On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books by karen swallow prior brazos, 272 pages, $19.99 In On Reading Well, Liberty University English professor Karen Swallow Prior sets forth a thoughtful, nuanced vision of the relationship between morality and literature. This vision . . . . Continue Reading »
The village idiot of the shtetl of Frampol was offered the job of waiting at the village gates to greet the arrival of the Messiah. “The pay isn’t great,” he was told, “but the work is steady.” The same might be said about the conditions of the bookish life: low pay but steady . . . . Continue Reading »
Featuring Hostos Community College professors Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks on teaching the great books to a diverse student body in the Bronx. Continue Reading »
Monterey Peninsula College is a two-year school in California. Students in the Great Books Program there don’t want to live in a disenchanted world. They told me so last month, when I spent a day interviewing them and their teachers. Some followed up on email. Nobody mentioned . . . . Continue Reading »
Reading Great Books in the language of left-wing pedagogy only subordinates them to progressive goals.
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Reading classics is humbling. Myopia becomes impossible. Millennia of human history unfold with the pages of books—and with an authenticity that no textbook or documentary can mimic. Continue Reading »
Last night, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute hosted a banquet at the University Club in New York City, with Peter Thiel as the guest speaker. Thiel is one of the titans of the Digital Age, famous as the founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook. Less known are his fight against multiculturalism in higher education (he was at Stanford during the infamous days of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go!”), love of Great Books, and faith in God. Continue Reading »
When you talk to humanities professors, especially those at elite institutions, it doesn’t take long for the complaints to begin. They say that the administration doesn’t support them, choosing to invest in the sciences and business school, not language, literature, and culture. They witness the number of majors plummet—English used to collect nearly 8 percent of majors; now it’s close to 3 percent—and they feel unappreciated. (At my own institution, the number of majors has dropped by more than 50 percent since I arrived in 1989.) The overall drift toward the “corporate university” reflects values they abhor, and many of them would like to move, but the job market is terrible. Continue Reading »
I just got back from giving a lecture at a small liberal-arts college. The tenured professors were complaining. (That, after all, is allegedly what tenure gives professors the unlimited right to do). Their main complaint: Students are no longer doing the reading for “core texts” or . . . . Continue Reading »
On one hand, boomer-age cultured (i.e., liberally-educated) conservatives who don’t know contemporary pop culture and are too lazy about learning anything about it; on the other, young liberals who know it but are unashamedly un-cultured (i.e., rejecting the canonical distinctions that genuine . . . . Continue Reading »
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