Here are six academic areas that cry out for potential collaboration across the liberal arts college sector and between the liberal arts colleges and research universities.
1. Liberal arts colleges must aspire to internationalize their curriculum, teach the less commonly taught languages and invigorate or create new programs in geopolitical areas such as Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, South and East Asia.
2. Liberal arts colleges want the flexibility to explore intellectual themes that connect departments and disciplines but do so without creating new majors and without adding new faculty.
3. Liberal arts colleges seek to provide undergraduate research opportunities for students outside the sciences integrating teaching and research across the curriculum presents a complicated set of financial, pedagogical and logistical challenges.
4. Liberal arts colleges want to support faculty members’ integration into the digital humanities into their teaching and scholarship. In order to accomplish this goal, colleges need access to communities of practice and institutional infrastructure that build capacity and that address the challenges of training, standards, critical mass, interoperability and sustainability.
5. Liberal arts colleges also need to use digital technology to create new teaching resources such as virtual labs and to create truly interactive learning platforms for use in introductory courses in subjects such as statistics, mathematics and modern language.
6. Liberal arts colleges need to create arts-based campus cultures that embrace the making of art as an integral component of the life of the mind and a complementary means of connecting different bodies of knowledge.
