I’m Awake, Are You?
One of the latest fads in the university is being “woke”: a recognition of one’s privilege and therefore the need to empathize with those groups who have…
One of the latest fads in the university is being “woke”: a recognition of one’s privilege and therefore the need to empathize with those groups who have…
In today’s world, when the topic of the defects of university teaching and curricula comes up, the most well-known alternative put forward is the “great books programs.” I…
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The…
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal…
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written…
So it is characteristic of us professors of political philosophy to neglect what is really going in the “hard” sciences. I remember, for example, being astonished that…
I What I offer in these pages is not an “introduction to the reading of Voegelin” à la Alexandre Kojève with Hegel. Nor am I undertaking a…
The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career. Jeffrey L. Buller. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. When one enters academia as a professor, what…
The Faculty Factor: Reassessing the American Academy in a Turbulent Era. Martin J. Finkelstein, Valerie Martin Conley, Jack H. Schuster. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016. …
After retiring early from my career as an independent consultant and returning to a career as an independent scholar, I have frequently reflected on my experience and…
Everything is Political Just as I began my college teaching career twenty-five years ago, the whole academy seemed to have accepted as axiomatic the assertion that “Everything…
By “liberal education” I refer to two competing things which have been in tension since the ancient world, both of which have traveled under the label “liberal…
Commenting in 1940 about the perspective that had given modern education its fundamentally secular character, the sociologist Florian Znankecki spoke of “the deeply stimulating conviction that man,…
To be a teacher of the humanities at a university means participating in a community dedicated to inquiring into the good for human beings. As members of…
“Reason is not a faculty, not a tool, nor can it be used. Anyhow there is no reason at all which we could have, but only a…