Few jobs in higher education could be as challenging these days as that of president of a public college in California.  As Mildred García, AAC&U board member and president of California State University, Dominguez Hills, recently noted, this year her institution “experienced the largest budget reduction in its history.”  She notes further that “our social contract promising higher education for our citizens is being shattered.”

It is difficult to argue with this statement, at least in California.  García, however, and many other presidents like her who have formed AAC&U’s new Presidents’ Trust, are working hard to stitch that social contract back together and especially keep a focus on what really matters—providing not just access to a seat in a college classroom, but access to a true quality liberal education.  As García notes, her university community is responding to the current challenges as “a call to strategic action, with the goal of shaping a university that is academically stronger and more effective.”  Her aim for Cal. State, Dominguez Hills is “to embody a new vision of liberal learning for the twenty-first century.” Read the rest of this entry »