[CFP: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 21st]

The Art of Living: Living, Learning, and Liberal Education - October 29-31, 2025 

Keynote Speaker:

Julie Reuben

Professor of the History of American Education, Harvard University

The 2025 Residential Colleges Symposium will be hosted by The Blount Scholars Program, a living-learning community on the residential college model at the University of Alabama that confers a minor in the liberal arts.  The focus of this year’s conference is the notion of living a life at the intersection of residential learning and liberal education.  Each in its way is concerned to expand the idea of students making a living beyond simply earning money or having a career.  In their emphasis on living with others as both the means and end of education, residential colleges and liberal arts curricula alike situate the pursuit of knowledge with respect to the broader participation in society of which employment is only a part.  Thus, in the face of the increasing tendency to reduce undergraduate study to career preparation alone, both residential learning and the liberal arts attempt to restore a sense of holism to the project of education, insisting upon its connections to all elements of living a life.

The conference will host scholars, teachers, and student affairs personnel from across the country to fulfill the symposium’s traditional mission of extending learning networks and sharing knowledge about all facets of the residential college experience.  In addition, we hope to attract scholarship that examines the vision of liberal education in order to extend the notion of “making a living” beyond simply preparing for a career to preparing for all aspects of living a life with others.  We plan to produce an edited volume, the conceptual contours of which will be determined by the interests that emerge in the symposium.

Presentation topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Definitions: accounts of the constitutive aims and ends of liberal education;
• History: accounts of the history and aims of residential and liberal education;
• Structures: examinations of the constitutive and evolving features of residential education, and their connection to other institutional structures, such as disciplinary and departmental curricula, general education requirements, elective courses, descriptions of institutional mission, etc.;
• Contexts: research concerning liberal and residential education in the differing institutional contexts—private, public, large, medium, small, research universities, four-year colleges, community colleges—within which they operate;
• Challenges: analyses of the challenges to liberal and residential education at the present moment, and proposals for strategies to meet them. 

The conference will use three presentation formats:

• Single: a 35-minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A/discussion following.  
• Panel: three 20-minute presentations on a theme with 15 minutes of Q&A/discussion following.  (Proposers may submit either a full panel or an individual proposal which conference organizers will group with others by topical affinity.)
• Host: A roundtable discussion during lunch. This does not require a presentation; rather the proposer mediates a discussion on the proposed topic.  

Proposals of 250-500 words may be submitted at https://blount.as.ua.edu/artofliving

Deadline for Submission: May 1st.  We will respond to proposals by mid-June.