Sustainability: the Ultimate Liberal Art
October 20, 2006 issue of The Chronicle Review
By FRANK H.T. RHODES, president emeritus of Cornell University

"Ironic as it may now seem, the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic were regarded by the ancient Greeks as practical and useful skills — so useful, in fact, that they were seen as the indispensable preparation for citizenship, for participation in a free society. And it was in Greece, the same Greece, that science was "invented." How doubly ironic, then, that in our science-driven age, we have so little place for the wisdom of Greece."