Thread by @pleonidasp

Thread: the broader historical context of the West Civ programs at Arizona public universities—criticized by @stefsaul as "injections of conservative thought" and defended by @SohrabAhmari as transmitters of "common intellectual patrimony of liberal civilization."

In the second half of the 19th c., the dominant form of higher education in the US shifted from the liberal arts college—small, classical, usually religious, focused on teaching—to the research university. CW Eliot's presidency at Harvard may be taken as an emblem of the shift.

The research university expanded the liberal arts college horizontally and vertically—horizontally, by expanding and updating the range of subjects taught (esp the modern sciences); vertically, by incorporating existing professional schools and creating new graduate programs.

By the early 20th c., serious criticisms of the research university had emerged. Chief among them: the narrowing of learning that can come with (over)specialization, the failure to provide a coherent general education, and the resulting incoherence in the souls of students.

Beginning in 1919, there arose three attempts to revive liberal arts education at the college and university level.

#1: Western Civ courses—the most widespread
#2: Great Books seminars—the most intensively enduring
#3: Christian Culture programs—the most niche & countercultural

#1: Western Civ courses—historical integrations of the various disciplines, telling a progressive story of Western man from ancient Greece (or rather, prehistory) to modern, industrial liberal civilization. E.g., what became the Contemporary Civilization sequence at Columbia.

Western Civ courses were the most broadly successful of the revivals, spreading to all the elite universities as a core "general education" requirement. They tended to evince a confidence in the superiority of the modern West over other (& older) cultures

jstor.org/stable/1864161…

But given when they debuted, it's no surprise that the progressive confidence of Western Civ programs didn't go unchallenged. Philosophers in the early 20th c. were questioning the supremacy of modern thought—and of modern technological society—over the (premodern) alternatives.

And pedagogically, the best students and teachers of the Western Civ programs—John Erskine, Mark Van Doren, Mortimer Adler—discovered that the most interesting thing about such courses were the primary texts that were used to supplement the historical narrative.

So a philosophically and pedagogically radical alternative emerged, one that ditched history as the unifying discipline, replaced the lecturer with the discussion leader, and encouraged students to enter into the "great conversation," accessible to all through the great books.

Hence, #2: Great Books seminars—focusing on direct reading of the great books, and remaining agnostic on the question of whether the moderns were better than the ancients, or for that matter whether the philosophers were better than the poets.

There are two distinct forms of the Great Books phenomenon.

#2a: the publishing phenomenon—Adler's Great Books Britannica series, which enabled tens of thousands of midcentury adults to give themselves & their neighbors a better education than their fragmented universities had.

#2b: the colleges—above all, St. John's College, which since 1937 has offered an all-encompassing program committed to liberal education via great books seminars. It has inspired many others to undertake reform in full (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College) or in part.

See Amy Kass's article, "The Liberal Arts Movement," for a good history of how the great books approach migrated from Chicago to UVA to St. John's.

This issue of The College also records the death of Leo Strauss, a great ally of the great books movement.

digitalarchives.sjc.edu/files/original…

The Great Books mode flourished as a publishing phenomenon for decades, and continues to flourish institutionally at a few small colleges. Among its early critics were Christian educators who thought it was an insufficiently radical response to the incoherence of modernity.

#3: Christian Culture programs emerged as a third revival of liberal education. Christopher Dawson articulated this revival in The Crisis of Western Education. John Senior & co. offered a modified, intensive version of it in KU's Integrated Humanities Program in the 1970s.

The KU program, the third and in many senses the most radical departure from the modern, progressive research university approach, was the first revival to spark a reaction. It was shut down after being accused of inculcated a "medieval spirit" in its students.

The great reaction against the Great Books and Western Civ programs came in the "canon wars" of the 1980s-90s. Great Books schools such as St. John's survived this reaction, and many West Civ programs were reformed and diversified.

In the last three or four years, we have seen a new wave of reaction against the last remnants of the West Civ programs—e.g., Stanford students failing to reinstitute a West Civ requirement, persistent student protests at Reed.

In response, the most prominent defenders of liberalism in academia have reasserted the liberal principles undergirding the research university.

2014: the "Chicago principles" provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/…

2015: @HdxAcademy is founded heterodoxacademy.org

2017: the Princeton/Yale/Harvard "Think for Yourself" statement

jmp.princeton.edu/announcements/…

These are the arguments of non-radicals within the research university, who wish to preserve what is the best in liberal democracy and in the modern university. But I repeat myself—the most radical theories of liberal education are practiced at colleges, not research universities

Some such defenders—not all—argue for reading "the Western tradition" in the modern research university on modern, liberal grounds. Such defenders, focused on education as acculturation, fail to explain why we should take seriously the claims of Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas.

More radical defenders—within the research university, and at genuine colleges of liberal education—give due to education as philosophy and education as soul-formation. They accordingly offer better accounts for taking seriously the claims and writings of premodern thinkers.

I could go on, but evening falls and dinner calls. Feel free to DM me; this is basically a class I've taught before and will teach again.