Ghada Elshimi The Academy of Liberal Arts (ALA) recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Following are excerpts From Dean Ghada ElShimi’s Remarks at the ALA 10th Anniversary Celebration held on May 7th, 2024:
It is my great pleasure to welcome you today as we celebrate this important milestone in the history of the Academy of Liberal Arts (ALA).
Ten years ago, the university decided to create the Academy of Liberal Arts, to house the departments and programs that offered the core academic skills to our undergraduates into a coherent academic unit. At that time, it was left to the faculty and leadership of the Academy to formulate their new academic mission, and create a structure that was relevant and vital to the educational journey of AUC students.
Envisioning the Academy
The history of the ALA evolves much like the story of pioneers in a new land. The new territory was unfamiliar but filled with promise and opportunity. Free of restrictive borders of academic disciplines, we focused on the mission of establishing the ALA as a school for broad cross-disciplinary educational programs where students of all majors would find a home for their interests, feel a sense of belonging to our community, and find academic support and tools for achieving excellence.
With integrative learning being the most effective approach to delivering the liberal arts outcomes, our first task was to create an integrative ecosystem within the ALA that would facilitate curricular connections and deepen engagement with the intellectual skills at the core of a quality education. Our most valuable resource for achieving this goal was our people – nearly 100 educational visionaries, immersed in the praxis of quality teaching and learning, and unwavering in their belief in the capacities of every individual student.
We envisioned a unique educational structure that would serve as a springboard for student success. We set about to create an intentionally well-coordinated learning journey with a future-relevant destination. ALA academic departments took the lead on strengthening the foundational skills needed for academic success, while the academic enrichment programs (such as Undergraduate Research, Academic Community Engagement) supported AUC faculty in innovation, design and implementation of high impact teaching and deep learning pedagogy. Our administration of The Core Curriculum, the bedrock of AUC’s liberal arts mission, drove us to form partnerships and collaborate across departments, to ensure that this integrated core would become the epicenter from which students could transfer intellectual and cognitive skills to support learning in their majors and to prepare them for diverse careers. These skills would run through each of our programs and converge to deliver solid integrative learning foundations to all students and to AUC at large.
ALA Today
Today, our collective vision retains its original elements of internal integration but has broadened to include responsibility and connection to all of the programs at AUC, and to the community beyond our campus. In addition to offering strong educational programs, we are instrumental in creating an environment where students transition from tentative newcomers to full AUC citizens within a robust system of challenge and support. With other AUC colleagues and leaders of thought, we mobilize to instill in our graduates the lifelong qualities that distinguish them from others, and ground them in the skills, values and attitudes that prepare them for fulfilling personal and professional lives and the readiness to engage with the complex societal issues of our time – qualities needed today more than ever, in our troubled world.
The Future
As we prepare for the future, we will need to continue to come together to think about the most important impacts and challenges and how to keep our students well prepared for them. What might our future look like?
Recommitting to our mission: We are grounded by our deep conviction that our mission is life-changing for students, and critical for the welfare of our future world. We must continue to deliver on our promise of offering a quality liberal education that distinguishes our programs and our students. Today, it is more evident than ever that the humanistic values at the heart of a liberal education are ever-increasing in importance for any prospect of an advanced society. We must ensure that our students are deeply ingrained with the basic liberal attitudes and capacities originally sought by this tradition of education – readiness to engage in unprejudiced examination of complex human problems, willingness to accept ambiguity and engage with ill-defined problems, humbleness to reexamine one’s views, change course, and arrive at reasoned and just conclusions, tolerance to accept difference and speak on behalf of those without a voice, and courage to show empathy and understanding when it is unpopular to do so. By anchoring the modernization of our programs in the traditional core values of our educational mission, our programs can cultivate enduring civic responsibility and moral accountability in our students – behaviors that will be clear distinguishing features of a university graduate.
Framing and Communication: We hope to “rebrand” our holistic approach to education to emphasize its real-world benefits to society and employers as being critical in shaping the leaders of the future and intrinsic to entrepreneurial and innovative thinking.
Future-Relevant Curricula and Programs: We will continue to revitalize our programs through relevant professional development, program evaluation, redesign, and openness to change. We will continue to research and employ new knowledge, pedagogies and technologies to create meaningful coursework that is relevant to civic and professional preparation. We will continue to harness technology, and delve into AI and other innovations, to make sure that our students are getting the best intellectual training possible.
Interdisciplinarity, Integration and Connection: We will continue to integrate practice with theory, erode unnecessary academic and disciplinary boundaries, and form partnerships across and beyond campus, to enrich the learning activities of our students. We will continue to provide curriculum to career and curriculum to community connections.
Community: And we will continue to be the place where students and faculty feel safe to take risks along their learning journey, challenge ideas and find a community where their personal and professional well being matter to the institution.
I would like to thank all those who contribute to the development of our students and our academy through their hard work, kindness and commitment to our values. It is an honor and a privilege to work alongside such dedicated and passionate individuals. I am confident that the coming years will bring us much growth as we continue to impart on our students the habits and virtues of an educated mind.
Congratulations on this very special occasion, and my very best wishes for our continued success.
