Eva Badowska on "#libedunbound, or 'Forbidding Mourning'"

Eva Badowska--former Chair of Fordham's English department, now interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences--recently attended the annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, held in Washington, D.C. In this article in Inside Higher Ed, she thinks about the future of liberal education and the value of Twitter backchannels. Along the way she quotes John Donne…as well as another former chair of our department, Nicola Pitchford.

“[W]hat the hundreds of tweets to #libedunbound also demonstrated,” she writes, “is that we may benefit from the exercise of thinking about the future of liberal education away from the historically accurate but no longer productive dichotomy that juxtaposes it with vocational training. In the knowledge economy, critical thinking and what we typically call skills are much more closely bound and more difficult to disentangle than they were at the inception of the liberal arts centuries ago or even in the relatively recent course of their 200-year history in U.S. higher education.” Read the whole article here.