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The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding in order to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line in a time of putative budget deficits. In this article, the author carefully documents the minute curricular dismantling that began during the 1990s that has greatly weakened the famous and vigorous core of the University of Chicago. (Contains 1 table and 20 footnotes.)

In this carefully documented essay, Russell K. Nieli outlines the major transformation in American higher education that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Today's research- and vocation-driven private universities began as Christian institutions founded by zealous evangelizers, while public colleges embraced a watered-down version of the earnest and forward-thinking Protestant gentleman's worldview, which saw no conflict between theological and secular knowledge. Science and religion remained friendly until the advent of the industrial revolution brought the model of the German research university to the attention of American academic reformers. Unity of knowledge was eventually supplanted by a secular, elective system. While the great "multiversity" had arrived, critics mourned the loss of educational coherence and abandonment of the civilizing mission to which moral and classical training were essential. In the 1920's, the Great Books approach was reborn, despite the seemingly unstoppable march of progress, science, and the subdiscipline. Vietnam-era upheavals led to the American academy's transformation into a politically correct mutlicultural smorgasboard seasoned to please the modern student palate. When today's students demand to be entertained and scholars continue to narrowly train, is there still room on the plate for the best that has been said, thought, and written about the human experience? (Contains 50 footnotes.)

Small programs can make a big difference on college campuses. At Duke University, a few dedicated people, with the support of college administrators, exploited the all-too-evident liabilities of curriculum fragmentation, political correctness, and the lack of direction felt by undergraduate students to create intellectually valuable and stimulating new offerings. Russell Nieli tells how the Gerst and Focus programs have influenced that university and others across America. (Contains 39 footnotes.)

Sadly, amidst a vast profusion of knowledge, universities abrogate responsibility for showing young learners what is essential. Left to select for themselves, most students arrive late, if at all, to an awareness of what they want and need out of college. Thus, according to James Bernard Murphy, a well-constructed core of courses, presented in the first two years, is crucial to a complete education. He presents his thoughts on constructing such a core, mindful that spirited interplay of ideas within a common framework of study fosters the social and intellectual growth that leads to freedom. (Contains 3 notes.)

Three faculty members of Concordia University in Montreal, who played integral roles in the formation of a highly successful core curriculum as part of their institution, discuss the logistics, the politics, and the philosophy behind the founding and growth of their Liberal Arts College. For Harvey Shulman, the program, which has attracted superior students, is Aristotelian in its unflagging pursuit of intellectual and moral excellence. As Aristotelians, the author and his colleagues strive to institute their ideals through action, to take what is an ideal vision of education and turn it into a program with students and books, to move from theory to practice. For Aristotle, the community's telos is primary and logically prior to that of individuals, and this parallel holds when designing a Great Books Core curriculum. As faculty, they initially come together asking themselves what do students need to know to become educated, not what each of them wish to pursue in their research and the courses that they want to teach.

Three faculty members of Concordia University in Montreal, who played integral roles in the formation of a highly successful core curriculum as part of their institution, discuss the logistics, the politics, and the philosophy behind the founding and growth of their Liberal Arts College. For Frederick Krantz, their program is Platonic. The author describes a coherent academic structure in which teacher-scholars vie to present the truth as a pedagogical ideal that makes no compromise to changing educational or political fashions. (Contains 1 note.)

Three faculty members of Concordia University in Montreal, who played integral roles in the formation of a highly successful core curriculum as part of their institution, discuss the logistics, the politics, and the philosophy behind the founding and growth of their Liberal Arts College. For Geoffrey Fidler, their program echoes Spinoza's synthesis of nature and reason, which elevates the truth as a goal that simultaneously constrains and liberates, controls and transcends, discovers and invents. (Contains 12 notes.)

The decades since the 1960s have been unfortunate in many respects for American higher education, but things are not uniformly bleak. Here and there, the study of Great Books persists. The general picture that is available, then, of the health of great-books study in colleges today is mixed. High-visibility news stories, along with curriculum studies and widely read books, present both high points and low points. But a clear-cut overview of where the great-books movement stands today lies beyond impressions or generalizations drawn from these sources. This article begins with some background history, and continues with a comprehensive list of specific programs currently in operation, along with an understanding of the various models they follow and issues debated among them. The reader is sent to http://www.nas.org/new.html where this list of specific programs, uncovered at institutions nationwide, may be found. (Contains 18 notes.)