Read and admired throughout the world, Shakespeare's plays and poetry have been the guiding light of statesmen, of authors, and of artists. His writings are the indispensable foundation for understanding English literature, language, and rhetoric. Yet less than 8% of the nation's top universities require English majors to take even a single course…

A key element of a liberal education is engagement with "classic" texts, texts that often present views in conflict with our commitment to diversity and inclusion. This article will ask, although not necessarily answer, a number of important questions: Do classic texts perpetuate long-refuted and harmful ideas? Can a racist, sexist,…

This paper draws on some of the classic literature on the subject along with recent scholarship addressing the increasingly urgent question of the continuing viability of liberal education in colleges and universities worldwide. This literature raises issues concerning the historical idea of a liberal education and points to new directions for the…

The debate over the best delivery of general education, whether through a canon of Great Books, a core curriculum of specific courses and course sequences, or a distribution requirement of course types providing for greater student choice, has existed for generations. Today, the debate plays out in practice across the top-rated colleges and…

For more than fifty years, an enduring criticism of American higher education has been that it offers students a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life. How this fragmentation came about is the topic of this essay. American higher education went through a major…