Education: November 2019 Archives

A Modern Great Books Solution to the Humanities' Enrollment Woes - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Purdue adds liberal arts to its STEM-focused campus with the five-semester Cornerstone requirement.

'In 2016, Reingold asked Zook to direct the fledgling program. Her "great achievement," he said, lay in the design of a yearlong, two-course sequence of Great Books courses for first-year students. Known as "Transformative Texts," the courses are built around a list of "foundational texts we recommend," said Zook. This first-year sequence has become the centerpiece of Cornerstone and its most distinctive feature.

'As a historian, Zook is well aware that Great Books courses have been criticized for enshrining a static canon of dead white men. "That argument came up initially," she said, but it receded "once people saw the list."

'Developed by various faculty committees, the reading list is highly diverse, not limited to the "usual suspects," and built around "books that people were really going to teach," Zook said. So among its 214 authors, the roster includes Sophocles and Plato, Shakespeare and Milton -- but also Adrienne Rich and Sherman Alexie, bell hooks and Bob Dylan.'