Liberal Learning and the Art of Self-Governance (Hardcover)

With the ever-increasing clamour for graduating students to be "job ready," there has been a drift towards an emphasis on the vocational aspects of higher education and the original aims and intentions of liberal learning are in danger of being forgotten. At its core, a liberal education is intended to imbue students with the habits of mind, practical skills and values necessary for effective participation in civil society but it has become too easy to claim that these ideals are less important than a narrower focus on preparing those students for the world of work.

This book argues that institutions of liberal learning should be cultivating the art of self-governance and that by practicing what they teach those institutions are better preparing their students for both the workplace and an active role in civil society. The interdisciplinary team of contributors draw on the work of Elinor Ostrom and others to consider the role of self-governance at the level of communities and, by extension, institutions. They explore the management of common pool resources including campus facilities, financial resources, the curriculum, and institutional reputation. It is argued that the institutions most explicitly committed to liberal learning are those which tend to have the most robust formal and informal rules of civic engagement and therefore enable this level of self-governance. Drawing on economic theory, institutional analysis, education studies and more, the book explores what institutions explicitly committed to liberal learning can do on a day-to-day basis to provide the intellectual, creative and physical space in which better self-governance can be both practiced and taught.