Welcome to the Gaede Institute!
Welcome to the Gaede Institute’s website. Here you’ll find information on our programs for strengthening liberal arts education and for providing liberal arts learning opportunities to the many communities Westmont intersects with beyond the academy. With the growing complexity of real world problems there is an ever greater need for people who bring a range of perspectives to social issues, and who recognize that their education is connected to the whole of their lives: their community involvement, their political engagement, their spiritual development, as well as their profession. We hope you’ll find the resources of the Gaede Institute helpful as together we seek to learn and teach for a complex world.
- Chris Hoeckley, Director
War and Peace as Liberal Arts
Issues of war and peace remain terribly vexing in regions across the world. Given their complexity, a wide range of disciplinary and institutional perspectives must be brought to bear on these issues. War and Peace as Liberal Arts, the Gaede Institute's 12th annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts brought scholars, academic administrators, and peaceworkers from around the globe to consider how the 
integrative nature of liberal arts education can equip students to engage justly and effectively in issues of peace and conflict. Learn more.
Watch the keynote addresses here.
Featured speaker:
Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study
Keynote speakers:
Sherman Jackson, King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture, University of Southern California
Duncan Morrow, Director of Community Engagement, University of Ulster
Helen Frowe, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Kent
Also on the program:
Chris Eberle, Associate Professor of Philosophy, United States Naval Academy
Gerald Mast, Professor of Communication, Bluffton University
Previous Gaede Institute programs. . .
The Gendered Liberal Arts? Femininity, Masculinity, and the Future of Liberal Education
The eleventh annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
February 24–25, 2012 • Santa Barbara, California
How can the liberal arts help us understand gender as it intersects with race, class, sexuality, religious identity and global position?
How do the institutional and cultural functions of liberal education resist, or reinscribe, traditional notions of gender?
Is the liberal arts campus becoming a "feminized space"?
What, if anything, is liberating about the liberal arts for gendered beings?
Join faculty members and administrators from around the country as we explore the relationship between gender and the liberal arts. Click here for more on the unique format of the Conversation on the Liberal Arts.
2012 Conversation Planning Committee:
Jamie Friedman--assistant professor of English
Cheri Larsen Hoeckley--professor of English, coordinator of gender studies
Omedi Ochieng--associate professor of Communication Studies
Christian Hoeckley--director, Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts.