We educators have gotten set in some bad ways. rarely do colleges and universities build on the work of their peers, and seldom do they engage in comparative study, except when they are benchmarking their progress against one another.” In his key essay, “The Future of Liberal Arts Colleges Begins with Collaboration” (published in the 2013 edited volume, Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal-Arts College), he quotes another big-perspective educator, Stanford University’s Ray Bacchetti, on the effects of colleges’ pride in their (supposedly) distinctive cultures: They imagine, Tobin writes, “all institutional problems are local and all the resources needed to solve them are, by definition, close at hand.” He further summarizes, “Little energy or thought is given to the experience of others. Eugene Tobin has a contrastingly large perspective as a senior program officer at the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Liberal-arts colleges, I’ve contended, provide a set of academic practices and social outcomes so positive and so vital that we should be obsessed not with cutting but with sensibly growing their size and influence.īut there’s another kind of smallness that we need to take arms against: the entrenched practice of colleges standing small, separate, and solitary. In my first two columns, I’ve argued against downsizing at liberal-arts colleges, and offered a curricular proposal aimed at attracting new students. I’ve been writing about the challenges facing liberal-arts colleges and urging them to be audacious, not risk-averse, from my new semi-remove of semi-retirement. Like meets only with like, and even then the competitive juices flow. Colleges talk a lot about the ideal of a diverse community, but they tend to be narrow-minded about creating that community with other institutions.
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