Does Liberal Education Still Matter?

Exploring the subject of the future of liberal arts education and the value of institutions of learning as they continue to evolve, university presidents Michael S. Roth and Beverly Daniel Tatum join the Library’s president, Anthony W. Marx, in conversation. 

MICHAEL S. ROTH '78 became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts. At Wesleyan, he has increased grant support for students who receive financial aid and has overseen the launch of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and four new colleges emphasizing interdisciplinary research and cohort building: the College of the Environment, the College of Film and the Moving Image, the College of East Asian Studies and the College of Integrative Sciences. Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His fifth book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past was published in 2012. His most recent book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, is a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.  He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and through Coursera has offered MOOCs, the most recent being “How to Change the World.”  

A 2013 recipient of the Carnegie Academic Leadership Award, Dr. BEVERLY DANIEL TATUM has served as president of Spelman College since 2002.  Her tenure as president has been marked by a period of great innovation and growth.  Spelman College, long recognized as the leading educator of women of African descent, is now ranked among the top 100 liberal arts colleges in the nation.  An accomplished administrator, Dr. Tatum is also widely recognized as a race relations expert and leader in higher education.  A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, her areas of research include racial identity development, and the role of race in the classroom. In 2005 Dr. Tatum was awarded the prestigious Brock International Prize in Education for her innovative leadership in the field.  Her best-selling titles include Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (2007) and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?  And Other Conversations About Race (1997). An active member of the Atlanta community, Dr. Tatum currently serves on several national boards including the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Teach for America, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Locally, she serves on the Woodruff Arts Center Governing Board, the Executive Committee of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, and the corporate board of Georgia Power. 

Since 2011, ANTHONY W. MARX has led The New York Public Library, the nation’s largest public library system with 18 million visits per year. At NYPL, he has expanded the Library’s role as an education provider, creating new after-school programs for children and teens, expanding English language, citizenship, computer and coding classes, partnering with Coursera, and improving programming for all ages at NYPL’s 88 neighborhood branches. Under his leadership, the Library has increased access to e-books, partnered with the City's public schools to enable millions of books to circulate directly to teachers and students, and launched a pilot to provide internet access in low income homes to redress the digital divide. From 2003 to 2011, Marx served as president of Amherst College in Massachusetts, where low-income student enrollment more than tripled during his tenure. Before Amherst, Marx was a political science professor and director of undergraduate studies at Columbia University, and had worked on education in South Africa in the 1980s. Marx has a BA from Yale, an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a PhD, also from Princeton.

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