I. New students heading to Dartmouth must ask: What shall I choose? What choices will make for a good four years? And what, after all, is a good education? What might elevate my soul to the lofty state that nature destines for me? And as I graduate, what studious achievements will prepare will have prepared me to go forth to a good life, for myself, my family, and my country, and some will add, for God? Upon arrival, such students will soon recognize that, like so many colleges today, Dartmouth’s primary answer is the ORC with its thousand and one courses, as if to say, “Well, it must be here somewhere. You figure it out.” Such students may, then, be grateful to their first teachers, to upperclassmen they come to admire, and to the Dartmouth Review for some counsel about which courses, with which teachers, might address their desire.
Yet the answer that colleges used to give was not, select what you prefer from a multitude of courses, but a curriculum, in other words, a comprehensive, sequential course of study, presumably of the most important and most fundamental matters, as if to say to all students, “we your teachers, whose lives are our answers to the same questions we asked when young, we think these studies in this order and these alone are the best answer to your desires.” For several centuries the curriculum at the American college was a four-year answer; after President Eliot at Harvard introduced electives, it became less than four; and then less and less; perceiving that, President Lowell firmed things with the majors, but then the post-WWII massive expansion of graduate departments shrank the undergraduate answer to its present state. Now at Dartmouth, despite the absence of graduate studies, the answer to the question: what do all students need to study to become educated, is a scattered distributive requirement, with no courses conceived and designed to be part of a larger core, and then one of many majors. Proposals to do better will surely spring up. And they might take both heart and counsel from one honors core proposed some years ago.
II. Near the beginning of my time at Dartmouth, in the English Department from 1969-75, I proposed the comprehensive Liberal Arts Program described nearby. My companions in this endeavor were Dain Trafton, since a translator of Tasso and Chairman of English at Rockford College, and Carnes Lord, since a member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, the translator of Aristotle’s Politics, and now professor at the Naval War College. Dain and I had had good courses in the old General Education program at Harvard; I had visited St. John’s (Annapolis); and Cary had had the intense experience of the old Directed Studies Program at Yale and doctoral work with Allan Bloom. Meeting together weekly to read Xenophon and pleased with our first teaching duties, we thought nothing could be better for our students than to read some great books together.
Although a number of senior faculty, including Ted Chick (German) and Tom Roos (Biology), said they would like to teach in the proposed program, and others supported it, although it met with some favorable public discussion, and although President Kemeny assigned me money to teach a pilot course from the program, nevertheless, a two course, two teacher pilot of the program was rejected by the Committee on Instruction, which brought all progress to a halt, and warned younger teachers away. In The Hollow Men, Charles Sykes regards that rejection as Kemeny and Dartmouth’s last chance. The opposition was various.
Any such list as we proposed provokes calls for the inclusion of other authors. Faculty who may not have been concerned that the great majority of students study no Shakespeare or Plato and don’t have enough natural science to keep up with Scientific American, suddenly become concerned that their favorites, Marvel or Halifax, Vauvenargues or Weil, Hölderlin or Keller, Münter or Morley, Fibonacci or Leuveenhook, do not appear on a proposed list. (Alas, today few lists would have such worthies. That students have the right attitudes, chiefly about race, class, and gender, are prominent.)
There is usually some sense in their suggestions. We should rejoice that there are more than a hundred great souls, and be glad that there are a thousand good ones as well. One can only add: “Not all good things can be done at once, some things come before others, Junior and Senior year do follow our program, and after college, there is later life.” Once such a program is in place such critics may come around not because of the inclusion of favorite authors, but by the pleasure of having in their classes students who have already read great works. The Greek professor who objects that no one could possibly study Plato without Greek, would soon find that students from such a program not only swell but enrich his Greek classes.
Such a program as ours offered what college curricula once provided, a coherent, purposeful, order of study in answer to the question: what does a man have to know to be educated? Our program provided more than a distributive requirement ever can because its parts were an order and a sequence, with Socrates before Nietzsche, who grew great struggling with him, and it was communal. Living together and eating together, our students would have had more than housing and food to discuss, and if the program had endured, alumni from different decades would share their studies, and been able to converse with current students about studies. (By now there might be 4000 in this fraternity.) Faculty, too, might have enjoyed the enlarged conversation. “That’s not my field” they often say, feel understood only by fellow specialists, and sometimes only once a year at the national meeting, but most faculty when they were young chose a life of or at least with teaching because they thought their teachers had good conversations together. Though great books are rare, elevated and difficult, they generate conversations that are both more desirable and more shareable. Crossing the Dartmouth green one summer, Lionel Trilling said to me, “All that I am to this day comes from the chance to teach in such a program.”
Some of the opposition was based on scholarly probity. Thus, the Committee on Instruction claimed there was no one at Dartmouth competent to teach such a program, and in a public meeting, one professor asserted none of us three had a right to teach most of the authors, since we had doctorates in only one field. In reply, I asked him would he agree that our list included the master spirits of humanity. He agreed. I asked if it was true that many of the later authors grew great by studying some earlier one. He said they had. And then I asked whether any of them had doctorates? Forgetting that Heidegger did and that Goethe had a higher degree, he said none did. SoI asked him “Then what gave any of these great souls the right to learn from the others except their desire?” He was silent, but not, I think, persuaded. (Later I learned that he taught Plato regularly, but knew no Greek, which is said to be typical of the “analytic” version of philosophy.)
Some supporters were also not really persuaded. Word reached us that one muttered “What is this wisdom s–t?” As Socrates suggests, although oligarchs tend to be “conservative,” they also tend to neglect education. They hold that the “old is the good,” but think the old consists in their privileges and their wainscoting. (I do hope Sanborn always has afternoon tea.) They may praise learning, but they truly love their horses, or dogs, shot guns, and cars. One such dollar-a-year man once stopped during his lecture to ask: does anybody know who the Norse god of thunder is? A hand at the back shot up, “Thor, sir.” And the teacher shot back, “Now that’s an educated man.” He had not noticed that it was the student’s only appearance in class that winter, which he had spent reading Thor comic books. And the two most noted “conservative” professors on campus lifted not a finger in support of the program.
From a wider angle, Vico observed that if you want to equal the scope of a single ancient mind, you would have to assemble a whole modern university; he did not mean that that crew would equal one ancient; however many specialists you add together, the sum is no Aristotle, and Vico went on to compare the modern university to a city ruled by a tyrant who makes all the boroughs mistrust each other. Later, Nietzsche criticized the emancipation of scholarship from philosophy understood not as an activity done M-W-F at noon, but as a way of life, the most immoderate and yet disciplined ardor. As a senior at the time, Algis Valiunas, observed, the contention of the Committee on Instruction that no one at Dartmouth could teach the proposed courses was an insult to all the teachers who said they’d like to teach it, and yet if true, a confession of the intellectual poverty of Dartmouth, all the worse for being unashamed.
III. In public opposition to our proposal was, then, based on good things, subordinate things I believe, but still on good things. The most potent opposition to our proposal came from something seldom mentioned in public, the departmental arrangement of the modern college and the competing interests it splits the community into. Although we fashioned our proposal to fit with any departmental major and even with pre-medical studies, the departmental mind was not assured.
To all visitors to Dartmouth, the Green in the middle suggests, “Here is innocence, here is happiness, and here is peace,” but surrounding it is the war of all the departments. Crossing the Green one day, the head of Comparative Literature shouted to me: “I’ll meet you here and duel it out for students.” That this jest could be serious, I learned one winter when I taught in a good Bible course (not as Literature but for Literature Students, thank God) with the senior professor who had pioneered it; after I had graded my students’ hour exams but not yet returned them, he invited me to lunch and asked about the results. I could tell he was concerned about something, and since it is proper for a junior teacher, even with some experience, to defer to, even hope to learn from, a senior teacher, I volunteered, “I would be very happy if you would look over how I marked and commented on my students’ work.” Gesturing that aside, he said “It is not so good if a major gets less than a B.” I suppose he understood himself to be supporting the Department in the silent but unrelenting effort to win and to retain numbers of students. Since I was not about to be both unjust and unhelpful to any student, by not judging their work, I can well understand why he did not want me to teach with him again. Once as I reached the top of Moosilaukee, suddenly from the other side, he emerged, blinked at me, and sighed “The happiest time of my life was when I was on this mountain.” As he disappeared into the fog, I wondered if he mourned the loss of more than his youth.
That there were personal motives as well as departmental interests at work in the opposition to our Liberal Arts Proposal is suggested by the confidential letter in which the Chairman of English, Henry Terrie, reminded Dean Bill Scott, an opponent of our proposal, of our “stubbornness” in proposing such a curriculum. Yet Terrie had actually come up to me at the end of the public meeting on our proposal and complimented me for gentleness. Still, maybe any proposal from an instructor might count as “stubbornness” or worse. And I did miss the faculty meeting where Provost Rieser declared, ‘This place is run by the senior faculty, associates are heard from rarely; the rest are neither heard nor seen.” (Some authors in our curriculum would have counseled me that most regimes, and some good, are run that way.) In my first spring, Provost Rieser had sent me a letter noting, in contorted prose a freshman would fail for, that I had enjoyed half the meals the whole faculty had with students that month (a dozen out of 25 if I remember correctly). I was inclined to take this as approval, and try to eat more meals a month with students, as my teachers at Harvard had in the House dining hall, until an older teacher said “You dummy, he wants you to stop, but doesn’t want it on paper in plain English.” A later Provost, Don Kreider, wondered why a provost would spend his time hindering a teacher who wanted to meet with students from doing so. For such students I soon began holding a Friday discussion club.
More significant, the Chairman of English fixing his signature to the 17 January 1972 letter mentioning “being long about finishing his dissertation” and “his stubborn cantankerousness” about the pilot of the Liberal Arts proposal, already knew I had the Ph.D. already; for he had a copy of the 13 January 1972 letter from the Donald W. Taylor, Dean of Yale Graduate School; and, moreover, it was Terrie himself, who had reneged on the Summer 1971 agreement between Yale and Dartmouth that if by the first day of classes in September (1970) my thesis was found good by all readers at Yale —which it was— I would be promoted right then, not nearly a year later, with all the compounded losses. How well I remember taking the call, sitting on the stairs to my cellar, that first day of classes in September of 1971 from Marie Borroff of Yale saying they would go along with Dartmouth’s perfidy. Betrayed by both Yale and Dartmouth. Such minor collusions help one understand how the Czechs felt in September of 1938 when Chamberlain and Daladier colluded to let them suffer for “peace.”
Why would a Chairman of English go to such crooked lengths? My most lasting impression of Henry Terrie was a conversation about the Bible, which I was teaching, in the Bible course. I said to him, “No work of literature I know of has 613 laws, says only a fool would disobey their Author, and then in a second part has a figure who says He is the meaning of all the hard passages in the first part, for He is the Truth.” To which Terrie replied, “With the Bible, I always talk about style.” Even without hearing such a confession, good students will divine in such a teacher an aversion to what is significant, disturbing, and yet deep, and never, by choice, elect such a man’s courses. Still, Terrie was not without interest in our program of great books; he had read Joseph Tussman’s Experiment at Berkeley with interest, but his declared evasion of what’s in the Bible suggested he would never want to teach in it. Precisely what in the great books addresses the serious concerns of students is what makes many adults avoid them in their teaching, shun them in their lives, and oppose any program of them.
In his letter misrepresenting me, Terrie acknowledges that “a remarkable number of our more energetic and intelligent students” want to study with me, but reports that the Department has no intention of granting tenure three years hence. In a subsequent year, when I asked about the innovation of merit raises: “What is merit and how is it to be determined?” the next chairman, Noel Perrin, sat with me and the deans, his lip quivering with rage for two hours at having to give reasons. (Credit for my lack of anger must go to Tolstoy, whose War and Peace I was reading for the first time then.) I am glad to think that my question led to the revived practice of class visitations soon announced. Next term my classes were visited 600% more than in the previous four years. Although all six visitors, including Perrin, said it was the best class they’d ever visited or nearly so, no vote changed. Reason was not dormant in them, but it was not strong. The books in our program, their reasoning conversation, and its wide scope, require the strength of reason. And disappointing in one teacher with reason was his “I didn’t want to be the only one for you.” Older Quakers were made of stronger stuff.
An old hand at Dartmouth, Arthur Luehrmann, once told me, “Tenure is only given to those who will never use it.” The corollary is that those who are perceived as likely to use tenure, will be denied it. Tocqueville, who said that envy is the secret emotion of democracy might say it is the dominant secret emotion of American Academe, but Nietzsche would divine resentiment, for resentiment is not satisfied with equality, and assumes superiority, and yet to achieve it, must turn resentiment into revenge. Studying the great books can make you very envious. Centuries of excellence look down on you. The only remedy is admiration, and an effort to emulate.
The six years or so in which young teachers prepare for and await a tenure decision are trying. One of my teachers at Yale, Al Kernan, once said, “During that time you put your friendships on ice, and after the waiting is over, you find they aren’t there.” At Dartmouth I observed young colleagues spending hours in the coffee room, some of them imitating the peculiar laugh of a senior faculty member; the flattery in their laughs was so sincere, they hardly recognized it. And he didn’t either, to his dismay later. Yet one young colleague as he was placing a publication on the vanity table, suddenly blurted out to me, “I know what I’m writing is not much good, but I’m doing it so I can do better later.” Few things in life are irreversible, but for most young teachers, six years are quite enough to fix the character and degrade the intellect so that you will merit the tenure conferred on you by those who said the same sort of things to themselves when they were young. Although Maynard Mack at Yale always said “Dartmouth is a graveyard for good young teachers,” I don’t think it was much different from most places. One summer I asked Lionel Trilling about the setting of his story, “Of This Place, Of That Time,” and he said, “It could be here.” Nevertheless, those colleges were better than colleges today, as we may learn from Ross Douthat’s memoir, Privilege, of his four years at my alma mater, Harvard: the hard part about Harvard is lining up internships for your career; the easy part is all the courses in the Humanities and most in the Social Sciences, just figure out what the professor wants you to be enraged about, and show it.
It is to the credit of Dartmouth then that in public the opposers of our liberal arts proposal spoke in the name of knowledge, of language skill, and of disciplinary integrity, all good things, however secondary. Today such opposers might speak differently. At many colleges, the dearest wish of the faculty is that the students adopt their opinions, their discontent, their indignation, their herd attitudes, and share their self-esteem for having them. Naturally those who want their students to think they are great resent genuine greatness anywhere near, in their classroom, in their course, in a curriculum, or a colleague. However much such resentiment was at work against our proposal, it was never voiced in public, and looking at the departmental curricula of that time, you would have to say that what the faculty deemed the best in each department was pretty much what was taught, which in English meant Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, etc. Given what is taught in English departments since, it must seem remarkable, that literature was taught, and that the teachers liked to read it. Also, it is to be remembered that our proposal had supporters, including the secretary who placed the copy of Terrie’s confidential letter in my path. Indeed, all around American Academe in the late sixties, despite the national and campus tumult, there were similar proposals made and some adopted, such as Joseph Tussman’s at Berkeley, John Senior’s at Kansas, and Allan Bloom’s at Cornell. Has any such program been initiated anywhere in American Academe in recent times? (If you know of any, do please write me: drmichaelplatt1942@gmail.com) Old ones have been maintained, at Columbia, at Yale, at the University of Dallas, and especially at St. John’s, but it is only new institutions, such as Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More (NH), and George Wythe that have newly founded the like. Where reform of existing institutions is unlikely, hope must turn to new ones. Five or so fellow teachers who are friends could by saving up for five years launch it.
For the student in an old institution such as Dartmouth, the question is: how much of such greatness can I get here, by selecting courses and teachers carefully, and, I would add, by sharing courses with friends. Since you are unlikely to find much theology; since you will not have courses in sequence; moreover, since the courses will not have been conceived as a part of a greater whole, you will have to make an order and sequence in your mind, and take each course as if it were part of a whole, which it is, namely your education. Does the atmosphere at Dartmouth today support such studies and such friendships? I am unable to say.[1]
When I visited Dartmouth in 1988, this time to teach in Government, and though few books provoke more conversation about fundamental questions that the Republic, the students as a group were reluctant to expose their convictions to discussion. Had they come to think of themselves as value projecting animals, the imposers, the willers, the fashioners of reality, a doctrine advanced by epigones of Nietzsche, such as Foucault and Derrida, but also Kantian Rawls, and enthralling English Departments especially? If everything is power, the pleasure of such knowing as gives no power vanishes and the happy pursuit of it has no home. The aversion of these students to discussion suggests, since they were not freshmen, it might come from some change at Dartmouth since I enjoyed so many good classes there.[2]
Graduates of Dartmouth since 1970 may judge whether their education would have been enhanced by studying the authors on our list. Present day students may wonder. Whether a student today at Dartmouth could put together on his own a group of substitute courses, I do not know. My sense is that it would be hard, but in any case, it would not be so shared an inquiry as we proposed. Students, however, should never underrate how much a group of friends, studying the same things, and also reading together things outside any course can make up for a curriculum.
The best course I had at Yale English was the four year, every Saturday night, reading group—our beer was Ringnes—of my fellow students, led by Mike Holquist, with our “village Hegelian” Jeff Barnouw, and friends like Don Marshall. And at Dartmouth my student Vernon Chadwick ’75 refashioned a fraternity into such a group.
The significant additions I would now make to our list are more Aquinas, a section on America, the founders and Lincoln, some Rembrandt, and some Mozart. Where greatness shines in beauty, in art and music, studying one master deeply yields more than a survey. Although I urge students to read the works of the East that make a similar claim to greatness, I do not recommend them to begin with. The motive is too likely to be a shallow dislike of one’s own civilization. I would not expect much good from a young Japanese student who, declaring an ardent desire to study the great Western books, turned out never to have memorized poems from the Manyoshu, read the Tale of Genji, or considered the Buddha’s call to quench all desire. And nobody who shouts, “Western Civ must go” can study anything. Study the great works of the West and you will come to see that they are both the ground of the moeurs, practices, and institutions around you, and their best criticism; somehow Socrates, the originator of philosophy, and Christ, the teacher of Christianity, are the founders of Western Civilization and at the same time such great critics of it that if they reappeared one would be hemlocked and the other crucified again. The study of them and their many students offers the liberation of understanding, and may lead to higher duties than you dreamed of.
V. Although proposing this Liberal Arts Program was my political unmaking at Dartmouth, it was my intellectual making, thenceforth and forever. President Kemeny’s support allowed me to take my pilot students to the anatomy lessons of Dr. Layton, issued in my dialogue “Looking at the Body” (with Rembrandt), led to a year at the Hastings Center for Biomedical Ethics, and then to teaching “The Experience of Modern Medicine” and then on to the University of Dallas (with such an honors curriculum for everyone). And it should be noted that despite the reneging on our agreement and subsequent falsification, Dartmouth gave me a six-year horizon, first to attend wholly to teaching and then in the later years to writing as well. The old customs of the college were better than the then current rulers. (Yet they were probably better then: administrators were expected to return to teaching; the faculty was not just one-seventh of all those on the payroll; and we taught six courses a year not three.) Young teachers today, stubborn or unstubborn, are not so well treated. And the elsewhere widespread use of adjuncts convicts the current tenured generation of the scandalous failure of not providing the next with the secure paths they enjoyed. My readiness for the happiness of teaching and the proposal of our Liberal Arts Program was, however, prepared by a rare and blessed experience, which no institution can supply, yet no institution prevent. Only at the end of graduate school did I meet a man equal in heart and in mind to the authors I then began to read, especially Plato and Nietzsche. Meeting him turned all one’s weak suspicions, which one had allowed others to make one feel guilty for, into one, single, firm, whole conviction, and inflame one’s desire. Teaching with that conviction made a classroom a place to learn in, about the best there is. At the end of spring, I never want our inquiries to stop (though at the end of summer, I never want to stop writing). Moreover, in the Freshmen Seminars at Dartmouth, no one minded if you read great books not in “your field”; the reason why the best writing addressed to students was not in the Course Catalogue but in the Freshman Seminar booklet was because there each teacher is trying to get the best crew, the most gifted and the most desirous, for the intellectual voyage he is planning, none but true Argonauts. In those Freshman Seminars, I began anew my education. And the pilot course President Kemeny provided for (enduring thanks to him), entitled “The Origins of Modernity,” allowed something in addition. It meant students from a Freshman Seminar could continue our studies together. When you do that, you don’t start from scratch. And then they could join my never-ending Friday sessions.
Classes with such fine, alert, and ardent students are one of the three things most instrumental to the life of the mind, friends and solitude being the others. I recall with happiness our many times together, our studies, our meals in Thayer, our extra classes, our extra-curricular Friday nights, and also our parties. One day, early in my time at Dartmouth, as I sat in my office a student, one and then another, and then another, came in a little sad, saying they did not feel they fit at Dartmouth. By the tenth one, I began saying, “On Saturday, at a party I am having for you, I will introduce you to nine other students like yourself.” After the party I heard students especially remarked on the walk we’d taken in the rosy twilight, and it pleased me to think they had discovered that part of the good life. As Nietzsche says, “[the] vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends).” (Frolicsome Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) No. 329) I still stroll with some (Mark Burgess ‘75, Bob Fastiggi ‘75, and once a decade Vernon Chadwick ‘75), dine with others (Paul Roberts ’74, Jeff Murphy’76; Bob King, ’75; Charles Kluender ’05), visit and teach with Lindsay Holt ’90 and hear from others (Joe Rendini ‘76, Randy Viola ’73, Fred Alexander ’74?, Sheldon Mirowitz, Michael Marohn ’75, Ellen Meyer ’74, and Walter Donat ’71?), and read Algis Valiunas (essays), Rob Grenier (88 Days to Kandahar) and Bill McDough (Cradle to Cradle). And last year, Bob Cunningham ’70 my first helper joined our study circle over the internet. It was at Dartmouth that I found time spent with students is almost always better than with colleagues. Exceptions during my time at Dartmouth were, in addition to my companions Dain and Cary: Ed Yonan in Religion, George Young in Russian, Joe Galloway, who held the permanently junior, permanently impermanent position in Continental Philosophy, and Roger Masters, ever ready for good conversation, and a rare thing in any one over 30, still caring that justice be done to another. (And since then Bruce Duncan, whom my later Humboldt in Germany allows me to share more with, and Russell Muirihead, whom good students at Williams insisted I meet, have been partners in conversation.)
Another exception among senior faculty then, a wonderful teacher of Shakespeare, was Bob Hunter; before he left at the end of my first year, he stopped by to say: “There are two ways to succeed here. Either you go to the coffee room or you publish.” I asked, “You did not mention teaching” and he replied, “I did not mention teaching.” I had already been to the coffee room; my interviews held there led me to expect more good conversations about literature and teaching; upon arriving what I found was talk of investments and taxes; in so far as teaching was discussed, it was complaints about students; no one ever spoke of a happy discovery in class, or even of the pleasure of reading. So I taught, and, as it happened, I did publish, one book and six articles, and, as it happened to me, I did leave, finding my way to the University of Dallas that had such a curriculum as we had proposed, but for all students, and a graduate school to match, whose Literature Program I presided over. So although it often seems we must choose between good and gain, it sometimes happens that when we choose the good, we also gain. In the tragedies we proposed to read in our program, human beings pay the full price and then some, and for their virtues as much as their flaws, and yet in the comedies they often receive no punishment commensurate to their vices, and are even rewarded despite them. Both seem unjust and yet, grosso modo, are they not just? A good judge might well be both hard to satisfy and easy to please.
When I, together with my friends, proposed this Liberal Arts curriculum, I was filled with the happiness of teaching, of having found in the classroom a wonderful place to learn, and because I met with such good students, I was sanguine about human nature, unobservant of it in the faculty, and complacent about the support such institutions as Dartmouth did give to teaching and learning. The discoveries about these things that I have mentioned were sometimes more than disappointing, some were injurious, but they were illuminated by the authors in our program, who are not as sanguine as I was about how much human beings can learn, especially about themselves. “Where men can do evil, they mostly will” said Madison and constructed a good institution to restrict the evil and promote the good. Among the things that recommend the books we listed, great and deep as are the differences among the authors, are their combination of sobriety and ardor. Without the one, life would not be worth living for some of us, and even with the other, it is sometimes very hard. Thus I think even more than I did then that such a program would be as good for students at Dartmouth now, as it was when we proposed it long ago.
In conclusion: while we, and especially I, were perhaps imprudent to make such a proposal, as some of great books might have warned us, even as they spurred us on; nevertheless, once launched and mistreated, I should have appealed to President Kemeny, who loved to teach, and might have intervened on my behalf, and thus on behalf of the many students since who never had a chance at Dartmouth for such a program. Second, what appeals to students in those books, the call to elevate yourself, is what disturbs adults, and rouses opposition in teachers, who want to feel alright about themselves, and for whom the modern university provides many niches. About the great books you can never be competent, only experienced, and if so, you will desire to enjoy them forever. Third, to succeed, such a proposal would have to appeal to the memory of youthful desire in the old, or at least their care that the young enjoy it as they did, or as they did not but wished they had not missed it. Finally, however, the absence of such a program does not mean that good students cannot carry it on together. Learning is more important than teaching.
Dr. Michael Platt The Friends of the Republic
Dr. Michael Platt was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale (M. Phil. and Ph.D. 1971). Here in America, especially at the University of Dallas, and abroad, at Heidelberg, he has taught philosophy, theology, government, statesmanship, and literature, English, Continental, and Ancient, but also Rembrandt and bio-medical ethics. His published work, especially on Shakespeare and Nietzsche, can be read on the web. It has been supported by Dartmouth Faculty, National Endowment, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. Of his teaching, John Randall wrote, “We all felt that we were a part of something extraordinary. No experience has matched those classes in scope or lasting effect. lastingeffect.”upon myself as a student of the world.”
[1] Recently I was impressed with the conversations of some students at the IT station in Baker Berry.
[2] However, three of the ten in the course, led by Lindsay (Holt ’90) Glover, asked for a Nietzsche course from me; which we did via Federal Express, and under the supervision of my old friend Roger Masters.
Friends Of The Republic 