Old Hopes for a New Place

Arend D. Lubbers was president of an unusual and rapidly developing state university for a long time-thirty-two years--and during a very significant period of American and global history--1969-2001, Vietnam, the Cold War, counterculture, energy crisis, financial crisis, Reaganism, Generation X, technological revolution. ... Lubbers was there. And Lubbers spoke. One significant element of his highly successful leadership style is that on a regular basis he articulated the goal of providing liberal education in a public context in relation to the currents of contemporary culture. His discourse was a modeling of the basic mission of the university: "Grand Valley State University seeks to achieve its undergraduate instructional mission through a liberal education curriculum that acquaints students with the tradition of humane values and the heritage, problems, and perspectives of their own and other cultures and the develops the lifelong skills of critical thinking, articulate expression, and independent learning." This collection of his speeches shows that Lubbers practiced what he preached. He spoke as a person who is not only generally educated, but also liberally educated, a person who speaks as a citizen in the full sense of the term, to and with other citizens, as one who is cultivated in his humanity and committed to that same cultivation in others.