Mortimer Adler discusses the Constitution with Bill Moyers and some seniors at St. John's College, Annapolis in 1987.  In Search of the Constitution

The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics'

Thirteenth Annual Conference
The Hotel Allegro, Chicago, IL, October 12-14, 2007

 

Seminar One: Teaching the Great Books

 

National Great Books Curriculum Academic Community

 

"This free academic resource focuses on the writings and authors found in Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World. The web site has been developed with funding from the United States Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

 

"The materials you will find as you explore this site have been written, adapted, and used by faculty and staff in a national consortium of urban colleges - mainly public community colleges - that employ the Great Books as the primary source texts in a wide variety of undergraduate courses in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences."

MIT Open Courseware

"MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum."

 

View all 1800 courses
 

Open Yale Courses

 

Yale University on Tuesday launched its free, online archive of popular undergraduate courses — including not only syllabi, problem sets and course materials, but videos and audio files of the lectures themselves.

 

(via Inside Higher Ed)

Arab world opens door to Western classics
JAMES ADAMS
Globe and Mail Update
December 10, 2007 at 4:02 AM EST


"It's been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide. Indeed, according to a 2003 United Nations report into human development in the Arab world, more books are translated into Spanish each year – 10,000 – than have been translated into Arabic in the previous 10 centuries.

"Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year."

A collection of reviews and news pieces regarding former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis's 2006 book Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (subtitle in paperback: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?)

Jacques Barzun turned 100 on November 30th.

Happy Birthday Jacques Barzun
ACTA online

December 05, 2007

A Georgetown senior reflects on their current core curriculum.

GU Liberal Education Needs a Liberal Dose of Change
Stephen Kenny

The Hoya - Georgetown University Newspaper

Dec. 05, 2007
 

Do we need a literary canon?

"Jonathan Sacks is right that we need a common culture, but wrong to think it should be based on a canon. Forcing young people to read the Bible won't foster a sense of belonging. Shared references must evolve more organically"

-Richard Jenkyns, Prospect Magazine, December 2007

 

 

The Daily Orange, an independent student newspaper published in Syracuse, New York, takes a look at Shimer College .

For the next month, New York Times' Reading Room bloggers will discuss the new translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf). Mr. Pevear has a recent  essay int the NYT Book Review about the new translation.

On the Uses of a Liberal Education (Part 2: As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor) (pdf)

Earl Shorris, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1997

 

(Apparent companion piece to Mark Edmundson's.)

"Forget Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, we've got Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup, the single work of required reading for the entire [Cornell] freshman class this year."

For a Core
Rob Fishman, senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University

Bellow brouhaha.

James Kugel, former professor of Hebrew Studies at Harvard and an Orthodox Jew has a new book out, How to Read the Bible, which is getting positive press. From a NY Times piece on the book:

"Most unsettling to religious Jews and Christians may be Kugel's chapters about the origins of God and his chosen people. Kugel says that there is essentially no evidence -- archaeological, historical, cultural -- for the events in the Torah. No sign of an exodus from Egypt; no proof that Israelites ever invaded, much less conquered, Canaan; no indication that Jericho was ever sacked. In fact, quite the contrary: current evidence suggests that the Israelites were probably Canaanites themselves, semi-nomadic highlanders or fleeing city dwellers who gradually separated from their mother culture, established a distinct identity and invented a mythical past."

A first chapter of the book is also available:

"In going through the Bible, however, this book will focus not only on what the text says but on the larger question of what a modern reader is to make of it, how it is to be read. This will mean examining two quite different ways of understanding the Bible, those of modern biblical scholars and of ancient interpreters."

(via kottke)

Elevating the Great Books Anew (Inside Higher Ed)
   
"In his new book, Anthony T. Kronman argues that the American college curriculum is seriously flawed for not giving students a true grounding in the classics that explore the human condition. Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press) mixes Kronman's assessment of the problems in academe with a set of proposed solutions. Kronman, the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University, responded to questions about the book."



Edit 10/19/07
Another review:
Jacob Laksin (City Journal)
Dissenter Inside the Tower
Yale professor Anthony Kronman laments the politicization of the humanities.
12 October 2007

Some musing on higher education in which Meiklejohn, Barr, Buchanan, McKeon, Hutchins, and Adler are all briefly discussed.

Thought for the day:

"If you haven't read the book you should shut the hell up," said Daniel Born, vice president at Chicago-based the Great Books Foundation and editor of the Common Review. "That should maybe be the central rule of etiquette for any book club or book discussion."

Read 'em the riot act
MEETING | Discussion hogs, bullies and non-reading slackers must be shelved for group to reach potential

September 18, 2007 | Chicago Sun-Times

More from Jim Sleeper (via tmpcafe)

Time For a Review of the Times Book Review?

 

"[Allan] Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to "left vs. right" scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn't notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.

"As it turns out, some of these confused journalists were working at The Times Book Review itself. "

Allan Bloom, 20 years later

"His famous critique of the academic left had merit, but the problem today - as Bloom himself recognised - is his neoconservative champions."

Jim Sleeper
Guardian, September 17, 2007

Chasing down the John Searle quote from Rachel Donadio's aforelinked Revisiting the Canon Wars piece.

 

"There is a certain irony in this in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."

John Searle
The Storm Over the University
The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990


 

Reading List
Books on the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Shelves of books on the state of American higher education have appeared over the years, ranging from the historical to the analytical to the downright polemical. The following list presents some highlights from the last half-century of debate over what an educated person should know."

Revisiting the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Today it's generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there's a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations."

Michael Silverblatt chats with David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of Infinite Jest. (KCRW's "Bookworm" 4/11/96)

MS: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that.

DFW: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me.

Our Compassless Colleges
By PETER BERKOWITZ
Wall Street Journal September 5, 2007

"At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being."

HEROES
The Champions of Our Literary Imagination
By Bruce Meyer
HarperCollins, 273 pages, $34.95

Reviewed by KEITH GAREBIAN
Toronto Globe and Mail, September 8, 2007

"From Gilgamesh to Jesus, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from Hercules to Superman, from Hamlet to King Lear, the most extraordinary heroes live through the pages of literature, tempting us to accompany them on their special quests through life's labyrinths, where they battle foes and obstacles and show how we, ordinary mortals, are joined to them collectively as they attempt to solve the puzzles of their own being."

Canon fodder
For forging higher ideas in young minds, Waller Newell says, there's nothing like the classics of Western civilization.  (Toronto Globe and Mail Sept. 8, 2007)

The Great Books Newsletter, Summer 2007 (pdf) announces the commencement of the eighth academic year The Great Books Academy has offered homeschooling curricula, books, enrollment services, and online classes.

Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children (pdf)
by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Diane Ravitch
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
7/11/2007

"America's true competitive edge over the long haul is not its technical prowess but its creativity, its imagination, its inventiveness. And those attributes are best inculcated not by skill-drill or "STEM" [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education] but through liberal arts and sciences, liberally defined. Thus argues this new Fordham volume, edited by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Diane Ravitch, which also explores what policymakers and educators at all levels can to do sustain liberal learning and sketches an unlovely future if we fail."

A review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, by Elizabeth Kantor

 

"Elizabeth Kantor has undertaken the monumental task of reviving the Western literary canon."

"The [College of the University of] Chicago faculty wondered how students, many just freshmen, could possibly read a classic a week. The eminent classicist Paul Shorey put this question to [President Robert M.] Hutchins, recalling that 'when I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year to study Dante's Divine Comedy.' 'The difference," Hutchins shot back, 'is that our students are bright.'"

THE WAR OF THE GREAT BOOKS
American Heritage Magazine, 1989
by Benjamin McArthur

Speaking of Chomsky, I'm not sure I was aware of this unitl now: here is a transcript, Realaudio soundtrack, and hyperlinked supplementary material to Part I of the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.

Hoover Institution partial digital archive of William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Noam Chomsky? Priceless.

At the end of an annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, a loose association of liberal arts colleges, it was announced that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges had decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

Are Liberal Arts Dead?  Far from it. In fact, liberal arts grads are in high demand in the corporate world.

-By Jamienne Studley

"TheGreatBooks.com  is designed to help Christian educators use the classical model to help each high school student own his or her faith as a total worldview."

A new report contends that fewer and fewer college English majors are being required to study Shakespeare. In a 60-page report titled " The Vanishing Shakespeare," the non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports that only 15 of the 70 colleges and universities it examined require their English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

10 Great Books about Education. A short reading list of works that have inspired the vision of Habele , a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of educational opportunities in the remote islands and atolls of Micronesia, an impoverished former American trust territory in the Central Pacific.

1777 and 1843 editions of the New England Primer .

Mark Edmundson's 1997 Harper's essay On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students.

 

Also, a video clip and transcript of his appearance on Booknotes in support of his book Why Read?

1937 Time magazine piece on the 'New Program' at St. John's College.

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.

A blog chronicling one family's experience educating their boys through what they call classical Christian homeschooling .

First Harvard College 'Core' curriculum overhaul in 30 years.

Liberal Education, Then and Now: J.S. Mill's idea of a university, and our own.

Peter Berkowitz, Hoover Institution Policy Review

Philip E. Lewis Appointed Vice President for the Liberal Arts Colleges Program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation .

Some reflections from a current student in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults (Graham School of General Studies, University of Chicago).

Complete text of Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir, by Milton Mayer.

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: essay ca. 1915 by John Erskine, early central figure in what has come to be known as the "Great Books movement" in the U.S.

Lion: A Memoir of Mark Van Doren  by Dan Wakefield (Ploughshares, Fall 1991)

One day I'll get round to these books by Susan Wise Bauer:

The Well-Educated Mind
A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

The Well-Trained Mind
A Guide to Classical Education at Home

What Should College Teach?  Rountable discussion with distinguished professsors.  MP3 from radioopensource.org .

 

 

Chapters One and Two of Robert M. Hutchins' Education for Freedom .

Complete text of the 1965 version of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book (with Charles Van Doren).  The Jesus thing and the annoying language pack installation prompt?  No idea.

Liberal Education & Global Community by Martha Nussbaum.

I feel as though I should have known about this essay before now:

The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy Sayers

Richard Dawkins on Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Education for Mutual Understanding?
Les Reid Jul 21, 04
Humanists and the Religious Education review in Northern Ireland

"Can believers and non-believers find common ground? In N Ireland we are so used to the perennial squabble between two varieties of Christianity that other forms of disagreement (and reconciliation, we hope) tend to be overlooked."

The End of Education
The Fragmentation of the American University

Commonweal
by Alasdair MacIntyre  

"What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond high school should be, by identifying what has gone badly wrong with even the best of secular universities. From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university."

Sustainability: the Ultimate Liberal Art
October 20, 2006 issue of The Chronicle Review
By FRANK H.T. RHODES, president emeritus of Cornell University

"Ironic as it may now seem, the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic were regarded by the ancient Greeks as practical and useful skills — so useful, in fact, that they were seen as the indispensable preparation for citizenship, for participation in a free society. And it was in Greece, the same Greece, that science was "invented." How doubly ironic, then, that in our science-driven age, we have so little place for the wisdom of Greece."

Dan Dennett on TEDTalks

Noam Chomsky - Santa Fe in January 2005

Review of Michael Berube's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? 

"In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom said that the goal of a liberal education was to acquaint students with the real alternatives that have been offered to answer the question: "How should I live my life?"  That question is as much aesthetic as political, as much religious as social or intellectual.  At the deepest level, I suppose, we think of The New Criterion as a handmaiden in that never-ending task."  -- Interview with Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of the New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books

Famed First Amendment scholar Leonard W. Levy dies

By Ronald K.L. Collins
First Amendment Center scholar
08.30.06
Leonard Williams Levy, noted educator and American constitutional historian, died last week. His death, previously unreported, was confirmed by his friend and co-author, UCLA Law emeritus professor Kenneth L. Karst. Levy died at his home in Ashland, Ore.

. . .[His] Legacy of Suppression was commissioned by Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic as a pamphlet; it was a revisionist interpretation of the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment. Levy argued, among other things, that freedom of the press as understood by the Framers meant merely the absence of prior restraints. Objecting to Levy's findings, Hutchins refused to print the work.

Years later, Levy noted that he published Legacy "to spite Hutchins and the Fund."

"Philosophical Stages [is] an interdisciplinary research project experimenting with using dramatic arts to teach philosophy to Bay Area high school students and Stanford undergraduates. " (Stanford News)

 

A description of the project and examples of student work can be found at http://philosophicalstages.org/.

 

 

"Most [business or technology majors] are conservative, not in any intellectual sense, but in the sense (which they admit) of fearfully conforming to the political and economic status quo, to the attitudes that will be expected of them as compliant employees, and to the necessity of looking out for number one in the "Survivor" sweepstakes of the global economy. Such students are not likely to welcome the cognitive dissonance forced on them by humanities courses demanding Socratic self-questioning of their sociopolitical or religious dogmas."

Rethinking the Culture Wars — I
By Donald Lazere
Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 22 '06

"What happened to the precision, discrimination and critical humanism that we celebrate as the hallmarks of liberal education and the Western heritage?" asked the late Edward Said in the June '86 issue of The Nation. This in the context of terrorism, American foreign policy, consensus, and dissent.

"Universities may be churning out capable earners and consumers, says THOMAS HIBBS*, but they are failing to equip students for meaningful lives." (Dallas Morning News, 8/20/06)

* Philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University

Discussed:

-Harry Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education -Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons
-Sex!
-Animal House!
-Happy Days!
-Madeleine Levine's The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material -Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
-Newman's The Idea of the University

. . .and more!

Appreciated seeing this editorial in the Seattle Times on the value of a liberal education.

Some of my recent iPod listening

http://www.thegreatideas.org/videosandbooks.html

 

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/csdi/index.html

Dallas Morning News piece in which former deep-sea diver recalls enrolling at Thomas Aquinas College* as "middle age was rapidly closing in."

 

* Catholic "great books" college in Santa Paula, CA modeled on the secular program at St. John's College.  Check out their reading lists:

 

TAC

 

SJC

 

Aspen Times article on the recent controversy surrounding the proposed renaming of the Paepcke Auditorium at the Aspen Institute to Resnick Auditorium, in recognition of a $4 million donation to upgrade the facility from Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

 

And some letters to the editor regarding same.

 

 

A wealth of Walter Kaufmann material I've not seen available online until now, including the complete text of the out-of-print Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy.

Some thoughts on the work of Walter Kaufmann.

The Mortimer Jerome Adler Papers (1939-1944) at UT Austin.

East Valley/ Scottsdale Tribune -- Fight for students goes old school

Fight for students goes old school

By Andrea Falkenhagen
Tribune

An elite charter prep school wants to bring its traditional approach to education -Socrates, uniforms and all - to Scottsdale. More than 200 Scottsdale families have already shown interest in Scottsdale Preparatory Academy, which could open in fall 2008, said Daniel Scoggin, chief executive officer of Great Hearts Preparatory Academies,...

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Great Books and The Great Book

Marc Fisher over at the Washington Post remarks on the academic freedoms at Patrick Henry. Can a school study the scripture as well as Aristotle and what weight should be given to each text? Does having a statement of faith mean that you can’t learn and grow from the truths of non-biblical texts? (via scriptoriumdaily)

Sven Birkerts reviews The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, By Stuart Kelly. (Boston Globe)

"Stories and legends are the meat of Kelly's book. Take the case of Aeschylus and the Ptolemys. It was Ptolemy I who traveled the known world with Alexander the Great, and later ruled Egypt, building there the monumental Alexandrian library. His grandson, Ptolemy III, devoted to the great institution, discovered 'an anomaly of unthinkable proportions' -- the lack of a complete text of the master Greek dramatist. The only extant version, in scrolls, was in Athens, so Ptolemy III arranged to borrow the text for copying purposes, leaving as collateral the staggering sum of 15 talents. A small amount to sacrifice, though, for what was known to be 'a unicum, a nonpareil, a one and only.'"

You have to love a page that begins "You may never have heard the name of the World's Smartest Man, Richard McKeon."

And, further: "To the best of my knowledge, he is the smartest man in known history. For a rough approximation of his brilliance, think of ArIstotle [sic], about 2,000 years SMARTER [sic]."

Wiki begins their entry with the rather more restrained "McKeon is a pivotal but neglected figure in 20th Century American Philosophy. In a career which spanned seven decades, he published 158 articles and 11 books. He received most of the honours possible for an American philosopher, including being given an invitation to deliver the Paul Carus Lectures in 1969."

One more about him.

The Trivium

Chapter One (pdf) of a book titled The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, by Sister Miriam Joseph. Originally published in the 1930s, an updated edition appeared in 2002, reformatted with extensive notes, references, and biographical information.


"Sister Miriam Joseph, the author, wrote the book from a strong academic perspective. Holding degrees from Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University, Sister spent her life supporting her belief that women could be fine journalists and that more quality writers with a Christian and Catholic faith would help to address the ills of society. When she began teaching as an English professor at Saint Mary’s in 1931, she was assigned the courses on rhetoric, grammar, and composition. In 1935 after hearing Mortimer Adler speak, Sister Miriam Joseph was asked to "revive the united Trivium again in the freshman class." After studying closely with Mortimer Adler for several months, Sister returned to Saint Mary’s to begin putting together the text, The Trivium in College Composition and Reading, to be used in her class, a required course for all freshmen." (via homeschoolchristian.com)

Great Books Lists

Ancient Wisdom from Dead White Males

"We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves."

From the preface of "The Great Conversation", book one of "Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler - December 1, 1951. (via Curmudgeon)

New York Times review of Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon

A brief recollection of Mark Van Doren.

A Q&A With Darrin M. McMahon

...author of Happiness: A History

"In the 1990s, Darrin M. McMahon was teaching a "Great Books" course
at Columbia University ("from Plato to NATO," he calls it), and one
subject - happiness - 'was leaping off the page in all these major
texts'. . . .

"Times: Why did the ancient Greeks believe that you had to be dead if
you wanted to call yourself happy?"

Four Things Meme

Matt tagged me.

Four jobs I've had:
1. paper boy
2. fast food jockey
3. selling home stereo speakers out of a white van by flagging down other motorists
4. postproduction audio engineer for small broadcast TV studio

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Annie Hall
2. The Godfather
3. Barfly
4. Brazil

Four places I've lived:
1. Kansas City, MO
2. San Diego, CA
3. Pasadena, CA
4. Big Sandy, TX

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Sopranos
2. The Larry Sanders Show
3. The Office (BBC)
4. Home Movies

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Vail, CO
2. Jerusalem
3. Amman, Jordan
4. Some sugary white beach in Florida when I was a boy

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. potato leek soup
2. yer good ol' pepperoni pie
3. spicy Thai dishes
4. turkey 'n mashed taters

Four sites I visit daily:
1. news.google.com
2. kottke.org
3. blogger.com
4. bookfinder.com

Five places I would rather be right now:
1. in a bar
2. in the sack
3. somewhere far, far, away from computers with like babbling brooks and hiking trails and whatnot
4. on stage playing my drums
5. NYC

 

I tag  . . . wait I don't know any more bloggers.

Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts Launches Major National Study

 

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind., Jan. 30 (AScribe Newswire) -- The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College announces the launch of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. This four-year, multi-million dollar program is one of the most comprehensive national studies of the effects of American higher education. The study will focus on the impact of liberal arts education, exploring how students develop during their college years and how key educational experiences promote this development.

NITLE

"NITLE is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting liberal education. We provide opportunities for teachers in liberal arts contexts to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students by deploying emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways.

"Our mission is to catalyze innovative teaching to enrich and advance liberal education in the digital age."

“Freedom, Piety, and the Perpetuation of Our Institutions”

Keynote Address: American Academy of Liberal Education Annual Meeting
By Christopher B. Nelson, President,
St. John’s College i n Annapolis , MD
June 28, 2004

The American Academy for Liberal Education

The American Academy for Liberal Education is a national organization dedicated to strengthening and promoting liberal education through accreditation and research.

Eva Brann: Exploring Great Books

2005 National Humanities Medalist Eva Brann calls herself a latecomer to St. John's College and its great books program. "I've been here only forty-eight years," she says, laughing.

Bonanza for liberal arts

Christopher Pearson: Bonanza for liberal arts
Have your say, email The Forum theforum@theaustralian.com.au
January 21, 2006
LAST week's column was a series of bleak reflections on the declining levels of literacy in Australian schools and universities. This column, in contrast, is about some welcome developments in tertiary education - the opening for business of Campion College in Sydney and its new degree course in the liberal arts.

A Small Niche for Great Books

An Armenian Studies professor's lonely accomplishment in general education
Published On Friday, January 20, 2006  12:01 AM [ thecrimson.com]
By TRAVIS R. KAVULLA
 

Is Intelligent Design the same as traditional Natural Theology?

When zealots coerce the uninformed

By DALE BRAIMAN
COMMUNITY VOICES

Daytona Beach News Journal

"Someone to Read Up To"

Someone to Read Up To

 

-The Weekend Australian, 14 January 2006

 

The Kelso Institute

"Louis Kelso's vision of Capitalism was, in Dr. [Mortimer J.] Adler's description, 'the economically free and classless society which supports political democracy and which, above all, helps political democracy to preserve the institutions of a free society.' To Dr. Adler's mind, this conception was 'the most revolutionary idea of the century.'"

Some Great Books and Philosophy Discussions

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreatConversation/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreatConversationToo/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/more_great_conversation/

Reference Page for the above three.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/socratescafe/