The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) held annual elections on June 13, 2017. The Board of Trustees welcomes new members: Geoffrey Baum, Joshua Hochschild, Gary Kelly, and Amy Richards. Joining the Council of Scholars are Melissa Matthes and Kelly Sorensen.

Mr. Geoffrey Baum is the Director of Media Relations at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica (CA). A former C-SPAN executive producer, he has also worked for Public Radio’s Marketplace and ABC News, and served as assistant dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Baum is a member and past president of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors and has served as a governing board member of Pasadena City College. He holds an M.A. in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Economics and Literature from Claremont McKenna College (CA).

Mr. Joshua Hochschild is Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg (MD). He served as inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Mount St. Mary’s University and Director of the university’s freshman liberal arts seminar, the Veritas Symposium. Hochschild is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and co-editor of Virtue’s End (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008) and Ethics Without God? (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008). He received a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame (IN) and a B.A from Yale University (CT).

Mr. Gary Kelly is a private consultant, attorney and political scientist who resides in New York (NY). He has held assignments for the Asian Development Bank, the United States Agency for International Development and theWorld Bank. Kelly served as a consultant in the formulation of the successful World Trade Organization accession strategy for Georgia, and creator of a World Bank model for civil society input into parliamentary process in Albania in the development of reform legislation. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Fordham University (NY), a JD from the University of Maryland School of Law, and a B.A. from the University of Maryland-College Park.

Ms. Amy Richards is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Templeton Honors College-Eastern University in Saint Davids (PA). Her area of specialization is Ethics. Richards’ administrative responsibilities include the design and implementation of a new M.A.T. in Classical Education at Templeton Honors College and admissions assessment for Templeton Honors College and its Summer Scholars Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. in Biochemistry and Philosophy from Eastern University-Templeton Honors College (PA).

Ms. Melissa Matthes is Professor of Government and Humanities at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London (CT), where she teaches courses in the History of Political Theory, African American Political Thought (Modern), Religion and Politics, Feminist Political Thought, and Women, Religion and Globalization. She is the author of The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau (Penn State Press, 2000). She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Foote School (CT). Matthes received a Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz, a M.Div. from Yale Divinity School (CT) and a B.A. from Williams College (MA).

Mr. Kelly Sorensen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and Assistant Dean at Ursinus College in Collegeville (PA). He teaches and writes about ethical theory, biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, and metaethics. His work has appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Kantian Review, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Bioethics, Neuroethics, Criminal Justice Ethics, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. Sorensen holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, a M.S. from the University of Utah, and a B.S. from Brigham Young University (UT).

11.2010

Few accrediting agencies seemed to have more to gain from Congress's 2008 decision to dismantle and then reconfigure the U.S. Education Department's advisory committee on accreditation than did the American Academy for Liberal Education.

The accreditor -- once a darling of conservatives for its championing of traditional liberal education -- was under fire throughout the Bush administration for its perceived failure to meet federal standards, and it was left to accredit another day in mid-2008 when then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings lifted a restriction that had barred the agency from accrediting new institutions and cleared it to operate for three years.

The actions against the liberal education accreditor were among several that had led some higher education officials -- and their supporters in Congress -- to complain that the department's accrediting panel, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity -- had overstepped its authority in pursuit of Spellings' political and policy goals. In renewing the Higher Education Act in 2008, Congress scuttled the existing advisory panel and reconstituted it, giving much more authority to lawmakers and limiting the power of the executive branch.

The new committee begins its work this week, with its first meeting since mid-2008, and the liberal education agency is among the accreditors due to be reviewed during the panel's three-day agenda. (The committee's most significant responsibility is to recommend to the education secretary which accrediting bodies deserve federal recognition; without that recognition, an accreditor's stamp of approval of a college does not carry with it the all-important right for the institution's students to receive federal financial aid.)

If AALE officials were hoping that the new administration would take a kinder, gentler approach to the agency, though, they are surely disappointed. The report prepared by Education Department staff members to guide the panel's work at this meeting urges the panel to recommend that Education Secretary Arne Duncan deny recognition to the accreditor, citing the agency's "continued noncompliance" with dozens of federal accrediting criteria.

"Overall, the Department continues to have serious concerns with the performance of this agency, its reliability as a recognized accrediting agency, and its ability to fulfill its responsibilities as a recognized accrediting agency," the staff report states. "In addition to the issues cited here, the overall quality of the agency's submission and response, and the inconsistent and inaccurate information that it has provided in its submission, raise serious concerns regarding its reliability as a recognized accrediting agency."

Ralph A. Rossum, chairman of the AALE board and Salvatori Professor of American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College, said in an interview late Sunday that the agency's officials were "shocked" when they received a highly critical draft report from the department's staff in October, given that the accreditor had earned a clean bill of health when it was last reviewed.

"Then suddenly, we find ourselves deficient on all kind of matters for engaging in practices had never been considered a problem whatsoever" in the past, Rossum said. "It wasn't that we changed everything in two years. We were continuing to operate in belief we were in full compliance. It looked a little arbitrary that past practice that was fully acceptable [in 2008] suddenly was not."

AALE officials, Rossum said, made a wholesale series of changes to the agency's policies, procedures and forms in the five weeks after they received the draft report, "to go out of our way to demonstrate that we were going to do things in the way the new staff wants." The agency submitted between 500 and 700 pages of documents in that period, but its responses appeared to have only a marginal influence on the department: the staff's final report still found 46 areas of noncompliance.

Rossum said the accreditor's experience with the Education Department's new regulatory approach to accreditation had implications for other agencies. "I think every accreditor should be really nervous," he said, referring to AALE as a "canary in the coal mine."

History

AALE was formed in 1992 with the stated purpose of "supporting and recognizing excellence in undergraduate liberal arts teaching and learning through accreditation."^[2] Founders included Jacques Barzun, retired philosophy professor from Columbia University, E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University, and Lynne Cheney, former U.S. Secretary of Education.^[3][4] Its initial focus was on undergraduate education, which Barzun said had become "confused, misdirected or not directed at all."^[5]

In July 1995, the U.S. Department of Education granted AALE official recognition as an institutional accreditor for colleges and universities.^[3] This recognition allowed AALE-accredited institutions in the United States to participate in student financial aid programs authorized under the Higher Education Act and other U.S. federal programs.^[6]

In December 2006, the U.S. Department of Education suspended AALE's authority to accredit new institutions and programs.^[7][8] This restriction was lifted in December 2007.^[9] In the ruling that lifted the restrictions for a period of three years (expiring in December, 2010), Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote of "continued concerns stemming from AALE's being cited consistently since 2001 for either not having clear standards with respect to measuring student outcomes or not collecting and reviewing data on how institutions it accredits measures student outcomes."^[10]

In November 2010, AALE voluntarily withdrew its request for renewal of U.S. Department of Education recognition as a higher education accreditor.^[11] For institutions accredited by AALE in 2010 or earlier, accreditation remained valid through July 1, 2012 for purposes of federal government financial aid to students under Title IV of the Higher Education Act.^[12]

Accreditation

AALE provides two types of accreditation for higher education institutions that offer general education programs in the liberal arts. It provides institutional accreditation for universities and colleges that want AALE to be their sole accreditor and it provides program accreditation for liberal arts programs within higher education institutions that are institutionally accredited by another accreditor.^[13] AALE accreditation activities are not limited to the United States; the organization works with institutions and programs worldwide that emphasize liberal education and the liberal arts.

The organization also is an accreditor of K–12 charter schools and independent schools throughout the United States.

As of August 2009, AALE had accredited about 20 institutions within the United States,and another dozen members outside the country.^[14] Several AALE-accredited institutions follow a "great books" approach.^[7]

Leadership

Since January 2011, AALE has been led by acting president Charles E. Butterworth, an emeritus professor of politics and government at the University of Maryland.^[15]

am Academy for Liberal Ed AALE

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Contents

History

Accreditation

Leadership

See also