Education has multiple purposes, but learning how to ask essential questions and how to challenge dogma,tradition, and injustice in appropriate and constructive ways is its highest purposes.

As human beings, are we meant to develop as individuals serving only our own needs or also serving the needs of others? Do we aspire to develop as critically thinking, creative,innovative, humane people, or do we just want to think of ourselves as members of a specific nation and culture? Freedom allows choice and liberal education advocates for a specific choice: that the purpose of freedom is to enable creative, critically thinking,caring individuals to build healthy societies that serve universal (not just parochial) ends.

Constructively challenging authority requires the basic habits of mind a liberal education seeks to instill: the ability to frame the essential questions; to think critically, analytically, and ethically about the problems those questions identify; and to respond effectively, creatively, and wisely to the implications of the analysis. It requires not only an ability to appreciate the complexity of a problem but also to identify its essence in order to achieve effective, just, and fair conclusions.

As the world fights those who use violence to advance their agenda, engagement, not neutrality,is needed in our educational systems.

Engagement provides opportunities to demonstrate how confrontation can be done both effectively and civilly

They [students] had two common, strongly held expectations: the college should exhibit the behavior it expected from students and hold true to its espoused values.

Preparing citizens to act thoughtfully to create a more just, open, and creative society gives form, substance and meaning to often abstract concepts of freedom and democracy.