At today’s release of A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s latest treatise on improving undergraduate education, the foundation’s president, Lee S. Shulman, compared higher education to a California tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House, whose onetime owner believed that she would remain alive as long as construction on the house continued.

“And so over the years she added dozens, even hundreds, of rooms, ad hoc, all over the place, aggregating, rarely integrating, with corridors leading to dead ends, staircases leading nowhere,” he said. “Parts of the house that you would think should be readily accessible to one another didn’t connect at all. It was as if the single house had been built by architects who never communicated, in styles that were incompatible, and with little motivation except to grow.”

Universities, he said, have grown in much the same way. Academic disciplines have grown ever more abstract and detached from life beyond the university, while professional schools, often relegated to off-campus locations, have tended to focus exclusively on practical concerns.

A New Agenda for Higher Education, say Carnegie researchers, provides a model for establishing dialogue between parts of the university that have grown estranged. The book describes a two-year seminar that brought together faculty members in 14 disciplines and professions, including law, engineering, and teacher education, to compare pedagogies and discuss how liberal-arts and professional educators might borrow from one another’s practices and perspectives to better prepare students for their professional and personal lives.

The book profiles a number of courses that have attempted to integrate the traditions of humanistic and professional education. It describes an engineering course that asks students to imagine the challenges of the profession from the perspective of engineers in other countries, a teacher-education program that emphasizes the political pressures affecting elementary-school teachers, and a human-biology course that deals with the ethics of organ donation and life support.

A summary of the book, which was published this month by Jossey-Bass, is available at the Carnegie Foundation’s Web site. —Paula Wasley