Mark Edmundson (he of the famous 1997 Harper's essay On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students) has a new like-minded piece out: Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? (Oxford American, The Education Issue, Aug. 2011 - Issue: 74)

Book TV visited with author and teacher Eva Brann at her home in Annapolis, Maryland, to talk about her life and work. Ms. Brann, who has been a tutor at St. John's College since 1957, discussed her interest in the classics and talked about some of the philosophers her students read.  (Original air date August 1, 2009)

The University of Chicago Chronicle announces that the late Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who is among the University’s most celebrated faculty members, will “teach again” when tapes and transcripts of his courses are digitized and collected on a Web site to be built by the newly founded Leo Strauss Center.

“The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting the publishing project with a $350,000 grant over two years. In addition to the grant, the center is raising funds for the project, which is expected to cost $1.3 million.

This unpublished record refers in part to the audiotapes, transcripts and class notes of some 47 courses Strauss taught, most of them here at the University of Chicago,” said Stephen Gregory, Administrative Coordinator of the Leo Strauss Center, who will be managing the project.

“We consider these to be an extraordinary resource for the study of Strauss’ thought, and, more generally, of political philosophy and the intellectual history of the 20th century,” said Nathan Tarcov, Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, who founded the Leo Strauss Center, the Web site of which will host the documents.

A demo of Strauss on Plato's Meno is available here.

The Fantasy World of High Chat:  Hutchinsland

 

Some enjoyably wry reflections on Robert M. Hutchins and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions by Ed Engberg, Sr. Fellow Emeritus of the Center. 

 The Center in Santa Barbara, assumed a mission that cannot be defined more concisely than the Advancement of Everything Good. At one time or another, depending upon its finances, the immediate audience, or the condition of the world and the night vapors troubling it, the Center proposed itself as an "early warning system" that will alert us to each rise in the tide of "critical issues," and the flotsam to be found thereon; and as the sole locus of thought generated independently of the pressure of this world; it is the protector and civilizer of great conversation....

 

...Hutchins struck [Lewis] Mumford as "tall, urbane, boyish looking: keen but supercilious , rational and outwardly reasonable, but shallow; an unawakened isolationist." "Aloof," the adjective often used by friendlier critics, fell short of capturing Hutchins look and bearing of pain, as if enduring some unheard noise, as if he were bearing his assigned mission nobly, but wished constantly that he might be released for less burdensome service.

The Humanities Move Off Campus

As the classical university unravels, students seek knowledge and know-how elsewhere.

 

Victor Davis Hanson | City Journal - A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute

Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.

But in recent decades, classical and traditional liberal arts education has begun to erode, and a variety of unexpected consequences have followed. The academic battle has now gone beyond the in-house "culture wars" of the 1980s. Though the argument over politically correct curricula, controversial faculty appointments, and the traditional mission of the university is ongoing, the university now finds itself being bypassed technologically, conceptually, and culturally, in ways both welcome and disturbing.

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Why We Lost the Great Books

Speaking in Charlotte, Notre Dame scholar Ralph McInerny discusses the classics and what went wrong.

Jane Shaw, John William Pope Center For Higher Education Policy

November 10, 2008

 

Why do modern humanities professors hate the Western canon, the so-called Great Books that once defined a liberal arts education? Ralph McInerny, a professor of philosophy and medieval studies at Notre Dame University—and also the author of the popular Father Dowling mystery series—has an answer.

 

It isn't just relativism (or, in McInerny's words, the idea that it's as important to teach Tarzan as Hamlet) or the claim that classical scholars push the works of "dead white males" in order to control society. The reason, says McInerny, is that most of the Great Books are "were written under Christian auspices." Their religious underpinning is obvious in the works of authors such as Dante, but also "inescapable" in those of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Furthermore, the non-Christian parts of the canon, such as those by Plato and Aristotle, were written under the assumption that providence, or a divine mind, governs human life.

 

This is an idea that many modern academics cannot stand, said McInerny.

 

McInerny shared his thoughts about Great Books at an evening lecture in Charlotte on November 6. His talk before an audience of about 100 people was sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Pope Center.

 

Towering Ivories

Stanley Fish and his ideal of the American university.

A review of Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time

by Peter Berkowitz

Weekly Standard,  11/03/2008

 

'Many people have as difficult a time hearing and giving due weight to the liberal in "liberal education" as they have in hearing and giving due weight to the liberal in "liberal democracy." But in both cases the adjective is critical: A liberal education is a specific form of education, one that fits individuals for freedom; and a liberal democracy is a specific form of popular government, one that protects individual freedom by limiting majority power.'

 

A lovely blog post that takes a look at, among other things, 'How to
Read a Book' by "a guy named Mortimer Adler."

http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-read/

A Great Idea at the Time
The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of The Great Books

Alex Beam

Public Affairs Books, Pub date: 11/03/08
 

"Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial "dead white men," are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?"

Learning How to Learn

Forbes Opinion

Daniel Born 08.13.08, 6:00 PM ET

 

"To talk to freshmen about the liberal arts as an education for freedom (the Latin liber, as in "free") will strike many as absurd. Liberal arts requirements are the stuff most students try to 'get out of the way' as soon as possible, the grunt work one does prior to shopping for courses that hold real allure."

The Burden of the Humanities
by Wilfred M. McClay

The Wilson Quarterly

. . .What does it mean to speak of the "burden" of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the ­near ­opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our ­duty.

Both of these senses of ­burden—­the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as ­task—­need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization's past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible.

Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again

"In 2004, Roger Martin, former Harvard dean and then President of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, enrolled as a college freshman at St. John's College in Annapolis Maryland. When this undertaking captured the headlines of the national media, Dr. Martin appeared on NBC's Today Show and was interviewed by NPR's Scott Simon. His book, Racing Odysseus: A College President becomes a Freshman Again (UC Press, July 2008) now tells the whole story in a way that will be enjoyed by young and old alike."

English Faculty Take Great Books, Learning to Three Prisons

"Thanks to a recent partnership between Middle Tennessee State University, the Tennessee Department of Correction and the Great Books Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization, prisoners at three Nashville-area prisons recently had a chance to explore [what Longfellow called] 'the sweet serenity of books' by participating in a nine-week program titled Great Books in Middle Tennessee Prisons."

Bookfox today blogs:

'So the seventeen-year-old kid [Alec Niedenthal] who wrote a letter to the New York Times about making way for the new generation of authors, whom he described as "the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam," has not only been interviewed by The New York Observer but contacted by Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins requesting manuscripts. If only it was that easy for the rest of us to avoid the slush pile. Then again, I'm not a wunderkid who had read William Vollmann, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Scott Snyder, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and David Foster Wallace before graduating high school.'

Bookfox via, in turn, The Elegant Variation

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
 

-The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An [anonymous] instructor at a "college of last resort" explains why.
 

June 2008 Atlantic Monthly

Richard Carrier gives enthusiastic recommendations for three recent books* related to ancient science.

"These are the kinds of authors I wish I were, and strive to be. All three books are entirely approachable to laymen, yet all are advanced, cutting-edge works, and will be required reading for experts in their respective subjects for decades to come."

 

* The Catapult: A History

  Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity

  Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity 

Three Books for the Aspiring Language Guy

(via ADYNATON)

Liberalism vs. Humanism
by James Piereson
The New Criterion

On the battle between learning for the sake of learning and learning for utility.

Charles Van Doren's The Joy of Reading (subt. "210 Favorite Books, Plays, Poems, Essays, Etc - What's in Them, Why Read Them) is back in print, apparently as a new edition (subt. "A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works").

The Great Ideas: The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education
An Exhibition in the
Department of Special Collections
The University of Chicago Library
May 1, 2002 - September 6, 2002