The TFAO Digital Library: A vision of the future for TFAO

The TFAO Digital Library

A Vision of the Future for TFAO

While TFAO's operations and finances are stable, TFAO will entertain joining with a nonprofit educational institution to absorb its functions in future years in order to provide:

For the public

further in-depth education in American art outside of traditional establishments [1]
affordability in art education

For the enterprise

a guarantee of long term continuity of mission
extension, evolution and acceleration of programs

Absorption may be accomplished through an initial exclusive license of operations, followed in time by acquisition.

For a list of TFAO's current programs please see About TFAO

Note

1. Of interest is a quote from a 12/01/2005 Weekly Standard article, "Is it the future of college?" by Ross Douthat:

Thanks to the internet, we've entered an age where a college education doesn't need to be as constrained, in time and space, as it did in the age before streaming video and online libraries. The old-fashioned campus experience--the leafy quads and wood-paneled classrooms, the dorm-room arguments and late-night pub crawls--may be the ideal way to experience college, but it's neither available nor well-suited to the needs of most Americans. As public financial aid diminishes, it's prohibitively expensive for the public colleges in most states to enroll, house, and provide lecture halls to accommodate every student who wants a degree. And the traditional four-year residential model of college doesn't fit the needs of those students whose attempts to balance work and higher education usually require giving up on the latter, leading to what the Times described last year as a growing "college drop-out boom."

A more democratic model of higher education, then, might involve shifting federal and state dollars away from the large state schools, with their vast resources and their "beer-and-circus" atmosphere--and perhaps away from old-fashioned brick-and-mortar campuses altogether. This isn't how our mandarins usually think about democratizing college: When American liberals imagine expanding access to higher education, they tend to envision a wave of working-class achievers sweeping over the picturesque lawns of a Princeton or a Duke. But while elite schools ought to be doing more to diversify the class composition of their student bodies, the average degree-seeking American twentysomething will benefit more from a system of higher ed that's streamlined and flexible--that lets him work and take classes at the same time, watch lectures from home and read assignments online, graduate in 15 months or 5 years--than from all the financial aid dollars that an Ivy League school can muster.

Inevitably, such extension-school and distance-learning models of higher ed will be geared more toward practical training than toward the traditional liberal arts, and more likely to introduce a working-class striver to Peter Drucker and computer science than to Plato and the New Historicism. But even though the debate over the design of a liberal arts curriculum is important, it's also essentially an elite debate, affecting only a fraction of the nation's college-going population. The nation's "liberal arts college students," two college presidents recently pointed out, would "fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer than 100,000 students out of more than 14 million." Whereas more than half of American undergrads are part-time students, and a third hold down full-time jobs. This is the population that any "public" system of higher education should be designed to serve--even if it means accepting some internet-age alterations to our nostalgic, groves-of-academe notions of what a "college education" ought to look like.

Ross Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

Go to

Individual pages in this study will be amended as TFAO adds content, corrects errors and reorganizes sections for improved readability. Refreshing or reloading pages enables readers to view the latest updates. Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other Web sites and in employing referenced consultants or vendors. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although Traditional Fine Art Organization, Inc. includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over those other sites. For more information on evaluating web pages see Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc.'s General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.