Thus David H. Porter in a contribution to American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 59, Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities (2005),
a volume I can easily recommend to you, because it's a free download. Some of the essays, especially Lucie Lapovsky's essay on the economic challenges for liberal arts colleges, are very rich and provocative. (The graph's from her article, illustrating the big difference between the advertised cost of most colleges and what nearly all their students actually pay. Eye-opening!)Porter's fun too. As a classicist who's been the president of two colleges (Carleton and Skidmore), he has a unique perspective. Classics used to be the bread and butter of liberal arts colleges, but he doesn't mourn it. As a true liberal arts advocate, he doesn't understand his job as replicating himself as a classicist or even an academic, but as opening the minds of his students in various ways. Suppose we took that old saw to heart, he suggests, when we plan a course or a curriculum. Suppose we asked ourselves: what do we want (and what dare we expect) students to remember of it in 5, 10 or 25 years?
