This article is an exchange of ideas between Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and Tom Klingerstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute and NAS Board Director, on the study "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students" (by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano). This…

When "Academic Questions" editor Peter Wood asked the author to give some thought to the dispute between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), he thought he should say no. Well, what did the CFR report prepared by an independent task force chaired by Joel I. Klein, former…

This article presents an interview with Robert George, who holds Princeton's celebrated McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program. George has served on the President's Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is also a member of the…

On December 31, 2013, Hillsdale College--a small liberal arts college in rural south-central Michigan--will no longer be authorized to recommend students to the state of Michigan for teacher certification. Hillsdale's over a century-and-a-half tradition of preparing teachers for public schools will, sadly, come to an end. Hillsdale will lose the…

The author expresses his doubt that the general higher education bubble will burst anytime soon. Although tuition, student housing, and book costs have all increased substantially, he believes it is still likely that the federal government will continue to pour billions into higher education, largely because Americans have been persuaded that it…

To get an inside view of campus life today, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (whose purpose is to foster in college students an appreciation of the values that sustain a free society) was approached and asked to supply a list of their Collegiate Network editors--students who are active on their campuses, interested in the issues facing higher…

Academics are inclined to think of their work as a pure calling. But the fact remains that the profession of higher education--like all professions--is embedded in various rules, assumptions, and programs that further the fiduciary obligations of the profession and also protect the rights, agendas and self-interests of the profession's members.…

"Service-learning" has been adopted by many colleges and universities as a way of instilling in students an ethic of community service. Its advocates typically distinguish it from simple volunteering, which lacks an academic component, and from internships, in which students acquire practical skills. The author argues that the rationales for…

A lot of people probably believe that a liberal education is a broad education that exposes students to a variety of academic disciplines. This once translated, in many universities, to a "General Studies" core requirement consisting mostly of introductory courses to various disciplines that were loosely related to one another around general…

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…

The motivation and methodology for measuring intelligence have changed repeatedly in the modern history of large-scale student testing. Test makers have always sought to identify raw aptitude for cultivation, but they have never figured out how to promote excellence while preserving equality. They've settled for egalitarianism, which gives rise to…

Be it metaphysics, theology, or some other unifying framework, humans have long sought to determine "first principles" underlying knowledge. Larry Arnhart continues in this vein, positing a Darwinian web of genetic, cultural, and cognitive evolution to explain our social behavior in terms of human nature as governed by biology. He leaves it to us…

Of the seven liberal arts, on which Western education was based, grammar has always been preeminent. Yet English teachers in recent years have belittled it to the point of an irrelevance. Not only has this higher illiteracy rendered Americans unable to extract ideas from sophisticated prose, David Mulroy worries, but also it leaves us with the…

In this essay, the author contends that a university has a place in society, but that this place is not the function of contributing to some other kind of activity in the society, but of just being itself. Its first business is with the pursuit of learning and its concern is with the sort of education that has been found to spring up in the course…

In this essay, Strauss contends that liberal education is education in culture or toward culture, and that within the mass society of a democracy, liberal education is the mechanism of founding an aristocracy--of ascending to democracy as originally meant. He explains that liberal education consists of listening to conversations among the greatest…