Last November, without fanfare, a new organization met in Chicago hoping to rally some humanist troops to the defense of the Western liberal tradition. The Alliance for Liberal Learning (ALL) is the brainchild of Agora Foundation president Tom Krause and various academics, entrepreneurs, and foundations. I was there representing the Monterey Peninsula College Great Books Program which, following the demise of Santa Barbara City College’s excellent program, is the last of its kind in California’s 113 community colleges with over 2,000,000 great-books-deprived students.
It is no secret that higher education’s continuing abandonment of the humanities and the liberal arts is eroding the historical raison d’etre of higher education, along with the foundation of Western democratic institutions. Adherents of western civilization today often seem vulnerable, small, fugitive, isolated, and scattered. As one conference attendee put it, “We’re all just trying to keep each other afloat.”
In town for a lecture a few months ago, David Steiner, professor of education at Johns Hopkins University, claimed that defenders of the humanities are in a “panic.” When he complained about the state of the humanities to his father, the renowned critic George Steiner, George said, “Oh, David, grow up. The humanities have had 23 good centuries. Why are you so greedy all of a sudden? Just because you happened to come along at the end of it all? That’s called bad luck.”
Have we reached “the end of it all?” Can the scattered few join forces? The 60 or so attendees included representatives from The Great Books Foundation, The Aspen Institute, The San Francisco Great Books Council, Great Discourses, The Association for Core Texts and Courses, Great Hearts Academies, and colleges such as Pepperdine, Shimer, Thomas Aquinas, St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe), and the University of Dallas. Those five great books colleges have a total enrollment of about 11,000. California State University, San Jose alone enrolls about 33,000.
Still, ALL remains hopeful, promising in its mission statement “. . . to promote and support conversations about great works and ideas. ALL seeks to open the public imagination to the enduring value of lifelong liberal learning, which prepares us to live freely and well. ALL believes that the foundation of liberal education lies in active engagement with the ideas, insights and discoveries embodied in the world’s great books and works of art and science. ALL will bring together members of the general public, scholars, academic programs and institutions, businesses and other organizations promoting liberal arts education to share its work via seminars and discussions, conferences, online networks and sponsorship of events.”
The Chicago conference offered speakers, panels on “Conversing with the Public,” “Lifelong Liberal Learning,” “Quantifying the Value of Liberal Learning,” and a kind of “getting to know you” in a speed dating format, “OK, your five minutes are up. Go to your next table.” Highlights for me included presentations by St. John’s (Annapolis) President Chris Nelson, Aspen Institute Director of Seminars Todd Breyfogle, and St. John’s sainted Eva Brann, who asked “Are there Adults?” Her answer? “No.” At least not in the sense of someone who has finished learning.
Back in California, I asked Tom Krause for his take. Tom emailed, “I thought the conference went well, especially considering that it was the first one and we did it on a shoe-string. We were all delighted to learn how large the network of organizations interested in great books/core texts/conversation learning is! It was like meeting an extended family that you didn’t know existed.”
Fair winds and following seas, ALL.