On Wednesday afternoon, April 11, Condoleeza Rice spoke in Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University. Her speech was in conjunction with the school’s national conference titled “Rethinking Success: From Liberal Arts to Careers in the 21st Century”.
In her keynote speech last night, Rice called the American higher education system the gold standard, and cited it as one of the most powerful forces for the United States abroad.
But Rice cautioned that the most successful institutions are often the ones that fail to read signals from the environment that indicate the need for change. A Michigan State University study showed that between 1990 and 2009, the number of liberal arts colleges declined from 212 to 136. According to Rice, the challenge for today’s liberal arts educators is to adapt to the new economic landscape without losing the core of who they are.
She outlined a path forward to an attentive Wait Chapel audience.
