Based on the curriculum, the learning community addresses many important concerns already touched on. The learning community enables faculty who feel isolated by the limits of their discipline and miss the richness they knew so well in graduate school to reach out to other disciplines. At the same time, learning communities address the growing diversity among students in terms of age, race, ethnicity, religion, and marital and enrollment status. Most important, the learning community allows for a wide variety of applications, not simply application in the small liberal arts college. In many ways, the learning community brings together the themes of leadership, faculty, and students.
Leadership is essential to colleges' and universities' sensitivity to values in higher education.
The learning community symbolizes the delicate nature of that task. At the same time, collaboration among faculty in this learning project is of the essence. Such communities can bring out the best in faculty and resolve several of the tensions faculty face in their careers, especially the tension between research and teaching. Only such an approach will do justice to the complexity of ethical issues facing higher education. Achieving Educational Excellence.