Alienation between the U.S. military and society has grown in recent decades. Such alienation is unhealthy, as it threatens both sufficient civilian control of the military and the long-standing ideal of the "citizen soldier." Nowhere is this issue more predominant than at many major universities, which began turning their backs on the…

The history of liberal education is the story of a debate between orators, whose tradition stresses commitment to a body of civic knowledge derived from texts, and philosophers from whom our modern notion of formal science and specialized research originates. The story is very old--not only historically as it begins with Socrates and Plato--but…

An historical and conceptual analysis of general education in the United States is presented, comprising the following chapters: (1) transformation and the search for meaning (including a discussion of the concept of general education); (2) the classical curriculum confronts democracy (democratic pressures on the classical curriculum; the Yale…

The argument of this book is that the modern American university has given up its responsibility to provide a thoughtful, coherent, and well-articulated education to undergraduates. It is asserted that the university should be neither a trade school nor a repository of tradition, but rather an institution with the responsibility for the…

The Lilly Endowment has a long-standing commitment to supporting liberal arts programs and teaching at the undergraduate level. The Endowment-sponsored summer workshop on the liberal arts, held annually at Colorado College, has a 28-year history. It offers professors and deans from a variety of colleges and universities the opportunity to study a…