Remembering Alexander Meiklejohn

by Joseph Tussman

 

Originally published in Liberal Educator (Winter 1984) and reprinted in The Burden of Office, Talonbooks (1989)

Harvard's Postmodern Curriculum
By R.R. Reno (First Things)
Wednesday, January 9, 2008

 

...a brief critique of Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Report of the Task Force on General Education .

"What is 'How we work'?
 

"We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work. Here's a list of some stories and habits."

 

I love the ones regarding authors.

David Frum's Diary (a National Review blog) has a year-end post on the Great Books, responding to the question "Do you have a few books any breathing person needs to read?"

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)