The final event in a lecture series focusing on undergraduate education will be from 4 to 5:30 p.m. May 5 in the ACES Library Heritage Room. The event will include a conversation to reflect on the year’s four lectures and the issues they raise about undergraduate education on the Urbana campus. The series has been planned and hosted by the Lecture and Discussion Committee of the Campus Conversation on Undergraduate Education. Light refreshments will be served.
The series began in September with a visit by Nancy Folbre, a professor emerita of the University of Massachussets, Amherst. Folbre, an economist, provided a helpful history of shifts in funding for public higher education and also reflected on the grassroots political work that she and others undertook to maintain state funding for the university.
In November, Coursera CEO and former Yale President Rick Levin made the case for a common curriculum designed to foster crosscultural understanding along with other core competencies.
In December, Dartmouth University Provost Carolyn Dever described Dartmouth’s efforts to rethink liberal arts education. Among other things, Dever stressed the importance of living-learning communities and bringing faculty members and students together in informal dialogue.
The series continued in February with a visit by Harry Boyte, a senior scholar at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, who challenged the audience not to reduce democracy to the machinery of government or civics to volunteer work, but to transcend ivory tower detachment and imagine higher education as the very work of democracy.
Blog posts about two of the lectures are available online and videos of three of the lectures also are available.
This final event will use these lectures as occasions to continue the campus conversation on undergraduate education. Members of the campus community are invited, regardless of how many of the lectures they have been able to attend. The session will begin with brief recaps of each lecture and then shift to open discussion.
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