ABSTRACT

John Erskine, Professor of English, initiated his General Honors course at Columbia University in 1921. He first presented his ideas about liberal education in a paper called ‘The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent’. Robert Hutchins had become a member of the law faculty at Yale University at 26. In his career at Yale as professor of the law of evidence and Dean of the Law School, Hutchins was a legal empiricist: the law was what the courts did, not an ‘unchanging, self-evident reality’. Other forms of education were important and necessary, but Hutchins wanted the university to stop appropriating to itself the educational work that belonged to other institutions. In 1947 Hutchins and William Benton, with assistance from the University of Chicago and foundations, organized the Great Books Foundation. The Great Books provided the sources for engaging in the Great Conversation with the best minds about enduring human problems.