Lehrman American Studies Center

My colleague, Don Downs, recently wrote ROTC and the Future of Liberal Education for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which might be of interest to some of y'all.

I had many stimulating conversations during the two weeks at the Lehrman Center Summer Institute. In this post, I would like to expand on some thoughts related to a few conversations with John Mueller, Sophia Aguirre and a third colleague—a fellow participant whom I will not mention by name. Any especially bizarre ideas or errors are doubtless my own, while all praise should be directly to these three.

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How to evaluate a liberal-arts college's teaching excellence? As I see it, it must strike the right balance between philosophical questioning and the existentially open mindset this requires, and religious and metaphysical truth, which must constitute the institutionally embodied telos of the college, for truth is the telos of the mind, and truth about God is the telos of this telos, as it were.

The first criterion for evaluation is the rigor and sophistication with which the college trains the student in the liberal arts. How well does the particular college teach, and not just give the appearance of teaching, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and dialectic; history, mathematics, and philosophy? The second is the rightness of the end, purpose, or telos for which the liberal arts are taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the light of which the pedagogy is ordered.

Excellence or rightness in either of these criteria by itself does not make fo…

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While online courses pose a number of difficulties for teachers and students, the reality is that they are becoming increasingly popular among departments. I’ll be teaching online courses for the first time this fall, and I am particularly concerned about how I can best engage a group of students whose interaction will be completely virtual. I will be using the Desire to Learn (D2L) system through the University of South Dakota—a technology similar to Blackboard. I also have the option to use Elluminate, a system which allows for live classroom discussions as well as a forum for pre-recorded lectures (with power-points and other images). I have used discussion boards (through Blackboard) in conjunction with on-campus courses before and found them to be useful. But I am still looking for suggestions for how to best facilitate community, engagement, and free discussion in a strictly online course. Can anyone offer suggestions or lessons learned from personal experience?

What does the "rejection of a Promethean vision of the human being" imply for education? Here I offer a few first thoughts on how the technological mindset helps and hurts education, particularly economics.

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Towards the end of his second term as President, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from his granddaughter, who mentioned that she had been reading from the works of the Roman historian Tacitus. In his reply, Jefferson wrote: “Tacitus I consider the first writer in the world without a single exception. His book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.” Given that Jefferson was extraordinarily well-read, one cannot help but wonder what he found so compelling. I would suggest that in order to understand Jefferson’s unique claims for Tacitus we need to consider two questions from Jefferson’s perspective: What is the historian’s role in a democratic republic? and Does Tacitus fulfill that role?

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In the world of work, the real go-getters are the ones who want to get out of IBM and start a small business. Why do conservative academics still have a yen for joining the old ossifying universities, as opposed to striking out on their own?

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I noted in an earlier post that the Enlightenment justified itself in light of a narrative demonstrably false at many crucial points. In a number of disciplines, the Enlightenment reached its culmination in logical and scientific positivism as well as in the fact-value dichotomy. The instrumentalization of reason was also a foundational program of the Enlightenment. These foundational programs of the Enlightenment have died. In particular, the empericist and positivistic claim that we can only predicate truth of that which is empirically verifiable is not itself empirically verifiable. But it was the requirement of empirical verifiability that moved theology out of the realm of "science" and that grounded the prohibition on invoking claims of faith when doing political philosophy or when assessing the truth of conclusions reached by political theorists, philosophers, and theologians from ages past.

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Or, More Reflections on Liberal Learning.

Some recent posts and comments offer useful insights about the nature of liberal learning and the obstacles to genuine liberality in the classroom. Responding to the post "Heresy on the liberal arts?", one commentor is correct to remind us that teachers should challenge all students, and not just the "promising" ones, to take up the difficult but preeminently fulfilling pursuit of truth, and hope that each one will answer the challenge.

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I've just read Albert J. Nock's essay "On the Disadvantages of Being Educated.” Great satire. How much truth is there? …

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