Beyond Soft Skills

Call for Papers

Beyond Soft Skills: Redefining the Role of the Liberal Arts in a College Education

There is broad agreement that the liberal arts have an important role to play in a modern college education. Just what that role should be, however, is a matter of considerable debate.

This uncertainty is partly due to the fact that the liberal arts encompass fields of inquiry that are inherently self-critical and that subject their own aims and purposes to constant questioning. But the issue is also complicated by the nature of the college itself, an institution whose principal mandate is to deliver practically oriented vocational training.

For liberal arts faculty, it is an open question how our teaching is supposed to relate to this mandate. Should our courses be ministerial to the core subject areas, serving mostly to teach college students the “soft skills” sought after by employers? Or should the liberal arts also seek to cultivate less instrumental ends, such as a capacity for critical reflection that goes beyond problem-solving?

Another insistent question confronting college liberal arts professors relates to the institutional goal of preparing students for the contemporary workforce: How do we balance the need to help students adapt to the structural realities of the modern economy with our responsibility to help them think critically about these realities and perhaps even entertain alternative models of economic, social and political order?

Finally, liberal arts faculty at colleges are confronted with some unique challenges of a very practical nature. For instance, how do we engage students who worry that in taking a liberal arts course, they will be stepping outside of their educational comfort zone? For that matter, how do we overcome the cultural divides that sometimes exist within the college and foster awareness, dialogue and even cross-disciplinary collaboration between liberal arts faculty and faculty in other departments?

We invite scholars interested in presenting a paper on any of these themes to submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) by June 30, 2019. Please see conference website for details. 

Keynote address:  Barbara Seeber and Maggie Berg, authors of The Slow Professor.