Eight Hundred Years of University Learning: Two Pictures of the Liberal Arts

Stephen T. Davis Claremont McKenna College I My job at this conference is to assess the liberal arts at the present moment in time. I will take that to mean the liberal arts as they are taught and learned at colleges and universities in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To tip my hand, I am going to argue that small liberal arts colleges, and especially those like Westmont with a religious orientation, are in a particularly strong position to achieve excellence in liberal arts teaching and learning.