Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

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The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civ­ic, and professional growth. New technologies that might have brought people together have instead frustrated the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s lead­ers and exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities that are poison­ing America’s civic culture.
With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collec­tion of 19 original essays, editors Justin Dyer and Constantine Vassiliou present the work of a diverse group of scholars to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today.
  “This is a valuable volume that addresses the importance of liberal education and the challenges to it. From reflections on the classical meaning of liberal education, to the promises and perils of technology and the sciences, to curriculum issues within the modern academy, this book has something important to contribute.”—Khalil M. Habib, Hillsdale College, coeditor of The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom Justin Buckley Dyer was, until June 2022, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Last month, Justin took on the roles of Professor of Government and Executive Director of the newly formed Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Among his many authored, co-authored, and edited books are Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning; Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition; and American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence.
 
Constantine Vassiliou is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. A political theorist who specializes in Enlightenment thought, Vassiliou’s research points to a perennial civic challenge, that of trying to balance commercial considerations with the public interest. His upcoming project, “Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment: Liberty and Honor in the Modern Commercial World,” examines the competing theories of honor of Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson to bring to light a strand of foundational liberal thought that emphasizes the emotional basis of political life.
 

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