2015 Ann Ferren Conference Plenary Session: Why Liberal Education Matters
Channel: CTRLAmerican
Date: 2015-01-30

Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, draws on his new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014), to discuss the debate over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a broad-based liberal education. Critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Roth will focus on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education (including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams and John Dewey) to develop his own defense of a “pragmatic liberal education.”