Let me first say that some of the most petty inter-office politics mixed with high school clique shenanigans I've ever seen were in the English department at the university level.  Which just goes to say that a liberal education is no means a path to place of mindful groundedness and maturity. 

But also believe that much of what we witness on Wall Street or in the antics of the likes of the upper elite of Enron etc would be much less likely if those folks were immersed in a good liberal arts education on top of their MBAs. 

The notion of two threads - inquiry and reverence - is interesting.  One of the battles I witnessed throughout my time in first the History Department and then the English Department was the attack on the reverence for the "dead old white guys" and the Euro-centric approach to what constituted good literature or what a poem was or what really happened 400 years ago.  Of course, it all got political, and each side dug in their heels, becoming as partisan as Congress is today. 

It is a battle that is always raging.  When Anne Sexton and the other poets who wrote in the style of self-confession emerged, there were those in academia and criticism who said it was not just bad poetry, it wasn't really poetry at all.  And the uproar when the impressionists hit the scene way back when.

But there was one statement made in the review that caught my eye:

Now more than ever, we need both reflective and pragmatic liberal education if we are to shape accelerating change rather than be shaped by it.

I think it reveals the on-going delusion that we can somehow not be shaped by changes, as well as the same-old, same-old; that somehow knowledge and a good education can provide one an autonomy and power over one's ego that just isn't the case.