The Liberal Arts and Academic Freedom: Five Disruptive Principles
At a recent AltLiberalArts event, Mary Ruiz, AltLiberalArts Chair (second from left), poses with former New College faculty colleagues (from left to right) Matt Lepinski, Jono Miller, and Stephen Miles.
By Mary Ruiz
Why is AltLiberalArts, a nonprofit global education initiative, gathering scholars, students, educators, and advocates to talk about “Five Disruptive Principles” in the liberal arts? In short, because the foundational values of academic freedom are under threat, and not at the margins, but at the center of public life, in the US and around the world. The 2025 update of the Academic Freedom Index, a collaborative global research initiative, presents sobering findings. Thirty-four nations and territories have seen statistically significant declines in academic freedom over the past decade.
What do we do now? AltLiberalArts suggests that this time of disruption and confusion is a good opportunity to consider the essential principles of an authentic liberal arts education. And through our courses and public events, we have reached the conclusion that these principles can not only be disruptive to external influences of control but also progressive in advancing the liberal arts.
The source of inspiration for AltLiberalArts is ironically also one of the first targets of the authoritarian takeover in the US: New College of Florida. New College was a public honors college in Sarasota ranked fifth in the nation. Founded in 1960, the small liberal arts school was renowned as an early pioneer in educational reform as it used disruptive principles in a liberal arts education, including student agency, mutual engagement, mastery, depth and breadth, and assessment for excellence.
In January of 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a majority of conservative trustees to New College of Florida, charged with changing the mission of the college. Interestingly, as of this writing, some key elements of the academic structure that supported the five disruptive principles at the historic New College remain, including the contract system and narrative evaluations, as well as intensive research dedicated to independent study projects and the senior thesis.
In response to what’s happened at New College and across the US, AltLiberalArts has created a collection of open resource tools for the classroom, study group, or personal inquiry and invites scholars and students to use them to spark a dialogue on how these five disruptive principles might fit in with the future of the liberal arts. Short essays, short videos, and recorded webinars are available to all, with attribution, at www.altliberalarts.org.
This project began as a series of essays commissioned by AltLiberalArts from five scholars—Robert Benedetti, Dan Chambliss, Stephen Miles, Juliana Paré-Blagoev, and Eric Schikler. Each essay reflects on one of the five principles as expressed in practice at New College from roughly 1970 to 2020.
Stephen Miles, Vice Chair of AltLiberalArts, taped five short videos based upon each of the five essays in front of a live audience at the Manatee Performing Arts Center in Bradenton, Florida in 2024. Those 15-minute videos can now be used to provide a springboard for engaging group discussion on each principle.
In April and May 2025, weekly webinars focused on each principle were produced by AltLiberalArts, each beginning with Miles’ short videos and then moving on to discussion among scholars and prominent persons in media, television, finance, and digital publishing. The recorded webinars feature practitioners of the disruptive principles reflecting on how the experience impacted their learning, teaching, and careers.
"The problem with the conventional approach to education is that it defines failure in such a way that students become afraid to take things they aren't good at,” said panelist Daniel Chambliss, co-author of the book How College Works, in the webinar on “Agency and Responsibility.” He noted that at liberal arts colleges, such as New College, the education students receive is “more management-focused” and students are “better positioned to see problems from a variety of points of view and explore creative solutions to problems rather than a step-by-step response."
In the “Mutual Engagement” webinar, New College alumna Maureen Cannon said “Learning how to learn, and learning things that are very different from before opens your brain so that you can analyze things and make sure it’s legitimate. …Having the kind of education that involves this engagement and back-and-forth, this sense of rigor and the way you analyze and accept information, benefits you no matter what.”
The Disruptive Principles project has created a renewed sense of purpose for all who have engaged with it. The Five Disruptive Principles in the Liberal Arts are now more essential than ever. These principles—student agency, mutual engagement, mastery, breadth and depth, and assessment for excellence—stand in direct opposition to authoritarian thinking. They are not nostalgic ideals. They are tools for preserving academic freedom and reinvigorating our shared understanding of what liberal arts education can and should be.
As Masha Gessen recently wrote in The New York Times, the appropriate response to attacks on academic freedom is not withdrawal, it is more dissemination of knowledge. Visibility, dialogue, and public engagement are our best defenses. The question before us now is not just how to protect academic freedom, but how to express it, live it, and pass it on.
Watch all five AltLiberalArts webinars here.
Post Date: 06-18-2025