Join other interested members of higher education as you spend the day at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s annual conference, “Building Excellence into American Higher Education.”

Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College and author of “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” is our keynote speaker and is sure to raise provocative questions and entertain you.

Stephen Balch, founder and president of the National Association of Scholars, will open the conference with “What Does Excellence Mean?”

Pondering what makes an educated citizen is as old as the ancient Greeks and as recent as the October 11, 2007, meeting of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

Responding to a request by Board of Governors chairman Jim Phillips, officials from three UNC campuses told the board how they updated their general education (“GenEd”) requirements. These are the courses that students take to develop the “whole person” (using the university’s terminology).

Don’t think that UNC campuses have a core or common curriculum to which all students are exposed, however. UNC-Chapel Hill students have 2000 courses from which they can choose their “Gen Ed” classes. At N. C. State students can adopt “thematic tracks” such as environmentalism or follow one of six interdisciplinary programs to meet the requirements. Fayetteville State is more focused on specific outcomes—what should graduates “know and be able to do.”

These ways of developing the whole person may have merit, but they are a far cry from the tradition of liberal learning (an earlier term for “developing the whole person”) that underlay the creation of the University of North Carolina and many other American universities.

The drive to do something about the alleged climate change crisis has been sweeping the world. Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” received an Oscar and he has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his attempt to convince people that we must take drastic action now, or else suffer irreparable harm to the planet’s environment.

As Clarion Call reported in July, Elon University chose the book An Inconvenient Truth as its required summer reading for freshmen. And there is much more global warming action on campuses, in particular the proliferation of the American College & University Presidents Climate Change Commitment.

The Climate Commitment calls itself a “high-visibility effort to address global warming.” It aims at “garnering institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth’s climate.” Presidents who sign the Commitment pledge to make their campuses “climate neutral” as soon as possible.

Samuel Johnson called him the “immortal Shakespeare,” but his image is fading at colleges in North Carolina.

Nearly half the four-year colleges in North Carolina no longer require their English majors to take a course in the work of William Shakespeare, reports a new study from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Only eight out of the 15 University of North Carolina campuses with English majors require a course in William Shakespeare. Of 34 private colleges and universities in the state, only 17 require Shakespeare for English majors.

N. C. State does not require a course devoted to Shakespeare; UNC-Chapel Hill does. Some of North Carolina’s best-known private colleges, including Duke, Davidson, and Elon, do not require Shakespeare.

If you want to get people yawning, bring up the subject of accreditation. It seems terribly dull, but can have serious consequences. I know, because for years I have been involved in a battle against the overly restrictive accreditation standards the American Bar Association imposes on law schools.

The American Bar Association accredits most, although not all of the law schools in the United States. Supposedly, ABA accreditation ensures high quality legal education. The sad truth, however, is that it mostly serves to drive up the cost of a legal education and keep down the number of people who can enter the profession. What it’s doing is good for lawyers already in practice, but bad for Americans who need legal help – especially poorer ones.

Overall, there are two main problems springing from ABA accreditation. One is the use of mandatory input rules. These mandatory, straitjacketing rules are unnecessary to good legal education and in many instances contravene it. Furthermore, by exclusionary admissions requirements and by necessitating high costs and high tuitions, the ABA excludes minorities, working class, and nearly all non-affluent people from legal education.

The American higher education system is often called the envy of the world. Many careful observers, however, find that much of what goes on in the name of higher education is mediocre or worse. The recent Spellings Commission found that American higher education is very high in cost, but to an alarming degree fails to deliver on educational basics for many students.

While the recommendations of the Spellings Commission focus on what the federal government should do, others in higher education prefer to focus on what individual schools should do to make their programs excellent. An assembly of leading educational observers will share their insights at the October 27 conference of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Every fall, the Pope Center hosts a day-long conference devoted to a key higher education issue. This year’s conference, to be held October 27 at the Hilton RDU Airport-RTP, will be about educational excellence. Do we have it? If not, what can we do?

In addition to hearing nationally acclaimed speakers — from college presidents to intellectual flame-throwers — address these questions, participants can dine with the speakers in small groups the night before by attending the October 26 “Dinner with a Scholar.”