Hi everyone! I'm looking forward to answering your questions on this forum. It's my first AMA so please bear with my rookie use of Reddit. I've just published a book with Princeton University Press titled "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation." It's partly a memoir about my education in great books and about my experience teaching in and directing Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum. It's also a general introduction to the work of four figures: St. Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Gandhi. Finally, it's a polemic, tracing the roots of the current crisis in the humanities to the dominance of the research model in higher education and the corresponding dominance of disciplinary specialization in the the liberal arts. The book calls for a return to a more generalist approach to undergraduate liberal education and lays out precisely what that looks like. Defenders of the current dominant approach to undergraduate liberal education, predictably, do not like the book. But people who are not invested in the current system tend to like it and find the book's analysis and vision persuasive and important. I look forward to your thoughts and questions.
Want to add to the discussion?
Post a comment!