Publisher’s Note

Looking Ahead

A Special Note to Journal of General Education Readers and Contributors from The Pennsylvania State University Press

The Pennsylvania State University Press continues to take pride in The Journal of General Education as a primary resource for college and university faculty, administrators, and others interested in general education teaching, research, content, and effectiveness. In keeping with our commitment to a journal devoted to scholarship that sustains general education’s distinctive contributions to undergraduate education, the Press is pleased to thank editors Elizabeth Jones and Claire Major and their staff and editorial board for a job well done.

Building on a significant past foundation and meaningful tradition, the Journal of General Education will enter its sixty-second year under new leadership, with some course changes in its editorial direction, and with increased emphasis on general education as a purposeful curriculum.

Dr. Patty Wharton Michael, co-chair of the department of communication at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, has accepted the invitation to serve as associate editor. Dr. Jeremy Cohen, associate vice president and senior associate dean for education at Penn State has agreed to become the journal’s editor, beginning with vol. 62, no. 1, which will be published in March 2013. Cohen also serves as Penn State’s faculty head of the intercollege bachelor of philosophy degree.

Under new editorial leadership, jge: The Journal of General Education, will receive a new moniker. Effective January 1, 2013, the journal will be titled, Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences. “The new title emphasizes,” editor Cohen says, “the journal’s recognition that general education is first and foremost a curricular integration intended to provide an enlightened means of discovering what has come before, of making new discoveries, and of placing scholarly discovery into a meaningful context.”

Many journals provide forums for research and scholarship focused on important issues, such as retention, assessment across the college or university, pedagogy applicable to a very broad range of courses, service learning, international study, and the place of new technologies in teaching and learning. Each topic is important to the educational mission as a whole. Many times, jge has published the work of leading scholars on these and other topics of general interest to those engaged in undergraduate education. In its new iteration, we are confident at the press that Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences will distinguish itself as a journal focused not on a scholarship of general interest to those engaged in undergraduate education writ large, but as a scholarly community interested in general education as a distinctive cornerstone of the arts of liberty and as a conservator of enlightened engagement.

It is appropriate here for the press to thank also a cohort of scholars who gathered at Penn State in the fall of 2011 for a symposium, The Ideals and Ideas of General Education. Stephanie Kenen from Harvard, Steven Lamy from the University of Southern California, Lisa Lattuca from The University of Michigan, and Sukhwant Jhaj from Portland State University joined Cohen, members of the Penn State Press, and key figures from Penn State University’s faculty and administration to consider ways in which a scholarly journal can play an increasingly meaningful role in promoting general education as a curriculum and a community that fosters the highest values of what it means to be educated beyond the disciplinary and professional concentrations in order to provide an undergraduate educational commons.