PRACTICING LIBERAL EDUCATION:
Deepening Knowledge, Pursuing Justice, Taking Action

2004 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities

Held in conjunction with the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans

January 21-24, 2004
Washington, DC

AAC&U is very pleased that our 2004 Annual Meeting, which was held January 21-24 in Washington, DC, drew more than 1,300 registrants - our largest audience ever.

We extend our sincere appreciation to those who presented their work at the Annual Meeting and contributed to a very well received program of events. And we thank those of you who attended the meeting and generated an atmosphere of collegiality, collaboration, and spirited challenge.

We hope to see you all next year at AAC&U's 2005 Annual Meeting, which is scheduled for January 26-29, 2005, in San Francisco.

At the 2003 Annual Meeting
At last year's AAC&U Annual Meeting, The Courage to Question: Liberal Education in the 21st Century, more than one thousand attendees took up the call articulated in AAC&U's 2002 report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, and wrestled with our most fundamental questions: What does it mean to be liberally educated? What kinds of curricula will produce students with engaged intelligence? What is the future of the disciplines? How do we demonstrate the success of our institutions and our students? These, and other critical questions animated our efforts to articulate a new vision for a practical and valuable liberal education.

For the 2004 Annual Meeting
In Practicing Liberal Education: Deepening Knowledge, Pursuing Justice, Taking Action, we put our answers to the above questions to the test of on-campus experience. At the same time, we continued to weave together two broad visions of liberal education. The first is that liberal education provides the practical skills and modes of thought that best prepare students for a complex and rapidly changing world. The second is that these practical benefits of a liberal education carry with them ethical obligations and civic responsibilities.

Deep knowledge is required for both educational visions. Students who practice liberal education are inspired and empowered to take action—to become intentional learners responsible for their own intellectual development, to become valuable employees comfortable in the world of work, and to become engaged citizens convinced of the profound significance of the ways they put their knowledge to use.

When we – students, faculty, and administrators – practice liberal education in the pursuit of justice, we combine action and knowledge in ways that truly educate as well as attend to the work of the world.

Sessions for this year's meeting were organized around three themes – deepening knowledge, pursuing justice, and taking action. Special attention was given to strategies, programs, projects, and experiences that translate educational vision into practice, apply lessons learned to new contexts, prepare students to perform at the highest levels, apply our own high expectations to ourselves, and build commitment to shared ideals about the purpose and value of liberal education.

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If you have questions, please e-mail us at meetings@aacu.org.