LIBERAL EDUCATION, GENERAL EDUCATION, AND THE CORE CURRICULUM

The United States is unusual, if not unique, in its emphasis upon "liberal education" in higher education. In other countries, such as Great Britain, Canada, France, and Germany, university students are almost exclusively specialists, focusing on professional, technical, and disciplinary training. The assumption is, I suppose, that students get such liberal learning as is required, both to prepare for subsequent specialization and to live as human beings and citizens, as a part of their secondary education. While this certainly implies the superior rigor of these secondary school systems (products of the German Gymnasium and the British public school are indeed on the whole well-educated), there is nevertheless something to be said for the American approach. Genuine appreciation of the great books and themes of a liberal education—as opposed to mere acquaintance with and rote knowledge of them—requires an intellectual and moral maturity that most teenagers do not possess. While young people may be able to master and even excel in science, mathematics, and logic, they lack the emotional maturity and experience to understand history, literature, and moral and political philosophy.[1] Of course, it is impossible to draw up hard and fast rules in these matters, but, generally speaking, intelligent college-age students are more likely to begin to be able to make sense of works like Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Henry V than are their younger peers.

Thus we in the United States have a unique challenge and opportunity, for we confront students who are often woefully ill-educated, but who are nevertheless more ready and able than they were a few years earlier genuinely to grapple with the important works and issues that comprise a liberal education. Whether we can succeed in overcoming this challenge and taking advantage of this opportunity is another question. Another advantage we have as we confront these circumstances is that curricular matters are not dictated from on high, by, say, a ministry of education, but are often matters for individual college and university faculties to determine.[2] Some efforts at liberal education may be abysmally bad; others may be quite good. While I know enough about faculties to know that the good will not always defeat the bad, that the marketplace of academic ideas is an imperfect winnowing mechanism, American students will be able to find places where they can get a good liberal education.

At this point it is important to define and distinguish some terms: "liberal education," "general education," and "core curriculum." Liberal education is the education befitting a free human being, one capable of governing him- or herself and of contributing to common efforts at self-government.[3] While liberal education might because of its connection with self-government seem to be subservient to the "regime" and hence to be a form of civic education, it is in fact in some tension with political life. To the extent that political action depends upon "self-evident truths," to the extent that every political order is what Socrates would call a "cave," genuine freedom and self-government may not easily be joined with them. After all, a liberally educated person should be as free as possible from illusions and delusions, including those regarded by his or her fellow citizens as self-evident and foundational. He or she should indeed, as the bumper sticker says, "question authority," albeit in a thoughtful and responsible way. He or she will ask questions and may draw conclusions that are profoundly unsettling, not to say politically incorrect by almost any standard.

As a result of this tension, liberal education is perhaps best understood not merely as a means to some external political end, but rather as an end in itself. In other words, education as liberation for the sake of genuine self-government (not for the sake of contributing to the perhaps illusory "common good" of a particular state) might actually imply a curriculum that is in large part independent of the community in which the college is located and also of the professional or vocational ends students might have. Rather than being bound up with contemporary concerns, however compelling or respectable, such a curriculum would by and large examine "timeless" questions and answers.[4]

While it is often confused with liberal education, "general education" is in fact something different. Although some general education curricula might have liberal goals or at least be influenced by liberal ends, it is equally if not more likely that general education requirements would be designed to serve the needs of professional schools and academic departments, not to mention the political, economic, or cultural needs of the sponsoring state, religious denomination, or ethnic group. Thus, for example, one might require composition and calculus simply because they prepare students for advanced work in a large number of disciplines. Or one might wish students to sample a wide variety of fields before they choose a major. In short, unlike liberal education strictly speaking, general education may well serve a variety of external and contingent masters. It lacks its own ordering principle or architectonic. To say that one is committed to providing students with a general education is not to say anything specific. One must still answer the question of what ends the general education is supposed to serve.

"Core curriculum" is best understood as a particular approach to general education. Rather than offer students a menu of courses designated as "general education" from among which to choose, a core curriculum prescribes a set of courses and, in the best instance, requires them to be taken in a particular sequence or at a particular time in the student’s undergraduate career. A core can comprise the whole of a student’s general education or it can be joined with cafeteria-style choices. By designating certain courses as the "core" of a student’s education, the college or university indicates the central or foundational character of these courses for the education it provides.[5] While it is possible to regard these courses as merely preliminary to the real business of education—in these cases usually acquiring a professional or disciplinary credential[6]—it is also possible to speak of the core as that which introduces students to what it means to be an educated or liberally educated person.

A core curriculum has another function that is related to the first. When students have a common educational experience—taking the same courses, reading (more or less) the same books, addressing the same themes, and asking the same questions at the same point in their educational careers—they are more likely to form an academic community. Rather than building community around the various aspects of residential collegiate life—fraternities, sororities, intercollegiate sports, or ethnic and "lifestyle" identification—the core curriculum can help build community around what is supposedly central to the institution’s mission.[7] It can quite literally contribute to the creation of a campus "culture" that is a microcosmic version of a national culture. (Indeed, were there an effective American national "high culture"—as opposed to the commercial homogeneity imposed by the omnipresence of television and national chains dominating the markets for everything from food and clothing to books and records—all colleges and universities would have essentially the same core curriculum. What we have instead, as I suggested above, are a number of quite distinctive efforts that vary widely in content and quality.)

Were a college’s core curriculum to be informed, not by the idiosyncratic tastes and agendas of particular faculty members, nor by the self-serving power plays of particular departments and faculty factions, but by a genuine understanding of what it means to be liberally educated, students would have an extraordinary opportunity. They would be in a position to gain a taste and the tools for a liberal education. It goes without saying that no collection of courses, however well-conceived and well-taught, could by itself achieve the goal that has traditionally been connected with liberal education. Nevertheless, young people could be inspired and prepared to pursue this goal for the rest of their lives, regardless of how they chose or were compelled to make their livings.

POLITICAL SCIENCE AND THE CORE CURRICULUM

The question then is, what role does political science have to play in constructing a core curriculum for the sake of liberal education? Let me begin to answer this question by offering a general warning to all the disciplines. It is tempting to conceive of one’s potential contribution solely in disciplinary terms, as if the disciplines themselves, taken in some combination, comprise a liberal education. On this understanding, a core curriculum would largely consist, as it did at Oglethorpe University in the 1980s, in a collection of introductory courses. Students who were introduced to the subjects taught and studied in the contemporary academy would by definition be liberally educated. But this approach begs a couple of important questions. It assumes, in the first place, an intimate connection among the academic disciplines, as they have evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the classic goals of liberal education. One consideration alone ought to be sufficient to cast doubt on this connection. The so-called progress of the social sciences has depended in large part on assertions of value neutrality or professional agnosticism concerning questions of just and unjust, good and evil, right and wrong. This is not to say that social scientists lack moral commitments, just that their research could not help them form or criticize these commitments. "Scientific" reason is merely, so it is said, instrumental, in the service of ends conceived or arrived at by other means.[8] Education in the social sciences could then not help students investigate the fundamental questions at the heart of a liberal education: How should I live my life? What sort of community or political order is best at facilitating or cultivating the good life? Of course, one could respond to this line of criticism by suggesting either that the social sciences thus understood have no place in a liberal education, or that they have a place that is subordinate to moral philosophy and literature, where these questions are addressed and answered. It would, however, be naïve to assume that these disciplines regard as their principal concern the cultivation of liberal learning or answers to the big questions. "Progress" in moral philosophy has by and large been purchased at the expense of inquiry into the fundamental questions; most contemporary moral philosophers understand themselves as working within the constraints of a particular tradition or community and do not regard it as fruitful or even possible to ask whether that tradition or community can be justified in universal terms.[9] And most literary scholars do not regard their authors (or the texts they produce) as moral teachers; such an approach would be much too simple-minded for a sophisticated discipline. Thus none of the contemporary academic disciplines in its current form is simply "liberal" in the classical sense.

The other question generally left unanswered by this approach to core curriculum is what the governing principle of the relationship among the various arts and sciences is. On what ground are some disciplines included and others excluded? Is there any particular order in which the subjects ought to be studied? The typical answer—not without some merit—is that offered ingenuously by many of my most eager students. If the goal of liberal education is, as they say, to be "well-rounded," then students should be exposed to a variety of subjects. More is presumably better than fewer, but there is some upper limit. (After all, their time and their parents’ money are not unlimited.) And if breadth (or well-roundedness) is the goal, then the order in which the subjects are studied does not really matter.

Those who offer such an answer have, however, not stopped to inquire why "well-roundedness" might be good. There are two related answers to this question, both of which suggest that the "laissez faire" implications outlined above are unfounded. The first answer is that, traditionally, liberal education and specialization were understood to be antithetical. A liberally educated person was supposed to know enough about the various arts to be able to make use of them for characteristically liberal ends (i.e., to lead a good life), but not enough to have his or her mind and soul stultified and limited by such study. While this answer would seem to permit the inclusion of some introductory courses in the liberal education curriculum, the larger portion of any core would still have to be devoted to questions connected with the nature and use of human freedom. Without such preparation, students would not know how to evaluate any given discipline. This consideration leads directly to the second answer: what is most important for a liberal education is understanding how the various parts of the whole fit together, how the various arts and sciences can contribute to leading a meaningful human life. Once again, without sustained consideration of the primary questions, one is in no position to understand the proper place of a particular discipline. In other words, "well-roundedness," properly understood, implies a coherent set of courses that prepare students to appreciate properly and hence make appropriate use of the arts and sciences that comprise the bulk of contemporary liberal education.

Where, then, does political science fit into a core curriculum thus understood? Aristotle offers the traditional—and, on some level for political scientists, both comforting and disconcerting—answer in his Nicomachean Ethics: political science is the architectonic art that determines how, when, why, and to what extent the various arts are to be studied.[10] Of course, he makes this claim not for political science as it is now practiced in academic departments and printed on the pages of major scholarly journals, but rather for an inquiry that has as its end knowledge, so far as it is possible, of the human good. It is in the light of this knowledge—or at least in the light of considerations dictated by its pursuit—that we are to approach all the particular disciplines. It simply makes sense to evaluate everything in terms of its potential contribution to our good.

Of course, this claim is immediately vulnerable to a time-honored and currently very popular objection that there is no such thing as a summum bonum—a good that is good for all human beings—and that goodness is relative to the needs, desires, and tastes of particular individuals and communities. Needless to say, I do not propose to resolve this dispute in the course of this very modest paper. Fortunately, for my purposes, I do not have to do so. I shall only make a couple of observations, beginning with the most obvious. It is possible to be a thoughtless and shallow relativist or a profound and subtle one. The former assumes his or her position is correct and proceeds to pursue his or her own idiosyncratic ends. The latter engages seriously with powerful alternative views.

Shallow relativism has two very different sorts of curricular implications. On the one hand, it could lead to the abandonment of almost all requirements in the name of individual self-realization or fulfillment. On the other, it could justify the willful imposition of very rigid requirements in the name of the self-determination or cultural self-preservation of any community. Both tendencies are powerfully present in the contemporary academy, manifest in the attacks on "old canons" and in the insistence upon culturally affirmative ethnic studies.

Thoughtful relativism, on the other hand, can actually make curricular common cause with non-dogmatic pursuit of knowledge of the human good. Someone who pursues this knowledge, who loves wisdom, so to speak, does not at the moment have it and must consequently seek for it wherever it might be found.[12] A liberal education animated by the desire to know the human good would require engagement with a variety of powerful alternatives, each of which offers reasons for its own position and arguments against others. Someone seeking a genuine liberal education would take seriously the possibility that there is no summum bonum and investigate the arguments for and against that position just as he or she investigates arguments for and against various accounts of the good. A core curriculum animated by this spirit would offer students the opportunity to examine a wide range of alternatives, from Aristotelian and Thomistic teleology to Nietzschean nihilism, not to mention a variety of non-Western religious and cultural traditions.[13]

Now, one could argue that such a core curriculum hardly resembles what most contemporary political scientists teach, study, or know. Indeed, that is exactly the point. Such a core could not be the exclusive preserve of any contemporary discipline. People from almost any academic background can contribute to the development of and teach in such a core. What it requires of us is the capacity to expand beyond the relatively narrow bounds of our scholarly and professional training and to "be naïve again" about the kinds of questions our students have, at least if they have not yet been fully formed and committed to an ideology and way of life.[14] We must take care to look at the texts, themes, and questions of such a curriculum, not from our disciplinary perspectives, but as human beings interested in addressing fundamental human questions.

I have in the past described these courses as "pre-disciplinary," which is to be understood quite distinctively from their more familiar interdisciplinary counterparts. An interdisciplinary course purports to examine a subject from a variety of well-developed and well-defined disciplinary points of view. In their study, students generally take the validity of the disciplinary perspectives for granted, considering how they all can contribute to the appreciation of a particular question or phenomenon.[15] A "pre-disciplinary" course, on the other hand, addresses questions that antedate the development and division of human knowledge into disciplines. Thus, for example, a course on "Human Nature and the Social Order," taught at Oglethorpe University by political scientists, sociologists, and economists, has as assigned readings books by people who do not understand themselves simply or primarily as political scientists, sociologists, or economists. The questions addressed by, say, Aristotle, John Locke, and Adam Smith lie at the roots of all of these disciplines, not to mention others. When we examine these authors and their questions, we need not do so as representatives of our disciplines. When we teach them, we are not necessarily introducing students to our disciplines.

A political scientist who undertakes to study these and other works in preparation for teaching in such a course can, if he or she works hard to shed disciplinary blinders, learn about the moral and philosophical issues that underlie his or her own discipline, thereby gaining or regaining a sense of the relationship between the profession and human life. He or she might even come to the conclusion that there are significant problems with the direction in which the discipline has evolved. In other words, there is a way in which teaching in a liberal core curriculum is in itself a liberal education.

In short, political scientists potentially have a great deal to gain—both personally and professionally—from participating in the development of non- or pre-disciplinary core curricula. In the first place, there is the opportunity to visit or revisit some of the fundamental questions of human existence, questions that we adults tend to regard as settled, albeit not necessarily very satisfactorily. Second, we can gain or regain a sense of vocation about the "mission" of our discipline, of which we often lose sight as we engage in the immediately practical tasks of teaching and research.[16] We can remind ourselves of why "our questions" are (or are not) important, not just to the incestuously collegial world of grant reviewers and journal editors[17], but to the ordinary human beings who ought to be our primary constituents. We can thus become more thoughtful critics or practitioners of our discipline. Third, by encountering our students, not on the level of our superior disciplinary expertise, but on the ground of what we have in common with them as inquirers into the most important questions of human life, we can be more effective teachers. We are less likely to filter our observations through the screen of advanced scholarship. We are less likely to make use of scholarly jargon. In general, we are less likely to bring to these authors and texts the questions and categories that we in our discipline have developed and more likely to learn from them what they actually want to teach. We are, in other words, more likely to try to understand these writers as they understood themselves. As a result, we are more likely to respond to them in the same way as our students do. Rather than preaching from on high, we can act more like the proverbial "co-learners," sharing in our students’ enthusiasm and frustration.

Finally, there is something to be gained by separating general or liberal education from the introductory courses in a discipline. A course that is made to serve two (or more) masters usually serves neither particularly well. An introductory course that prepares students for advanced work in a field should take into account the subjects and scholarship that are important for the discipline, regardless of whether these matters are (or can easily be made) relevant to the purposes of liberal education. While it is probably possible to discuss PACs, selective benefits, free riders, constituent service, the advantages of incumbency, and the House and Senate leadership and committee structure in such a way as to contribute to deliberations about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy, there may not be enough hours in the day (or the semester) to do so well. If the material is covered so as to satisfy the needs of contemporary political science, the related normative questions will be given short shrift. If the normative questions are highlighted, the disciplinary issues do not receive the treatment they deserve.[18] Where, however, the instructor in the introductory course can assume that students will elsewhere be exposed to the larger theoretical issues, he or she need only cast a glance at them while focusing on matters connected with the contemporary regime. In addition, it is possible to presuppose that students will be familiar with the big issues and that it will be relatively easy to relate contemporary concerns to them.[19] Not only does the division of labor make for better core courses, but it enhances what can be done in the introductory and upper level courses in the discipline.

GETTING THERE FROM HERE: HOW TO CREATE A "PRE-DISCIPLINARY" CORE

What follows is an account of how the core curriculum at Oglethorpe University—a small liberal arts college located on the northside of Atlanta—evolved from a more or less random collection of introductory courses to a carefully designed and sequenced program of "pre-disciplinary" courses. While some of the issues are probably unique to this institution, I expect that there are lessons we can all draw from this experience.

In the late 1940s, Oglethorpe University had a core curriculum distinctive enough to be written up in the New York Times. Forty years later, the faculty and administration had—for better or worse—by and large lost sight of the founding vision. The university still had a core curriculum, which distinguished it from its more latitudinarian counterparts that had relaxed or eliminated requirements, but the courses of which it was comprised could be found in the catalogues of virtually every college or university: composition, Western civilization, introductions to economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and political science, music and art appreciation, physical and biological science, "college algebra," and menus including sophomore-level courses in literature, history, and political science. In many cases, the courses were fairly standard surveys borrowed and adapted from the institutions at which the faculty members had received their doctorates. This arrangement satisfied some practical necessities. Because the teaching load was heavy (four courses per semester), this substantial set of requirements generated a high enough level of demand for certain courses to guarantee almost every faculty member one double preparation every semester.[20] In addition, the large number of service courses helped to justify faculty lines.[21] Thus faculty—especially those who had been there a long time—had a vested interest in the perpetuation of an intellectually and pedagogically indefensible set of requirements.[22]

What happened next was a fortuitous meeting of the minds between faculty in political science and sociology. The three professors involved were all recently hired[23] and all had professional or avocational interests in social and political theory. We proposed a course, called "Human Nature, Politics, and Society," which we presented as a "Great Books" background to the contemporary social sciences. Our authors ranged from Aristotle to Max Weber. Because it gored no one’s oxen but our own and because we were careful to protect the interests of the senior sociologist, who was nearing retirement, the faculty accepted our proposal, albeit not without spirited discussion. "Human Nature" was bracketed with the introductory courses in political science and sociology as part of the core.[24]

After a change in administration, the University sought and received a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to revise its core curriculum. The evident success of the non-disciplinary approach of "Human Nature"[25] made it something of a template for other revisions, especially in history, psychology, and philosophy. The most important changes were the abandonment of the notions that a core course had to be the introduction to a discipline and that a survey course ought to be the norm, and the commitment to make as much use as feasible of "primary texts" in core courses. The history faculty moved away from the "Plato to NATO" approach to Western civilization, while the psychologists and philosophy faculty decided that focusing on a few authors and topics was appropriate, especially since the point of their courses was not to pave the way for advanced work in their disciplines, but rather to expose students to a particular "way of knowing."[26] "Human Nature, Politics, and Society" evolved into a two semester sequence called "Human Nature and the Social Order,"[27] now taught by political scientists, sociologists, and a theoretically inclined economist.[28] It was now to be required of all students and replaced the introductions to political science, sociology, and (most controversially) economics in the core curriculum.

What we did not fully realize at the time was that curriculum reform of this magnitude is not accomplished in one step. The initial post-NEH core has proven to be merely transitional. The most recent version, adopted in 1996 with the overwhelming support of the faculty, moves even further in the direction of the "Human Nature and the Social Order" template.[29] It was the product of a strategic planning process that resulted in a decision to emphasize the university’s distinctive and long-standing heritage of core curriculum as one way of carving out a niche for the institution. The curriculum revision was further driven by the need to complete a "strategic self-study" for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ re-accreditation process.

How did we get to a point where a course designed largely by a political theorist and some like- minded colleagues has become a template for the revision of an entire core curriculum, which, in turn, is central to an institution’s self-understanding? There are, I think, a number of factors, whose presence at Oglethorpe University has been fortuitous, but which are not so unique as to be impossible to replicate elsewhere. The first is the small size of the faculty (currently barely over fifty full-time members). We know one another, perhaps too well, and cannot easily retreat into departmental or disciplinary camps or fiefdoms. It is inevitable that, if someone else has scholarly interests bordering one’s own, he or she has a degree in some other discipline.[30] We eat lunch together, have offices next door to one another, and co-teach honors seminars, which must be multi-disciplinary. The small size of the faculty also dictates our approach to hiring. We cannot afford to hire people who are unwilling to teach outside their narrow scholarly specializations. Indeed, in our circumstances it often makes sense to "draft athletes, not position players." We are most successful both in hiring and retention when we recruit colleagues who are intelligent and broadly educated, acquainted with and committed to life in a small liberal arts college, and who, for some reason or another, find that their own scholarly work is unfashionable enough to make them unattractive candidates for recruitment and tenure at research institutions.[31] We have, in other words, tried to hire well, if somewhat unconventionally, which also means taking the needs of the core curriculum into account as we recruit for positions.[32] (And it goes without saying that in the past twelve years, most of those who had a vested interest in the old core have retired. Strategic retirements have contributed mightily to the relative ease of change.)

Another factor in the success of core reform has been vigorous leadership. The Core Director, a Professor of English, has put her enormous energy and personal prestige behind many of the changes.[33] She has also succeeded in winning a number of grants so as to be able to offer incentives to those interested in core reform.[34] In the case of "Human Nature" in particular, it is also true that many of the faculty involved in that course had the respect of their colleagues, both for the overall quality and rigor of their teaching and for their productivity as scholars. The innovators had a track record that engendered acquiescence and may even have inspired confidence.

Finally, there has been a sense, shared fairly widely by the faculty and administration, that the core curriculum is important and that it contributes substantially to the identity of the institution. People take these curricular matters seriously, not just because a substantial portion of their teaching load is bound up with it[35], but because they understand that the character of the core has a decisive effect on the character and reputation of the institution. They care about their students and see how they respond, even to courses they themselves do not teach.

On the basis of my experience, I believe that a core curriculum devoted to the classical ends of a liberal education need not be a rare and endangered species in American higher education. I do not think it likely that many research universities or large state universities and colleges—where there are well-established departments largely isolated from one another both intellectually and geographically—will adopt one, but it is not out of the question that many smaller colleges will.[36] Political scientists at those institutions—especially political scientists with a taste for theory—can play a leading role in making the fundamental human questions that are central to what Aristotle called politike an important part of the education their students receive. Of course, they need to look outside their own department for allies, teach compellingly, secure at least the acquiescence of their administration, and identify external resources to support their efforts.[37]

Notes

[1] Consider Aristotle’s remarks on the appropriate audience for his lectures on ethics and politics in Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b29-1095a11, and also the implication of Plato’s trilogy (Theatetus, Sophist, and Statesman).

[2] I am, of course, aware that state legislatures and boards of trustees and regents have roles to play in curricular matters. There is still much more room for diversity and idiosyncrasy in American higher education than anywhere else in the world.

[3] Much has been written on liberal education. I shall cite only a few pieces that have most influenced my own thinking: Allan Bloom’s essays "The Crisis of Liberal Education," and "The Democratization of the University," most readily accessible in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 348-387, as well as his The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), especially pp. 243-382; the final two chapters of Thomas L. Pangle’s Ennobling Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 163-218; Leo Strauss’ "What is Liberal Education?" and "Liberal Education and Responsibility", reprinted in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 3-25; and Christopher Bruell’s "Liberal Education and Education for Citizenship," in Stephen M. Krason, ed., The Recovery of American Education (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991), pp. 75-86.

[4] The "Great Books" curriculum of St. John’s College comes to mind here.

[5] It goes without saying that a core curriculum need not have as its aim facilitating a strictly and timelessly liberal education. One could also have a cultural, multicultural, or civic core, to name just a few possibilities.

[6] My advisees unfortunately often speak about getting core courses "out of the way," and some of my colleagues even more unfortunately use the same language.

[7] As an undergraduate, I attended James Madison College, a residential college that is part of Michigan State University. Its curriculum, consisting largely of majors devoted to political philosophy and public affairs, served to unite the student body. We had many common formative experiences, the first of which was a course—required of all freshmen—called "Introduction to the Study of Policy Problems." The "Policy" midterms and finals were famously formidable. Upper-class students worked hard to fill the freshmen with terror about them, and the "survivors" gained an experience that they too could retail to their successors.

A brief account of the more formal research into this subject—under the rubric of "learning communities"—can be found in Rafael Heller, "Learning Communities: What Does the Research Show?" Peer Review I (Fall, 1998), 11.

[8] I am well aware that "post-behavioral" social science has to some extent abandoned the model of disinterested inquiry originally borrowed from the natural and physical sciences. But it remains the case that even frankly "committed" social scientists generally regard moral questions as subject to a fundamentally different sort of inquiry than that in which they engage. Moral questions are to be resolved by practical reason (as opposed to theoretical reason), by sentiment, feeling, or compassion, or by an act of willful commitment.

[9] I could cite many examples but will restrict myself to one: John Rawls’s retreat from the universalism of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) to the particularism of Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). The former work is "Kantian" in that it is apparently addressed to all rational beings; the latter is explicitly addressed only to citizens of a liberal democratic order who take certain things more or less for granted. In this respect, it more closely resembles ideology than philosophy as it was once understood.

[10] Cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a27 - 1094b12.

[11] The locus classicus of this objection is Hobbes’s Leviathan.

[12] Thus Socrates in the Republic very carefully defines philosophy as "that ascent to what is…" (521c; Bloom translation). Philosophers live in the cave and move toward the light; they do not, strictly speaking, live outside the cave.

[13] Note that the justification for studying non-Western religious and cultural traditions is neither to represent "diversity" nor to affirm the heritages of one’s students, but to examine powerful alternatives to the ways of thought that look to Jerusalem and Athens for their origins.

[14] The formulation "being naïve again" comes from Werner Dannhauser’s reminiscence of Leo Strauss’ teaching, published about 25 years ago in The American Scholar.

[15] Interdisciplinary courses might be appropriate capstones for a liberal education, once students had acquired some of the fundamental "tools" for evaluating the disciplines.

[16] On this general issue, cf. James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 1990).

[17] I once asked a prominent student of Congressional behavior whether he believed that his study of that subject had any influence on the actors. He responded, "Don’t be silly" (or words to that effect). If he is correct in believing that the study of Congressional behavior has no effect on Congressional behavior, then there is some question as to why we should devote so much of our professional energy to it. If this knowledge cannot be used in order to "relieve man’s estate"—to inform those who wish to influence or improve Congressional behavior—then it must be pursued "merely" to satisfy the curiosity of this particular brand of "anthropologist." It is then either entertaining in the way that television nature programs are, or an end in itself, the way reading Plato’s Republic might be. I suspect, however, that the prominence of this sort of study in our field has more to do with its purported public utility, then with its superior entertainment or intellectual value.

[18] When I was in this position—teaching an introductory American government course as part of a core curriculum—I attempted to serve both masters, but found that in order to discuss adequately the moral and political issues connected with the design of the American constitution and the character of American political culture, I had to relegate the standard aspects of the introductory course (those covered by the typical textbook) to roughly one-third of the course. The choice often made by my more empirically-minded counterparts—to assign and discuss only Federalists 10 and 51—is even less satisfactory.

[19] Oglethorpe University’s core curriculum has created a kind of lingua franca on campus, so that references to, say, Locke’s Second Treatise are immediately intelligible to most students and evoke a more or less predictable response. Needless to say, this is very advantageous for teachers of American government. At institutions without a core curriculum, one cannot presuppose that even very bright students have any sort of knowledge in common.

[20] For my first three years at Oglethorpe (1985-88), I taught four sections of "Intro" each year.

[21] The need to teach two semesters each of composition and literature made the English department the university’s largest (five full-time members). The two semester Western civilization requirement justified having three lines in history. The introductory political science course and various upper level courses that satisfied distribution requirements meant that enrollments in political science would be relatively healthy from semester to semester.

[22] I hasten to note that many of the courses—in their own terms and given the constraints of the constituencies they had to serve—were perfectly respectable. But there was no overarching justification for the collection of courses students were required to take. Everything was arranged essentially as a compromise between the needs of the various departments and the financial constraints imposed by the small size of the student body and the endowment.

[23] Brad Stone, Professor of Sociology, was hired in 1982; John Orme, Professor of Politics, was hired in 1983; and I was hired in 1985. I should note that the University’s President had received his doctorate from the University of Chicago and regarded himself as a man of ideas and that the Dean had as an undergraduate at Cornell taken a course or two from Allan Bloom. They were thus not unsympathetic to faculty with theoretical or philosophical interests.

[24] Note that this reduced by one the number of courses students were required to take.

[25] The distribution in student evaluations tended to be bipolar. Some students—usually the brightest ones—loved it; others loathed it. (Needless to say, the fact that it was not a college-wide requirement kept some of the potential malcontents out of our classes. In the early going, we got better overall reviews than those of our colleagues who had totally captive audiences.) Everyone talked about it. Our students cited the authors in other classes and began to make connections between this part of the core and the disciplines. It was, in other words, accomplishing what we hoped it would.

[26] The core itself was organized around a series of questions that courses were supposed to address. Courses were to be included if they addressed at least some of the core questions and if they represented a distinctive "way of knowing."

[27] The canonical authors in the first semester are Aristotle and John Locke; in the second semester they are Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. Individual instructors choose authors and texts to supplement these. Popular supplements are Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

[28] In the meantime, the senior sociologist had retired and been replaced by another sociological theorist, trained at Penn by Philip Rieff. The economist, a senior member of the faculty, had studied political theory under John Hallowell at Duke, and had a special interest in the Hume-Hayek-Oakeshott nexus.

[29] There are three year-long sequences focusing on broad themes and utilizing (by and large) primary texts. Freshmen take a sequence devoted to investigating the development of the notion of the individual; sophomores take "Human Nature"; and juniors take a sequence devoted to an examination of the institutional and historical consequences of the thinking examined in the first two years.

[30] My closest colleagues, in terms of intellectual and scholarly interests, are in sociology and philosophy. Indeed, the sociologists and political scientists have recently joined with colleagues at Berry College to co-sponsor an annual conference. We also have, for example, an historian and an English professor who have organized panels around their common interests in early modern Europe.

[31] Thus among five political scientists and sociologists, there are three theorists and two others who have substantial training in theory. This percentage does not at all reflect the usual practice in the disciplines, as most departments tend to devalue theorists in favor of those whose training and research interests are more empirical.

We also are more generous and individualized in our approach to assessing our colleagues’ scholarly activity. There is no rigid timetable for producing a book and a certain number of articles so as to be tenurable. And we are willing actually to read one another’s work, rather than rely on the judgments of referees at prominent journals.

[32] At some institutions, core directors do not encourage untenured faculty to teach in the core. They believe that until the institution has made a "permanent" commitment to the faculty member, he or she should be working toward success and marketability in the profession, which generally means turning the dissertation into a book and writing articles in refereed journals, not cultivating a non-disciplinary garden. There are, it seems to me, a number of objections to this approach. First, it deprives the core curriculum of the new ideas and insights junior faculty bring. Second, it makes it much more difficult to build community within the faculty around the core. If anything, it exacerbates the fairly common "generation gap" between junior and senior faculty. Third, it sends a clear message to junior faculty about the priority of disciplinary work. In their formative professional years, they are told to adapt to the demands of the professional academic marketplace, which does not place a premium on institutional loyalty, good teaching, or non-disciplinary preparation. In sum, this approach works against the requirements of liberal education.

[33] With respect to curricular matters, the higher administration was relatively passive. The Provost and President made some institutional resources available, but the active leadership came from within the faculty.

[34] Most recently, a substantial challenge grant from the NEH.

[35] As of 1998, the teaching load is 3/3, with a double core (or other) preparation in one of the semesters. Faculty in education and business do not teach core courses.

[36] The likely alternative at larger institutions is the "Great Books" certificate program, such as was recently established at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Inasmuch as this provides an option for some students without unduly threatening the vested interests of other faculty members, it can probably be successfully replicated elsewhere. (I must add that its non-threatening character did not forestall politically inspired opposition at UWM.)