Does the American University Deserve to Survive?
With corporate America, academia, and the cultural institutions of this country now captured by the political left, how does conservativism, libertarianism, and classical liberalism forge ahead? How…
A Proper Core Curriculum is Political and Ought Not Be “Politicized”
The idea for this essay came from a question posed during a meeting of the National Association of Scholars, where several of the presentations had decried recent…
Why the Humanities Matter Today
Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier's…
The Relevance of Political Philosophy and Political Science
Unlike other disciplines in the humanities, American political science since the 1950s has been concerned with establishing a scientific identity, drawing from the philosophy of logical positivism…
The Third Era of Education
This chapter proposes an alternative to contemporary liberal education, by specifying a form of liberal arts education that is fit for the 21st century. We begin with…
Why the Humanities Matter
The decline of the humanities in American higher education – literature, history, philosophy, classical studies, linguistics, and foreign languages – is most recently evident in the drop…
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education. Lee Trepanier, ed. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. This book promises to tell the reader why the…
Crisis in Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy: A Canadian Perspective
Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges. David W. Livingstone, ed.. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. There is…
Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges
Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges. David W. Livingstone, ed.. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Every few…
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…
Labor, Leisure, & Liberal Education
In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should like to proceed in the following order: first, to…
Does Classical Education Promote Diversity?
Though classical learning is gaining steam again in many parts of the United States, one common argument often made against it is that the promotion of Western…
Classical Education and Friendship
It was a Spring night, and I was in the Soccer-Mom Honda Odyssey, picking up a group of eighth graders, all of them classmates with my son…
Josef Pieper, Totalizing School, and Embodied Liberal Education
I am—genuinely—one of the luckiest people in the whole coronavirus pandemic. With my steady if unspectacular income protected by my tenured position at the University of Dallas,…
Let’s Save Liberal Education by Rethinking It
The ascendency of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subject matter in American higher education has largely displaced the previous model, liberal education. But this displacement raises…