Top Highlights

• Accounting is a trade, but the history of accounting is a subject of disinterested inquiry—a liberal art. And the accountant who knows something about the history of accounting will be a better accountant. That knowledge pays off in the marketplace. Similarly, future lawyers benefit from learning about the philosophical aspects of the law, just as ...
• KNOWLEDGE is our most important business. The success of almost all our other business depends on it, but its value is not only economic.
• My argument is that these issues are all fundamentally systemic—they arise from the way in which institutions of higher education sustain and reproduce themselves—and the most significant fact about American higher education as a system is that it is one hundred years old.
• A pressing pedagogical challenge right now is the problem of adapting a linear model for transmitting knowledge—the lecture monologue, in which a single line of thought leads to an intellectual climax after fifty minutes—to a generation of students who are accustomed to dealing with multiple information streams in short bursts.
• So engaging in the process of general education reform says a lot about a faculty, an institution, and the state of knowledge. Many hopes and ideals, along with many preconceptions and insecurities, come to the surface. General education has many stakeholders.