The AAC&U Annual Meeting

This issue represents the theme of the 2009 annual meeting, “Ready or Not: Global Challenges, College Learning, and America’s Promise.” Included are highlights of the meeting, along with the keynote address from the 2008 annual meeting. Additional articles examine the faculty’s role in students’ moral formation, efforts to increase access for low-income students, and the senior capstone as a transformative experience.

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CONTENTS:

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President’s Message
Ready—Or Not?
By Carol Geary Schneider
As we move forward in this new and uncharted terrain, we will need to make consequential choices about our institutions, our shared commitment to higher learning, and our own lives—choices that will shape the future of our democracy for decades to come.

From the Editor

News and Information

FEATURED TOPIC

Education for Profit, Education for Freedom
By Martha C. Nussbaum
What would an education for human development look like, and how would it differ from an education for economic enrichment?

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
By Peter Sacks
We are fostering an increasingly class-bound education system in which only a small segment of the population can realistically hope to earn postsecondary degrees. If we continue along this path, the United States will become a second- or even third-tier economic power.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait
By Chris Jordan
Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, Running the Numbers raises questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming

Adaptive Budgeting: Thirty-four Ideas for Raising Revenues, Cutting Costs, Retaining Students, and Saving Jobs in Hard Times
By Peter A. Facione
If you think the current situation is like being at sea in a sailboat during a gale, you are right. But you are not without tools for navigating these troubled waters.

PERSPECTIVES

Should Faculty Members Teach Virtues and Values? That is the Wrong Question
By Mark W. Roche
Faculty members do not ignore moral formation. Despite their caution, reticence, and open denials, faculty members are heavily engaged in the moral formation of students.

Increasing Access for Low-Income Students and Making Financial Education a Priority for Higher Education
By Adrianna Kezar
Individual Development Accounts have the potential both to increase access and retention of low-income students and to fulfill higher education’s commitment to offer financial education.

The St. Lawrence University Adirondack Semester
By Baylor Johnson and Steve Alexander
Though the courses reinforce one another, experience itself unites the elements of the program. The most important part of that experience is living in a small, close-knit community with a materially simple lifestyle that is in close contact with nature.

The Disorienting Dilemma: The Senior Capstone as a Transformative Experience
By David Sill, Brian M. Harward, and Ivy Cooper
Recognized as one of the university’s hallmark features, the Senior Assignment can bring about transformative learning for students, faculty, and even programs.

MY VIEW

Sustaining Institutional Mission through “Pilgrimage”
By Charles S. Weiss
My colleagues and I—all senior administrators at the college—returned from the trip profoundly changed, with new respect for what can emerge from intentional work to sustain institutional mission.