“And this, stripped of highfalutin rhetoric, is what we mean by liberally educated. Not something soft and willowy, but something fierce and wondrous: nothing less than the capacity to understand the universe. What a fierce and wondrous thing that is!” —Inaugural address, April 30, 2005
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The Valley
acrimonious, and in the end we were able to come to an agreement.”
The Richest Reward While MacDonald takes great satisfaction in the transformation of LVC’s campus, in the growth of its academic offerings, and in the development of its community relationships, he notes that the deepest rewards of his career took place on a more individual scale: “One of the greatest satisfactions has been teaching people to think,” he said. “Not teaching people stuff. The longer I taught, the less I wanted to teach stuff— information—and the more I wanted to teach students to read and write about things that they were interested in. I wanted to see students write and shape their ideas and arguments. That’s been a great satisfaction, and if what I said in my inaugural was true—and I think it was and is—that remains the great task of what liberal education is about.”