Reviving Undergraduate General Education One Classroom at a Time

Our Mission

The Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life is leading a movement to restore liberal education to the heart of the undergraduate curriculum. We promote small, discussion-based classes that bring students together in conversations about foundational texts and questions of enduring significance. We support faculty in building general education programs that introduce students to great teachers, great texts, and great questions regardless of their major or career aspirations.

Our goal is to help every college and university offer its students a personally transformative liberal education that prepares them for lives of meaning and civic purpose.

What Is Liberal Education? Why Civic Life?

The connection between liberal education and civic life goes back to the ancient democracy of Athens, where liberal education was conceived as a way of equipping citizens for the task of self-governance. 

  • Liberal Education

    Liberal education is an education appropriate to a person who is free. Its concern is with an individual’s full development as a person and as a member of a political community. Rather than transmitting a particular set of skills or areas of expertise, a liberal education seeks to prepare students for the complex and unbounded character of their whole lives. It cultivates judgment, adaptability, curiosity, imagination, and the ability to speak, think, and act with others—qualities that last a lifetime and extend far beyond any single career or field of study.

  • Civic Life

    Civic life describes the social dimension of a flourishing life lived among people who share a commitment to freedom and collective wellbeing. It is the practice of living well and freely together. In a democratic society, all citizens share in collective self-governance as free, whole persons—no specialist training required. In this way, liberal education equips us with the tools and capacities necessary for civic life. Freedom is a collective achievement and liberal education is the indispensable condition for its realization.

Our Story

Higher education is at a crisis point. Students have been led to see college as transactional. Faculty feel isolated and administrators feel lost. Public trust is slipping. Even the classroom—the place where learning should come alive—has been overshadowed by specialized research, careerism, and technology. Artificial intelligence is calling into question the meaning of academic work including basic skills like reading and writing and is making it impossible to anticipate which academic majors are likely to lead to good careers.

 

We believe that colleges and universities can be revitalized by putting transformative liberal education at the heart of their educational mission: administrative leaders find institutional purpose, teachers find community and collegiality, and students find opportunities to reflect deeply, to connect with their peers in robust, face-to-face discussions about texts they’ve read in common, and to challenge themselves to ask big questions.

 

The Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life shows a way forward for higher education by bringing college back to its roots, its strengths, and its true purpose: the cultivation of thoughtful, discerning, and imaginative citizens on whom civic life depends.