The Teagle Foundation is committed to supporting educational excellence and to enhancing student learning by broadening exposure to the liberal arts. Liberal arts learning helps individuals to develop their critical thinking skills, so as to be better able to evaluate claims and ideas on the basis of evidence, and to communicate with clarity and civility, both verbally and through the written word.
The Teagle Foundation is focused on how we can best champion the liberal arts while being attentive to the challenges facing American higher education. Over the past two decades, our initiatives have spanned key issues: how to engage students in the liberal arts, regardless of their major or background; what we know about how people learn and how that knowledge can shape our efforts to improve undergraduate education; how graduate students should be trained for teaching careers; how judicious use of technology may help achieve the goals of higher education; how to redesign curricula to make them more intellectually cohesive for students and financially sustainable for institutions. Our initiatives have been focused on the roles that college leaders and faculty must play if American higher education is to operate at a level of excellence and to serve as a democratic source of opportunity for the students it serves.
We invest our resources in ways that strengthen teaching and learning in the arts and sciences while leveraging opportunities to share resources and contain costs. We think of our work as “seeding” sustainable change. Our grantees bring energy and creativity to tackling some of the most critical issues in the effective communication and delivery of a true liberal arts education today. They demonstrate leadership by disseminating the lessons they have learned and modeling reform for the broader higher education community.
As Chairman of the Board of Directors, I take great pride in The Teagle Foundation’s rich history of supporting liberal arts education. We have learned a great deal in partnership with our grantees about how to sustain and improve education in the arts and sciences. We remain optimistic about the future and look forward to continuing our support of teaching and learning in the fast-changing environment of institutions committed to bringing the liberal arts to their students.
--Walter C. Teagle III