Advocating modest educational reform, this book seeks to define more clearly the goals of higher education through a critical appraisal of its nature and promise. The four chapters in Part 1 provide an overview of the intellectual and curricular issues of liberal education, beginning with a view of academic disciplines as professional organizations and an account of the political and economic challenges that structure faced during the 1970s and 1980s. The author then proposes a redefinition of liberal education as critical-inquiry education and discusses the curricular and pedagogical principles embodied in such an approach.