What does liberal/general education mean, in promise and practice? Debate about what a college degree should be is as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. This book respects the complexities and concepts of liberal and general, pushing at their historical and rhetorical legacies to redefine and reaffirm their potential in a new age. Faculty and administrators from across the seventeen colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY), the nation’s largest urban public university, re-examine these critical issues. Through recollection, vision, debate, and disagreement, the contributors state what the public university needs to be in the new century.

The Editors: Judith Summerfield is the University Dean for Undergraduate Education at the City University of New York. A professor of English at Queens College, she is also on the faculty of the Ph.D. program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has written on composition and rhetoric, literary studies, and narrative. Crystal Benedicks is Assistant Professor of English at CUNY’s Queensborough Community College, where she teaches composition and literature. She is currently working on a book about spasmodic poetry.