January,  2005 -  President George W. Bush started his second term on January 20th. Exit polls and post-election commentary seemed to show that the message of instilling and upholding moral values resonated with many voters. With this issue framing the discussion about President Bush's next four years, what role do liberal arts colleges play, if any?  Is the liberal arts college an appropriate and effective environment for instilling moral values in American society? In the world? Within this political culture, how would it be done? Has this “shaping” role shifted in recent years? Have parents (and society) placed a large part of this responsibility, fairly or unfairly, on educators, including liberal arts colleges?


Michele Tolela Myers
President of Sarah Lawrence College
(914) 395-2218
mmyers@sarahlawrence.edu
Liberal arts colleges have the ability and therefore the responsibility to provide students with an education that goes beyond the mere learning of facts or a profession or a trade. Education should be about developing one's character as well as one's mind, about being given the opportunity to think through one's values and act on them. It is about learning to live in a diverse and changing world and maintaining a sense of self as well as opening oneself to others. It should foster a questioning of everything but the dignity of all human beings. And it should be about love, trust, generosity of spirit, justice, decency and courage. It should prepare students to live lives of responsible leadership, thoughtful citizenship and productive work. A liberal education should help students to develop the courage to see clearly, think critically and persist in the face of obstacles and doubts. Beyond economic well-being, the goal of education should include the promise that each generation will live in a society more just than the generation preceding it. 
 

SanfordJ. Ungar
President of Goucher College
(410) 337-6040
sungar@goucher.edu
The current vogue surrounding “moral values” has to do more with the right wing’s reframing of the term than with a genuinely renewed debate.  Liberal arts colleges have always concerned themselves with a very broad range of inquiries with profound moral dimensions.  Is it not, for example, a moral issue to discuss how we might ensure that people have adequate health care, nourishment, housing and education?  How about discussions on global inequities, or the ethics of genetic research?  These -- and many others -- are subjects that liberal arts colleges were engaging long before the exit polls in the last election called attention to moral values as a political issue.  It seems to me, then, that our role in the coming years should be not to respond to a contrived moral values debate as though it were something new, but to continue working to ensure that the debate -- and the definition of moral values -- remains broad.

Tori Haring-Smith
President of Washington & Jefferson College
(724) 223-6000
president@washjeff.edu
Whether they like it or not, whether they do it intentionally or not, liberal arts colleges actively instill moral values.  We could argue at some length about whether and how colleges should formally teach moral values in the classroom, but that question is moot.  Every action taken by a professor or administrator, every remark made by a student leader, every decision a college makes about financial allocations, curriculum reform and general equity has moral implications.  And those actions speak louder than any words from a professor’s mouth.  As a result, liberal arts colleges that foster close faculty-student relationships and prepare citizens for a participatory democracy must carefully monitor the moral actions they model in everyday life.  The moral values we preach are always trumped by the moral values we enact.

Diana Chapman Walsh
President of Wellesley College
(781) 283-2243
president@wellesley.edu
America's liberal arts colleges are among our nation’s most diverse communities, bent on fostering a style of learning based on honest conversations that engage students and faculty in probing their differing beliefs. And so it is with the work of citizenship in a democracy. As our nation has become more polarized, we have become, to our detriment, less willing to explore our differences.

Moral citizenship arises out of an inner core of integrity, surely. And yet it is not fixed, stubborn or implacable. The liberal arts disciplines instill in students humility, awareness of the limits of their knowledge, eagerness to hear responsible critique, appreciation that the first and most difficult obligation of a citizen is the Socratic injunction to “know thyself.”

We sorely need such environments to sustain a meaningful dialogue about the values upon which America was founded: equity, freedom to disagree, fairness, strength, mutual responsibility and national unity.

Jake B. Schrum
President of Southwestern University
(512) 863-1570
schrum@southwestern.edu
Traditionally,  the college years afford undergraduates an opportunity to explore new perspectives and encounter new ideas.  Often, this new-found knowledge challenges students’ pre-existing moral and ethical systems.  In engaging these challenges, students either discover that their beliefs bear scrutiny or realize the need for change and, hopefully, restructure their belief systems accordingly.

Liberal arts colleges and universities offer an active, engaged and nurturing environment for this, a generally challenging phase of personal development.  We emphasize close student-faculty relationships so that our undergraduates have a source for guidance and intellectual resources to navigate the sea of new ideas and concepts they encounter.  Our encouragement of community-based learning ensures that students understand moral values as an inseparable part of social decision-making and helps them shore up the courage of their convictions through civically minded scholarship.

 

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