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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.

The possibility of compounding different variations of perspectives and viewpoints is extraordinary.

we have found that over time this can lead to more hires, as more classes are offered and student interest is given an opportunity to grow

there are ways to focus on a use of technology that is supplementary to what it is good professors already do, rather than as a replacement for it (or them).

collaborating on engineering-design projects and research activities, exchanging students and professors, and pooling their expertise to work more closely with industry.

The new alliance would instead be based on "universities that have similar missions and share key characteristics,

For example, they could focus on energy challenges one year and clean-water problems the next.

Both projects, says Deborah E. Allen, the NSF grant manager who worked with them, aim to "capture authentic research experiences within biology courses" at the undergraduate level

The hope is that a project like Mr. Boyle's can bring some of the same benefits to a larger number of students.

Mr. Boyle's project is a direct descendant of a project that a Davidson College biology professor, A. Malcolm Campbell, has been running for a decade. In Mr. Campbell's project, called the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching,