b'FRIDAY3:30PM4:00PM Refreshment Break NETWORKING4:00PM5:15PM CONCURRENT SESSIONS IVPAIRED THEORY & PRACTICE CHIPPING AWAY AT INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY:Theory & Practice of Inclusive and Engaged College Initiativesthrough Critical EngagementsAs Eric Alterman outlines in The New Yorker, intellectual inequalitythe fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society and others do not is an increasing problem with some dire consequences for our country. Access to a liberal arts education becomes now more than ever an imperative. It also couples well with the other imperatives for American higher education to meet diversity, equity, and inclusion goals on our campus-es. Our universities must work together to give all students the opportunity to address unscripted problems in the context of a diverse nation and glob-ally interdependent, multicultural world (AAC&U on diversity and equity). Is it possibleparticularly for those of us at public institutions that have seen state funding almost disappear and declining enrollments throttle our creativity to find ways to give our students the economic, social, and intellectual resources theyll need now and those tools theyll need later for those unscripted prob-lems? Within the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Central Mich-igan University, we are exploring these questions around an initiative called Critical Engagements: Questions That Matter, a collaborative project that makes the academic mission of Central Michigan University concrete by high-lighting how our college and university are tackling the worlds most pressing and difficult problems. This session will provide background on the project, in-cluding its genesis in our desire to make visible the colleges core values and to frame the advantages of a liberal arts education in terms of what Sha Xin Wei calls palpable impact. Now two years into the initiative, we are working to make it better, particularly around student success. During this session, we will explore the value of such an initiative as it relates to questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will describe our progress on various projectsin-cluding the creation of an interdisciplinary and collaborative design-lab course and a deliberative committee anchored in our local communityefforts that we hope will give students of different backgrounds and identities the tools to help solve some of the worlds most wicked problems.Register at ccas201921'