Excellent Maroon article comparing UChicago’s general education curriculum to St. John’s Great Books. Explains the history and development of the Core Curriculum and how it evolved to what it is today. Those interested should read through John Boyer’s “The University of Chicago: A History,” but Boyer has some good quotes here as well.
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That piece captures a fair chunk of the history of the College, with special reference to the Great Books philosophy that inspired Robert maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler but found its purest expression at St. John’s College. It’s well worth reading. Prospective students will be interested in the big idea underpinning a Chicago education, explaining why it is just a bit different from any other. Mr. Shin, the student author, did some digging for this piece and wrote it up very competently.
Three schools figure in this quest for a great-books based education: Columbia, where Adler and McKeon got the idea from John Erskine; Chicago, where Hutchins, Adler and McKeon partially implemented the idea; and St. John’s, where refugees from Chicago fully implemented it. This philosophy was very much against the progressive and some said the democratic grain, as represented by the practical educational philosophy of, say, John Dewey. That critique of it is still made today. Yet this old idea of “the best that has been thought and said,” odd and out of step as it may be in the contemporary American landscape, continues to flourish in different ways at each of these schools. Perhaps there is a hunger, even if it is a minority one, to actually read, thiink about, and discuss the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and company.
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I like the last part of the article that emphasizes how a liberal education should be experimental and “never done right” as that Self prof. is quoted as saying. The UChicago Core isn’t perfect but it does attempt to provide a truly intellectual liberal education with a broad array of choices, considering that it’s a curriculum and not just a hodge-podge of unconnected coursework. As I’ve said before, the university itself was founded as an experiment has not been hesitant to continue that experiment throughout its history. IMO, it’s one reason why they were able to stay open in the Year of the Plague and not make a bunch of undergraduates stay home (unlike so many other top schools). They are used to upheaval and change. It’s unnerving to many who just wish the place would “settle down” but I seriously doubt that’s ever going to happen.
Another thing that sets the College apart from so many other places is that they seem to prefer pedadogy to politics. The large number of Civ sequences, for instance, resulted from genuine scholarship in those areas that began to deviate from the Western/European foundation somewhere around the mid 20th century. Islamic, Asian, African, South American and later topical subjects such as gender - as politically correct as they all sound now - were not the result of outside political pressure from the '80’s but rather a decision to welcome in the extensive and diverse Civ studies scholarship that had been developing from the '50’s. The student must choose one to study, but no one tradition was going to be privileged over another. Boyer, commenting on this in his book, doesn’t see a contradiction between that decision and one that understands the extensive and continued contributions that Western thought has brought to higher education and to the progress of scholarship in general. Rather, he agrees with Hannah Gray that the European tradition is “intensely self-critical and intensely self-conscious, characteristically interested in coming to know other cultures in part as a way to define its own, to question its own assumptions and enlarge its own experience.” (Boyer, John W. The University of Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).
I think it’s probably possible to expand the canon and not sacrifice rigor or give in to trendy goals that contradict the university’s efforts to provide a transformative liberal education. As pointed out in the article, the authors in the Western Canon basically have an ongoing conversation; there is little way to introduce non-Western authors into a course entitled “Classics of Political and Social Thought” because those authors and conversations have been established for quite awhile now. But some of the newer sequences seem to have globalized the canon a bit more and that might be quite appropriate given the subject matter there. Perhaps students don’t have as much of a shared tradition to discuss over coffee like they used to but the College is twice the size and a lot more diverse than it used to be, and my guess is that there are more sections of Classics now than there were 30 years ago. If the overall goals remain the same (critical reading, analytical writing) then expanding the canon this way can only enhance intellectual inquiry, not stifle it. Plato may be expected to share space with other, newer authors (western as well as non) but - unlike elsewhere - he hasn’t been cancelled.
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