Business View Magazine | October 2020

212 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2020 and humanities in favor of vocational and pre- professional programs, seen as more marketable to prospective students and their parents. In contrast, AAC&U’s vision for the future reaffirms the salience of a liberal education as the best means of preparing students for work, citizenship and life, and for catalyzing social mobility. The nature of the challenges arising from COVID-19 illustrate the reasons why. Despite the extraordinary advances that have been made in science over the centuries, appealing to technology alone is futile when it comes to grappling with the most fundamental questions of human existence, rendered unavoidable by the proliferation of COVID-19. At a time of scarce medical resources, health care professionals have been asked to decide which patient should be given the last ventilator; to treat those who have tested positive for the virus without the availability of personal protective equipment; and to determine whether to comfort patients who are dying alone due to hospital-imposed bans on visitors when they could be tending to others who are likely to survive. No matter how much scientific expertise our medical professionals possess, the skills and knowledge necessary for confronting the types of challenges arising from COVID-19 call for the capacity to apply integrative learning and ethical decision making in ways that speak to a universality of human experience. Moreover, the dilemmas confronted by those on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 in the US are unfolding within the context of an increasingly fractured society. Consider, for instance, the debates over whether, or how quickly, states should have reopened during the pandemic. Clashing perspectives over how much individual liberty should be sacrificed for the public good signal the fact that partisan divides in America are greater than they have been in more than half a century. If nothing else, the current culture wars being played out on the national stage highlight the inextricable link between a strong democracy and liberal education - an education which prepares students to be mindful of the dangers of ideological filtering; to speak across differences; to engage in deliberation with AAC&U members peruse AAC&U publications at the 2020 AAC&U Annual Meeting. Photo courtesy of AAC&U.