Building Liberal Arts: A lecture by Clifford Chanin

Clifford Chanin, president and founder of The Legacy Project in New York, was visiting AUK during its eventful Liberal Arts Week. He was here to celebrate with the AUK family the official opening of the new Liberal Arts building, as well as to deliver the keynote speech aptly titled "Building the Liberal Arts."

Chanin expressed his pleasure in being part of this ceremonious event and noted that it is important for him as an American to acknowledge the honor of visiting a university in Kuwait that has chosen to call itself American. "The choice of name states what you are doing in Kuwait, but it also poses a question about the meaning of education and its role in our society and in your society. By posing this deeper question, AUK's founders have crossed fully into the realm of the liberal arts," he said.

There's nothing exclusively American about the Liberal Arts approach, he noted. Liberal Arts anywhere in the world extends an intellectual and ethical tradition that goes back to Antiquity and passes through various civilizations. It extends back from American universities into Enlightenment Europe, medieval monasteries, Arab humanists, and the Greeks.

Chanin explained that "the term 'liberal arts' is derived from Latin and was intended to denote the knowledge that a 'free man' needed to live freely and live well." He noted that this loftier form of education has now been eclipsed by what were once known as the 'servile arts', since the demands of Globalization have given more importance to vocational training. However, a liberal arts education remains crucial because, as he explained "it is not the particular content of the disciplines that forms the liberal arts. The means of learning is their defining feature."

The skills learned through a liberal arts education, which include critical reasoning, self reflection, and problem solving, have the capacity to enrich any field of study or profession. He emphasized that in order to truly succeed, one must not only be able to master a discipline but be able to "think: creatively, critically and adaptively" which is the strength of the liberal arts.

Addressing the students of AUK he said "It is important that, on graduation, each of you be prepared to participate in and contribute to Kuwaiti society and the global economy.The question, though, is how best to prepare yourself, and what you might expect from the university to which you have entrusted this preparation," and in closing added "let's think about the world that your generation will inherit - and the need you will have to engage fruitfully with people different from you, where difference will, in fact, be more a part of your lives than it has been for any generation that came before."