In Search of Wisdom: Liberal Education for a Changing World. (Featured Topic).

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mount Holyoke College sponsored a conference, In Search of Wisdom: Liberal Education for a Changing World, to facilitate a vision of liberal education as a search for wisdom. Nancy Thomas, one of the conference planners and a participant, reflects on how colleges and universities might realize that vision.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (2)

-T.S. Eliot

FOR MANY YEARS, commentators on higher education have lamented the growing "disconnects" that seem to dominate the profession: disconnects between disciplines, liberal and professional learning, academic and student affairs, faculty and administration, students and faculty, campus and surrounding community, theoretical and applied research. There is a nagging sense that colleges and universities have lost much of their public relevance. Perhaps Ernest Boyer (1996) captured this concern best when he wrote:

What I find most disturbing...is a growing feeling in this country that higher education is, in fact, part of the problem rather than the solution. Going still further, that it's become a private benefit, not a public good. Increasingly, the campus is being viewed as a place where students get credentialed and faculty get tenured, while the overall work for the academy does not seem particularly relevant to the nation's most pressing civic, social, economic, and moral problems. Boyer's words challenge educators to consider:

What should our students value, know, and be able to do by the time they graduate? What are we, both individually and collectively, doing to realize this vision for student learning?

For nearly a year, I worked with Beverly Daniel Tatum, then acting president of Mount Holyoke College (now president of Spelman College), to consider these and other questions as we worked with other educational leaders (3) to plan a three-day gathering.

What follows are my thoughts on that planning year and the rich range of ideas and views that emerged at the Wisdom Conference, an event that stretched my understanding and thinking.

Disengaged communities

Colleges and universities are not alone in their "disconnected" way of being. Robert Putnam created the image of Americans "bowling alone" to describe his view that America's social capital--the norms, networks, and sense of community necessary to allow people to work collectively to support democracy--is declining. His research suggests that fewer Americans vote, organize, join community or social groups, or run for public office than in earlier periods of U.S. history. The United States is strong, and democracy is at its best, when it consists of engaged communities in which pressing social, economic, and ethical issues are the subjects of democratic dialogue and collective action.

Yet, the nature of discourse in general today seems polarized; both individuals and institutions appear unable to deal adequately with social divisions based on race, gender, ethnicity, and diverse lived experiences. In The Magic of Dialogue (1999, 16-18), Daniel Yankelovich, president of Public Agenda, wrote:

Until recently, most people made the assumption that no particular skill is required to do dialogue. They assume that dialogue is just another form of conversation and that we surely know how to carry out conversations without requiring a special discipline ... But in the past decade, a growing literature has demonstrated that there is something unique about dialogue when it is done well.

...Today's diversity means not only that more people participate in decision making but that the new players bring different backgrounds and expectations to the table. Dialogue used to be simpler to do because we shared frameworks. When frameworks are held in common, there is no need to be self-conscious about doing dialogue. No special method is needed to arrive at mutual understanding. You just do it ...But we can no longer "just do it." Reaching mutual understanding through dialogue doesn't come naturally to us anymore. For graduates who will be assuming leadership roles in society, these are significant issues. College and university graduates must be able to engage in meaningful dialogue and collaborative problem solving across difference.

What are the desired ends of a quality liberal education today? The ability to use knowledge wisely, to think creatively, to be able to continue learning independently, to make balanced choices, to exercise judgment, and to apply these skills for the common good. Surely this is where a liberal arts education should lead. Yet, from reports from our colleagues on so many campuses, we wonder whether many students lead "an examined life." Research on the characteristics of college students suggests that as a result of their college experience, they are more interested in "being very well-off financially" than in "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" (CIRP 2001).

A quality liberal education leads students to reflect on their place in the world and locate themselves historically and socially. Balancing work and family, private and public life--how does college prepare students to make difficult choices? Graduates of a liberal education need to be people of integrity possessed of a sense of responsibility to society. These qualities require a sense of humility as well as a commitment to the common good, with a conviction that there is something that is more important than oneself.

While these concerns were important before September 11, 2001, the events of that day and their aftermath have brought new clarity and urgency to the need to focus on education for a changing world. Higher education must cultivate in students the passion, balance, integrity, vision, and sense of collective responsibility that will prepare them for wise and ethical stewardship of their world. As educators of the next generation of "leaders of church and state," harking back to higher education's roots, we need to pause and ask: What are we doing well? What could we be doing better? How can the reinvigoration of liberal education address these issues?

Exploring ideals and ideas

No gathering of educators could have "right" answers to all these questions. Strong communities, whether in society, on campus, or all of us in conversation, need multiple opportunities in which people with different views can exchange ideas and problem-solve together. Such communities support our collective wisdom through every voice being heard. While the Wisdom Conference featured roundtables, workshops, quiet time, a keynote address, panel discussions, and more, for me, the most compelling format featured at the conference was the study circle -- small, facilitated group discussions that met regularly over the course of three days. The study circles confirm my belief that reliable wisdom resides within communities.

In a world that suffers from apathy, excessive busy-ness, cynicism about group dynamics, hours of television and computer gazing, frazzled dual career parenting, and frustration over stalled social change initiatives, why would people become engaged in time-consuming, sustained dialogue? To engage in a process that is grounded in both personal meaning-making and public potential, by asking people to dig deep, share their stories, and revisit why something matters. Study circles do just that.

A study circle is a simple, informal, and effective process for democratic dialogue and community action. It consists of a small group of people, usually eight to ten, who meet regularly over a period of time to address an issue in a deliberative and democratic way. Usually, study circle programs are organized around public issues (e.g., public safety, local school reform, race relations, terrorism, other pressing local or national matters). For this conference we worked with Study Circles Resource Center. (4) Their approach is a progressive one. It begins with personal reflections (How does this issue affect me personally?) and moves to broader perspectives (What is the nature of the problem? What do others say about it? How do we frame it? What is our shared vision regarding this particular issue?) to personal and collective action (What can I do? What can we do?).

By participating in this process, I, with other conference participants, experienced a better way to facilitate change on a campus and to help students develop the capability to engage in meaningful dialogue and collaborative problem solving in a diverse society. It is a process that holds promise for all faculty, irrespective of discipline, interested in crafting student learning experiences that cultivate skills of engagement.

What should graduates value, know, and be able to do?

Certain ideas emerged from the Wisdom Conference study circles that held particular meaning to me:

Personal reflection and empathic listening: Educating for wisdom starts with providing opportunities to explore identity, to seek clarity on racial, ethnic, class, religious, gender, and other affiliations that help explain why we view issues as we do. Equally important, it involves an exploration of others, understanding what makes an issue poignant for others as individuals, the source of their views. If our educational objectives include compassion and integrity, we need to challenge students to recognize and analyze privilege and to think beyond their own circumstances.

Wisdom as a process, not just an outcome: Students need to be active participants in a learning process, one that involves reflection, integration, application, questioning, seeking mentors, living an examined life, and narrowing values down to a few truths. Liberal learning involves the creation of conflict to provide opportunities for students to engage in this way of being. This kind of learning does not stick unless students are active participants in their own learning.

Dialogue across difference: Students should be provided multiple formative opportunities to reflect on their own experiences, understand those of others, and engage in open dialogue about both in order to find shared values and common ground for action.

Action strategies

What can we as educators do to achieve this vision? These strategies that emerged from the study circles are those I found most compelling:

* Create reflective spaces such as time in classes, exercises in journals, and reflective opportunities within a student-advising context.

* Create communities of discourse/dialogue on our campuses to flesh out issues of balance, integration, reflection, mission, and vision. This will enable educators who grapple with these questions to find like-minded colleagues on their campuses. Guided, small-group study circles can be a powerful way to create such communities, particularly when the process assures active listening and deep understanding of how lived experiences shape beliefs, attitudes, and choices.

* Develop succinct statements on the campus ethos--a credo--and use those statements to wrestle with norms and to frame dialogues.

* Create faculty and staff development programs on deliberative democracy and collaborative action, values inquiry/audits, intergroup dialogue, diversity, case method teaching, reflective practice, vision, and mission.

* Develop assessment tools to measure progress.

* Amend the academic reward system to recognize engaged, integrated, interdisciplinary learning, public scholarship, and applied scholarship.

Changing course

How can campuses put these strategies into action? Change initiatives typically begin with enlisting key institutional leaders, marketing or generating publicity to rally others, and holding a set of meetings for those who might be interested, all with the view to winning support for that change. More often than not, this seemingly obvious strategy fails to make a significant impact.

A better approach is to link reform efforts to the broader educational objectives of an institution--the institution's mission and the myriad ways that it fulfills its mission. It means engaging faculty, administrative leaders, trustees, students, and community partners in dialogues about the institution's vision for student learning. Key questions for the campus community: Why did I choose this profession? What is the purpose of higher education overall--education for what? What should students value, know, and be able to do by the time they graduate? What are we doing to realize this vision for student learning? What am I doing or contributing to realize this vision? This is nothing short of a challenge to campuses to retrace their steps, to return to their origins and reconstruct why they came into being.

What community organizers know--that higher education may have yet to learn--is that real change only happens when power is shared with the community. It is a matter of buy-in and ownership. Institutions need to foster habits of democratic dialogue and collaborative problem solving modeled after the work of exemplary methods in community organizing and social action. These habits foster a particular quality of campus life--what might be called the campus climate or ethos--a way of being, where diverse views and lived experiences among its members are viewed as a resource and asset. In short, we need to view our campuses as communities and employ models of democratic dialogue and social change to make them better places to work and learn.

The big picture

One of my favorite painting styles is Pointilism, a method of painting developed in France in the late 1800s in which dots are applied to a canvas to create a picture. A dot by itself does not make up an image. Dots combine to create an image or movement. Viewed from a distance, the dots blend so much that the viewer usually cannot discern the separate dots.

Colleges and universities are like the canvas on which faculty, students, institutional leaders, programs, and activities make the dots. The process is to step back from that canvas and as a community, examine the picture, where dots should be combined or new ones added. The campus community's vision--the image of the mission accomplished--is what should be on that canvas when the community steps back to view and engage in discourse on it.

Paul Ylvisaker, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, once advised students(in Esposito 1999):

Never lose your sense of outrage...there needs to be in all of us a moral thermostat that flips on when confronted by suffering, injustice, inequity, or callous behavior.

For colleges and universities, the challenge is to educate students to harbor and maintain that passion and to possess the skills they need to act on them.

NOTES

(1.) The author would like to thank Scott C. Brown at Mount Holyoke College for reviewing earlier drafts of this document.

(2.) These words inspired in Beverly Daniel Tatum, former dean of the college and acting president of Mount Holyoke College and current president of Spelman College, the desire to act. She first encountered these lines from T.S. Eliot's "Choruses from the Rock" in a dissertation written by Scott C. Brown, entitled "Learning across the Campus: How College Facilitates the Development of Wisdom" (see www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/careers/wisdom)

(3.) The Wisdom Conference was the brainchild of Beverly Daniel Tatum who brought me in, as the director of the Society for Values in Higher Education's Democracy Project, to help conceptualize and organize it. An advisory committee consisted of Edgar Beckham, senior fellow at AAC&U; Scott C. Brown, director of the Career Development Center at Mt. Holyoke; Dorothy Denburg, dean of the college at Barnard College and visiting fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Richard Guarasci, president of Wagner College; Karen Remmler, co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership at Mt. Holyoke College; Carol G. Schneider, president of AAC&U; and David Schoem, faculty director of the Michigan Community Scholars Program and co-editor of Intergroup Dialogue: Deliberative Democracy in School, College, Community, and Workplace.

(4.) For more information on Study Circles Resource Center, see www.studycircles.org

WORKS CITED

Boyer, Ernest. 1996. The scholarship of engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1:1.

CIRP, Cooperative Institutional Research Program, Higher Education Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles.

Esposito, Virginia M., ed. 1999. Conscience and community: The legacy of Paul Ylvisaker, NY: Peter Lang.

Yankelovich, Daniel. 1999. The magic of dialogue: Transforming conflict into cooperation. NY: Simon and Schuster.

NANCY THOMAS directs the Democracy Project for the Society for Values in Higher Education. (1)