Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on General and Liberal Education

What does liberal/general education mean, in promise and practice? Debate about what a college degree should be is as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. This book respects the complexities and concepts of liberal and general, pushing at their historical and rhetorical legacies to redefine and reaffirm their potential in a new age. Faculty and administrators from across the seventeen colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY), the nation’s largest urban public university, re-examine these critical issues. Through recollection, vision, debate, and disagreement, the contributors state what the public university needs to be in the new century.