Matt Dinan is a professor at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick and director of its Great Books program. In a recent essay, he recounted what happened, for his students and for himself, when he chose to spend a semester reading a single book—Plato’s Republic. He joins Brendan Boyle to reflect on that experience. Their conversation ranges from considering scenes and images in the Republic, to the idea of wholeness in liberal arts education, to how reading Plato influences administrative decisions, and much more.

The “Great Conversation” of the Western intellectual tradition is sometimes thought to be exclusive or exclusionary, representing a small set of voices and serving the interests of a narrow group of people. But, argues our guest, “diverse strands” have always been present in it. In the American context, some of the greatest Black intellectuals were steeped in this tradition, deeply engaged with its works and ideas, and indeed part of the conversation themselves.

Angel Parham is Associate Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. With Anika Prather, she is co-author of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. She joins Brendan Boyle to discuss the classical education of some of America’s greatest Black thinkers, debates within the Black community about the form post-emancipation education should take, how the Western “canon” can by more complete by its own lights, and much more.

• The Black Intellectual Tradition, (Classical Academic Press, 2022)

Many students go to college with career ambitions in mind, or perhaps because it seems like the next thing they’re “supposed to” do. But when questions of “why” arise—why pursue this or that job, one way of life or another—they are often perplexed. What does a good life look like? How should I live my life? What does it mean to “pursue” happiness? These fundamental questions we ask ourselves are all the more important for students in their formative adult years. Our guests, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and research professors at Furman University, join Brendan Boyle to reflect on nearly two decades of helping students discover and ask these kinds of questions about their lives through a liberal arts education.

• “The Art of Choosing What to do With Your Life”, New York Times, August 15, 2022.
• Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment. Princeton University Press, 2021.
• Plato, Gorgias.
• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness.
• “Hope for the Lost Souls of Liberalism”, Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2021.

What happens when a person reads literature? An observer, seeing little more than eye movement, might conclude that the answer is: nothing. But literature is a form of travel, says our guest, and encountering it a potentially shattering experience. “Literature,” he says, “allows us to imagine a future that we could not afford to live in.” Arnold Weinstein is the Richard and Edna Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Drawing on a lifetime of reading and teaching great works, he joins the podcast to discuss the galvanizing effect of literature and its darkness, how it can play the role of both wrecking ball and tonic in our lives, how reading changes with age, and much more.

• The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing. Princeton University Press, 2021.

The contemporary university, especially in the United States, is a place for free and open inquiry unencumbered by censorious forces, a place where “professors should be leading undergraduates on voyages of intellectual self-discovery.” Or is it? Professor James Hankins of Harvard University joins the podcast to discuss the history of universities as institutions, the intellectual and political conditions of their founding, and what the Renaissance humanists thought of their purpose in society and the lives of their students. What light might this history shed on our current debates about academic freedom in higher education?

• “Intellectual Freedom in Medieval Universities”, First Things, February 2022
• Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, Harvard University Press, 2019

What is the value of a humanities education, especially for historically underserved students? What is the place of the humanities in American higher education? Beginning with a discussion of Louis Menand’s essay, “What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?” (The New Yorker, Dec. 2021) and Brian Rosenberg’s response (“This Is the Way the Humanities End,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 2022), Boyle and Rosenberg’s conversation explores tensions between the research and education missions of the modern university, the role of the humanities teacher, what’s at stake in how we think about the purpose of general education, and more.

“[The human] condition of freedom, which is the condition that makes ethical life possible, is the question to which liberal education addresses itself.” So says Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, in conversation with Brendan Boyle about the aims of liberal education. Their discussion explores the use of texts as a means to help students shape their own lives, the compatibility of liberal education’s positive and negative ends, and the role of the teacher, among other topics.

Links:

• Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Change My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021)
• “What Should Students Learn?” The Point, August 2021
• Columbia College’s core curriculum
• The St. John’s College academic program

Daniel Harrell joins Brendan Boyle to discuss competing defenses of liberal education and the nature of liberal education’s “freedom.” What does it mean to be “freed” by education if we remain “bound” in other ways? How can we be free human beings in the face of our own mortality?  What is the relationship between knowledge and experience? How are tools of learning used and abused?

Read or listen to the lecture discussed in this episode: Daniel Harrell, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art,” delivered as part of the Graduate Institute summer lecture series in 2015.

• Read the PDF
• Listen to the audio

What is thinking? What isn’t? When does technology move from aiding to impeding human flourishing? How can limitations help us live better? Zena Hitz joins David McDonald to consider these questions and many more. Also discussed are higher education, tragedy and comedy, Don Quixote, depth and longing, the complexities of technological progress, and the influence of upbringing.

Links:

• Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought
• Matthew Crawford, “Shop Class as Soul Craft”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”