4. Creating a Great Curriculum

By the early 1940s, Adler was withdrawing from the University to pursue other interests. His How to Read a Book was a national bestseller, and he had become a celebrated popular intellectual. As Adler receded, Richard McKeon became increasingly more influential. In 1938, the student yearbook reported that McKeon had displaced Adler as the "intellectual lodestone of the undergraduate body." The faculty, too, were drawn to him. Cap and Gown noted a general shift from Aquinas to Aristotle in several departments feeling McKeon's influence.

More importantly, events in the early 1940s gave the College greater autonomy in defining the curriculum. In 1941, Hutchins named Clarence Henry Faust as Dean of the College. Faust set out to reexamine the curriculum across the College. The exigencies of the U.S. entry into World War II heightened the need to reexamine the curriculum: universities across the country were searching for ways to expedite the educational process for young men and women about to enter the war effort. Reacting in part to "the emergency of war," just six weeks after Pearl Harbor the University Senate voted 63 to 48 to allow the College to grant bachelor degrees and to determine its own curriculum, two roles previously given to the divisions. The most controversial change brought about by the revamped "Chicago Plan," was the College's decision to grant bachelor's degrees after only two years of work for students who could pass their comprehensive exams. Less publicized was Faust's effort to incorporate the Great Books into every student's College experience.

The new curriculum outlined four sequences of three courses each in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Physical Sciences, and the Natural Sciences. The new course of study was not based exclusively on the Great Books, nor was it intended to be, but dozens of texts from the General Honors list appeared on core syllabi in all areas except the Physical Sciences.

The first goal of the Humanities sequence was "increasing the experience of students with the great products of the arts by examination of a considerable body of the best works in the fields of literature, the visual arts, and music." The Humanities core rejected specialization in favor of "extensive familiarity" in a "great variety" of works. The reading list was wider ranging than Adler's Great Books. It included many authors favored by Adler but also women writers such as Jane Austen and it even ventured into the twentieth century with Thornton Wilder, Elizabeth Bowen, and E. M. Forster. While it incorporated many of the Great Books, it was a far cry from the curriculum envisioned by Hutchins and Adler. The Socratic method employing only discussions in long seminars was eschewed for five one-hour meetings per week where students were taught analytical methods for use in the art of criticism. In addition, entire books were rarely assigned. Instead, excerpts provided a wider variety of texts.

Because the Social Science sequence favored American history and politics over the Greek and Roman cultures, the Great Books did not make an appearance in force until the third year when the students read Plato, Mill, Hobbes, Locke, and Kant.

The Natural Science sequence included entire works or excerpts from Archimedes, Galileo, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and other luminaries from the Great Books list to give students a sense of the interrelations between the disciplines within the Natural Sciences. According to Professor of Natural Sciences Joseph Schwab, "the science program expresses the principles of liberal education as a whole, but as mediated and modified by the qualities which distinguish science from the humanities and the social sciences; therefore, the science program is best understood in the light of what these principles become when expressed through the materials and procedures of science."

The liberal arts ideal was most fully realized in two courses: "History of Western Civilization," and "Observation, Interpretation, and Integration." The two capstone courses were taught after students had completed the other core requirements (usually in their final year), and were designed to "integrate the College curriculum: the one historically, by focusing attention on genesis and development, the other philosophically, by concentrating attention on intellectual analysis and methodology." The structure and methodology of the courses varied significantly from the Great Books seminars, but the reading list for McKeon's O.I.I. course clearly shows the influence of his days teaching the Great Books at Columbia.

The curriculum reforms of the wartime era satisfied Adler, whose influence on campus had dwindled to the point where he could not play a significant role in the decision-making process. Compared to the rebuffs he and Hutchins had met with a decade earlier, the modest inclusion of the Great Books in the curriculum was a major victory for their vision of the liberal arts.

In 1937 four members of the Liberal Arts Committee frustrated by the inflexibility of the University left Chicago to establish the New Program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. Although most colleges and universities saw increased enrollment during the Depression, St. John's admissions dropped and the College was on the verge of financial collapse. Stringfellow Barr accepted the position as President, then installed Scott Buchanan as Dean and asked to have Robert Hutchins placed on the Board of Trustees. Together with two others members of the Liberal Arts Committee, R. Catesby Taliaferro and Charles Wallis, they reconstructed the College with the nation's first true Great Books curriculum.

Taught in seminars nearly identical in structure to those led by Adler and Hutchins at Chicago, students in St. John's New Program discussed the Great Books-the only other classes required, or even offered, were in mathematics and the sciences.

The reading list, which mirrored that set out by Erskine, was based on a five-part test of "Greatness":

1) A great book is one that has been read by the largest number of persons

2) A great book has the largest number of possible interpretations

3) A great book should raise the persistent unanswerable questions about the great themes in European thought

4) A great book must be a work of fine art

5) A great book must be a masterpiece of the liberal arts

Expounding on the philosophical base of St. John's, Scott Buchanan wrote: "The clearest historic pattern of the liberal arts for the modern mind is, curiously enough, to be found in the thirteenth century." He then laid out the Trivium and Quadrivium that would guide the students' education.

Trivium
Grammar
Rhetoric
Logic

Quadrivium
Arithmetic
Geometry
Music
Astronomy

The New Program failed to attract students at first (only forty-six applied in the first year) but it soon blossomed, and it has become a well-established and successful program with an offshoot in New Mexico. John Erskine saw the enterprise at St. John's as one of several "aberrations" on his original intent. He had thought of the classics not as a complete education in and of themselves, but as a way to provide students with a broader perspective than that being offered by the modern elective-based curriculum.

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