LEWISTON – A new, reformed core curriculum that will impact all Lewiston-Auburn College students will be launched in the fall of 2007, Dean Zark VanZandt said Monday.

Graduates will have a liberal education where the meaning of a global society and responsibilities of a college-educated citizen have been explored.

One major difference will be that future graduates will be better global citizens, VanZandt said.

With the world “changing around us, how are we preparing students to live in that world?” he asked. “We want students to have a sense of empowerment, a feeling they can make a difference … that they understand how the world works.”

On Wednesday, two artists will join university officials in a community discussion of how and why the University of Southern Maine’s L-A College will reform the college’s general education courses.

Artists Natasha Mayers and Robert Shetterly will join USM Provost Joe Wood for the talk, which begins at 4 p.m.

Mayers will speak about how important it is for artists and educators to cultivate compassion and translate it into informed action. Her exhibit, Signs of the Times, opens Wednesday.

Shetterly, whose Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait exhibit continues to travel the country, will speak about the obligation of artists. Wood will discuss liberal education in a changing world.

At the college now all degree candidates must take certain core courses in their first two years, VanZandt explained. The last two years focuses more heavily on the chosen major.

Next year, instead of getting the required courses “out of the way,” the college wants to boost liberal arts learning and require those courses to be taken all four years.

The idea will be to offer more challenging critical thinking, and incorporate that with whatever area of study the student is majoring in, VanZandt said. The theme of the required, more demanding liberal arts courses will be: “How, then, shall we live?”

Nationally, a more demanding liberal arts teaching is a trend in higher education, VanZandt said.

“The American Association of Colleges and Universities has in recent years been trying to get American colleges and universities to change their concept of liberal learning,” he said.

One of the goals emphasized is to produce more global citizens by ensuring that liberal learning is spread over four years, that it’s infused in all majors “so students have a sense of how it connects with them,” VanZandt said.

General education courses will also be changing at other USM campuses in Gorham and Portland, said college spokesman Roger Philippon.

The 4 p.m. discussion will be in the Function Room at the college at 51 Westminster St., Lewiston. The opening reception for Mayers’ exhibit will follow at 5 p.m.