About the Meeting

In recent years we have talked often of “the academy in transition.” It is now time to say “the New Academy” is emerging.

On the occasion of AAC&U’s 90th anniversary, we look back to acknowledge 90 years of leadership from our members in laying the foundations for the New Academy—an academy that promises the benefits of a liberal education to all students, especially those who have been underserved in higher education. We look to the future to create the New Academy in its fullest expressions of inclusion, excellence, and democratic responsibility.

The concept of a New Academy represents an emerging consensus about what really matters in college. It brings together a vibrant new generation of energetic leaders, innovative programs, and creative pedagogies that demand more from our students, our institutions, and ourselves. The New Academy is characterized by an engaged liberal education that builds on the best of tradition to meet today’s challenges—uncertain global relations, a large and diverse population of students, a fast-changing economy, and persistent inequalities and injustices in the United States and throughout the world.

AAC&U’s 2005 Annual Meeting will showcase the best designs and practices of the New Academy. It will continue AAC&U’s tradition of serving as a catalyst for innovation and educational vitality.

Yet, while we have made great progress, much additional effort and creativity are required before liberal education and the New Academy can reach their fullest potential. The robust development of the New Academy faces many obstacles, especially the absence of public and political support for higher education. Such disinvestment—financial as well as philosophical—seriously limits the potential for better, and more widely available, liberal education. It confronts us with the prospect of a broken compact between the academy and society.

Consequently, the 2005 Annual Meeting also serves as a call to AAC&U members and friends to act as vigorous advocates for inclusion and excellence in the New Academy. In the decade between our 90th and 100th anniversaries, we will hold the New Academy to the highest possible standards of excellence, demonstrate its enduring value, and measure its success. And we will continue to commit ourselves to keeping the promise of educational excellence and genuine opportunity for all our students.

Conference Tracks

Track One:
Inquiry and Intellectual Judgment
Colleges and universities are pioneering new educational practices intended to teach all students how to make sense of complexity, how to find and use evidence, and how to apply their knowledge to new problems and unscripted questions. In doing so, they are bringing new vitality to one of the oldest and most enduring goals of liberal education: the thoughtful and creative use of human reason.

Track Two:
Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement (At Home and Abroad)
Colleges and universities are providing students with real-world experience and rich opportunities to address social problems in cooperation with others. This revival of civic engagement and social responsibility is happening in nearly every field. Collaborative, intercultural, and community-based learning are the new civic frontiers for our twenty-first century world of diversity, contestation, and global interdependence.

Track Three:
Integrative and Culminating Learning
Colleges and universities are inventing new forms of integrative and culminating studies so that students have multiple, structured opportunities to make connections across the disciplines, fields, and varied learning experiences. In this way, students are able to connect theories to practice, and to engage their own lived experience in the context of what they are learning in general education and the majors. Analysis and application are coming together, where once they were presented as alternate educational pathways.

Track Four:
Assessment and Accountability in the New Academy
Despite the development over the past two decades of a veritable “assessment movement,” too many institutions and programs still are unable to answer legitimate questions about what their students are learning in college. Accountability for the highest standards of learning calls for new forms of critical inquiry and reflective practice—forms that are both appropriate to higher education's mission and feasible in the contemporary academy.

Track Five:
Access, Equity, and Meaningful Opportunity (Inclusive Excellence)
Colleges and universities are linking preparation, access, opportunity, and excellence in dynamic ways. They are creating environments where inclusion is a necessary ingredient for academic excellence, and excellence is only genuine when it is inclusive. In this way, institutions hope to achieve the highest level of student intellectual and social development, draw on the cultural differences of learners to enhance teaching and learning, effectively use institutional resources to enhance student learning, and create communities that take advantage of the fullest range of diversity in the service of learning.

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