“The Shape of Things to Come: Goucher and the Future of Liberal Arts Education”

Release date: September 10, 2009 |

Goucher College is holding a special community conversation titled “The Shape of Things to Come: Goucher and the Future of Liberal Arts Education” on Thursday, September 10, at 7:30 p.m., in the Hyman Forum of the Athenaeum.

Panelists will discuss how to preserve and protect the universal values embodied in the uniquely American concept of a liberal arts education, particularly at a time of economic and political crisis and in the context of pressure for more “practical” and “relevant” forms of study.

This event is free and open to the public. Please call 410-337-6333 for more information. To view a campus map, please go to http://www.goucher.edu/documents/campusmaplow.pdf.

The panelists will be Ron Daniels, the new president of the Johns Hopkins University; Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former critic for The New York Times; Cristina Page ’93, an author and women’s rights activist; and  Don Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Daniels became the 14th president of the Johns Hopkins University this past March. Prior to that he had been provost and chief academic officer of the University of Pennsylvania since 2005. Daniels came to Penn from the University of Toronto, where he spent 10 years as dean of the faculty of law and the James M. Tory Professor of Law. He is the author or editor of seven books, most recently Rule of Law Reform and Development (2008), on the role of legal institutions in the economies of Third World countries, and Rethinking the Welfare State (2005), an analysis of global social welfare policies.

Jefferson is a New York-based cultural critic. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published by Vintage in 2006. She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 13 years and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have also appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, Grand Street, Vogue, O, and Newsweek. She wrote and performed a theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland, at the Cherry Lane Theater and the Culture Project in 2002 and 2003. She teaches at Columbia University and at Eugene Lang College.

Page is author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex and spokesperson for birthcontrolwatch.org. Page also is a consultant for several national pro-choice groups, and her policy proposals have been adopted by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New Jersey state legislature. Page has worked in the editorial departments of Glamour and Ms. magazines, ran a gubernatorial campaign in New York, and edited The Smart Girl’s Guide to College. Her op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, Newsday, Guardian UK, The Tampa Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Huffington Post , and TomPaine.com.

Randel became the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2006. Previously he served for six years as the president of the University of Chicago. Prior to that he spent 32 years as a member of the Music Department faculty at Cornell University, where he was also department chair, vice-provost, associate dean, and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He became provost of Cornell in 1995. He is also widely published as a musical historian and has served as the editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society; The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed.; The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music; and The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

This program is part of a series of events to celebrate the opening of the Athenaeum and to launch the 125th anniversary of the college.