Liberal Arts
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Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative? March 15, 2024
The first thing you notice when walking into the middle-school classrooms at Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, is the sense of calm. No phones are out. The students are quiet—not in the beaten-down way of those under authoritarian ...
The Wisdom of Lifelong Education December 18, 2023
On the northside of Indianapolis, there is a senior living community, numbering about 160 residents. Over the past few months, a group of interested residents and I have been meeting weekly for 90 minutes, devoting our attention to the discussion of ...
Transcendent Liberal Arts November 28, 2023
In the 1970s, students in the University of Kansas’s Integrated Humanities Program were converting to Catholicism at such conspicuous rates that local media accused professors of proselytizing. Though an investigation found no evidence for the charge...
Are the Liberal Arts Elitist? September 27, 2023
We have interesting classifications of our institutions of higher learning. The Carnegie classification of major research universities distinguishes between R1 and R2 schools. The well-known U.S. News & World Report Rankings separate national univers...
On Being Your Own Teacher September 25, 2023
“Have you yet recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher?”These words have stayed in my mind since 2006, when I first noticed them stretched across a prominent wall inside St. John’s College in Annapolis, the Great Books school and...
The Liberality of Liberal Education September 12, 2023
There used to be a distinction that signaled the difference between study for the sake of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for some specific line of work or trade and a higher form of study that was undertaken because it was thought worth...
America Is Fighting the Wrong University Wars March 23, 2023
The University of Texas at Arlington consists primarily of large parking lots, brown patches of grass and rectangular buildings capable of holding thousands of students. When I was a tenure-track assistant history professor there, for four years in t...
The Utility of the Liberal Arts December 29, 2022
The heart of Agresto’s critique is that the liberal arts has lost its sense of purpose and promise. While Allan Bloom presented relativism as the modern classroom menace in his Closing of the American Mind, Agresto’s book recognizes that the baromete...
A Phenomenology of Ideology, Part 4 December 14, 2022
After five years of graduate study, I finally found myself teaching in a small liberal arts college on the Chesapeake Bay. The St. John’s program is a mostly all-required curriculum in which students and faculty move through classes on language, his...
The ‘Suicide’ of the Liberal Arts December 05, 2022
‘Mr. John, are you an Athenian or a Spartan?” A group of Iraqi students put that question to John Agresto in 2003, when he was in Baghdad working to rebuild Iraq’s university system for the Coalition Provisional Authority. After a classroom discussio...
The American Heritage of Freedom in the Liberal Arts November 28, 2022
Freedom is a complicated idea. Since we can talk about liberty in the positive and the negative, it’s also a contradictory idea. In our time, liberty has meant the ability or the power to participate in government as well as the freedom to be left al...
On Liberal Learning November 23, 2022
Since Allan Bloom's bestselling classic Closing of the American Mind revealed the depths of the problems in American higher education, there have been numerous good books written on the decline of the liberal arts, the relentless ideological assault ...
The Affliction of Victimhood November 17, 2022
The following is a condensed version of "Pathologies of Victimhood" by Richard Gunderman, published at Law & Liberty.In 1973, Sacheen Littlefeather appeared in full Native American garb at the 45th Academy Awards ceremony to decline the Best Actor Os...
Are the Liberal Arts Useful? September 20, 2022
It’s hard to say something new about the liberal arts. People have been discussing them since at least Seneca’s time, when he wrote in a.d. 55 that the liberal arts teach us how to live virtuously, even if they cannot make us virtuous. (The only way ...
Why Call It Liberal Education? August 16, 2022
Why do we say liberal education or the liberal arts? Why not call it conservative education, since it is an education that “conserves” so much of the world’s knowledge? Or, better yet, why not just drop all politically freighted terminology?The trut...
The Stigmatization of the Ordinary July 26, 2022
Over 60 years ago, we were introduced to the idea of “the two cultures” in higher education—that is, the growing rift in the academy between the humanities and the sciences, a rift wherein neither side understood the other, spoke to the other, or car...
Can Socrates Be Saved? February 14, 2022
When Crito came to rescue his friend, an aged and imprisoned Socrates, the philosopher denied any need to be rescued. At least, he did not need the kind of rescue Crito had planned. In Plato’s telling, Crito is the last and most dramatic in a series ...
Review: Roosevelt Montás's "Rescuing Socrates" November 12, 2021
Rescuing Socrates, Roosevelt Montás’s memoir-cum-paean to the classics, is a timely and much-needed book. Montás directed Columbia’s Core Curriculum program for a decade. In an era when dismissing the canon signals a concern for the less privileged, ...
The Liberal Arts and a Free Republic November 12, 2021
It is deeply consequential, even emblematic, that one of the greatest American defenders of the Western idea of liberal education was a former slave. The author of three (or four, depending on how one counts) autobiographies, Frederick Douglass explo...
Solid to the Core November 08, 2021
Rescuing Socrates, Roosevelt Montás’s memoir-cum-paean to the classics, is a timely and much-needed book. Montás directed Columbia’s Core Curriculum program for a decade. In an era when dismissing the canon signals a concern for the less privileged, ...
Toddlers' Terrible, Horrible, No good, Political Books November 05, 2021
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I am running away." "If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.""If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I...
Going Off-Book is Key to Liberal Education July 12, 2021
Many Hollywood stars, even those at the top of their profession, shy away from Broadway. Bruce Willis and Al Pacino, for example, both tried to debut their screen acting skills on the stage in 2015, but ended up being panned by critics.Consensus was ...
Surface Tension December 22, 2020
This year has put liberal arts institutions under unprecedented pressure to be relevant – to prove their worth as a financial investment, a seedbed for social justice, and preferably both at once. Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought could have predicted...
