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Pacific Lutheran campus.

He quoted the theologian Frederick Buechner as a way of connecting PLU's intellectual heritage with ANAC's emphasis on the integration of liberal and professional studies, "Vocation is where some vital need of the world meets the deep hunger of one's soul." And he cited a 1997 University of Washington graduate, who marveled when hearing an explanation of PLU's focus on professional/liberal integration, "For a university to take on as its mission helping students figure out what to do with what they learn and believe is an incredible thing, a huge thing, a noble thing!"

The Tacoma press featured PLU's New American College mission articulation over a year ago, and the Spring 1999 issue of Prism, a PLU division of humanities journal, has several articles that debate the merits of PLU's ANAC affiliation and its impact on liberal learning. In one article Menzel quotes classicist Martha Nussbaum in establishing the intellectual lineage of New American College ideas, "our own society has followed this Socratic/Stoic line more thoroughly than any other nation, attempting to construct a higher education that combines specialized pre-professional education with a liberal education shared by all students. . . .Students in Europe enter university to study one subject, be it law . . . or classics. There is no idea, in these curricula, of a course of common studies that is essential to the good life for each and every person." Nussbaum goes on, "Many institutions that call themselves liberal arts colleges have turned increasingly to vocational studies, curtailing humanities requirements and cutting back on humanities faculty" (from Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. 1997. 31, 297). By contrast, Menzel notes, PLU has not only maintained its strong humanities general education requirements, but in some professional programs requires additional humanities (e.g., professional ethics).

Roberta S. Brown, a professor of French, offers a counter view. In her essay she argues that students must gain a substantial understanding of self and soul before they are in a position to make intelligent choices about careers and professions. In the absence of that foundation they may both be making their career choices on the basis of market factors, rather than a sense of "authentic calling," and may lack the "necessary and essential foundation" that the professions in modern society require. She asserts that the undergraduate curriculum has room only for a kind of "premature professionalism," if students are to develop critical thinking and narrative imagination sufficient to meet the challenge of world citizenship (13-14). Quoting Nussbaum, "Unlike all other nations, we ask a higher education to contribute a general preparation for citizenship, not just a specialized preparation for a career . . . People who have never learned to use reason and imagination to enter a broader world of cultures, groups, and ideas are impoverished personally and politically, however successful their vocational preparation" (294, 297).

In the last essay in the group, Philip A. Nordquist, author of PLU's centennial history, former chair of the faculty, and interim provost during Menzel's fall 1998 sabbatical, describes the somewhat fragmented historical evolution at PLU of teacher training, business, and arts and sciences. What to some seemed a tripartite structure caused confusion about institutional identity and issues of coherence. According to Nordquist, the New American College model has enabled PLU to see itself as it is and to be more self-conscious about its history, and "can help us at PLU to produce a more unified and singular vision of who we are and what we want to do. Such opportunities come only rarely in the history of educational institutions. . ." (18-19).