For the last 50 years, serious academics have lamented the indoctrination, censorship, and bureaucratization of American higher education. Rarely have they been able to do anything about it.
Those days are over. At my school, South Carolina’s Clemson University, we are pushing back. The Clemson University Board of Trustees recently approved the creation of a new kind of academic department. Over the course of the next year, we will hire faculty, create courses, and build a degree program. I have the honor of serving as acting department chair.
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The name of our new department, The Lyceum, is borrowed from Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens. Our mission is simple: to revolutionize American higher education. The Lyceum will use a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American Founding, and the principles of moral character. Together, our faculty and students will explore the relationship between ideas and action; the history of human accomplishment; the political and cultural architecture of free societies; the economic principles and institutions of the free-enterprise system; and the requirements of character formation. We aim to inspire our students to pursue intellectual and moral excellence through a rigorous engagement with the great philosophical, literary, historical, and economic texts of Western civilization.
Each year, we will provide upward of 120 students with Lyceum scholarships. All of our Lyceum Scholars will be assigned what we call a Socratic Tutor. The tutors will meet individually with their tutees every other week to translate books like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, help apply their ideas to twenty-first-century life, and think deeply about questions of moral character. Ultimately, our goal is to teach our students how to think in principles and how to act on principle, so that they can fulfill their potential and achieve their highest aspirations.
The Lyceum will reclaim the lost art of Socratic instruction, elevating undergraduate teaching and mentoring above research and publication. Teaching, rightly understood, is the noble vocation of awakening young minds to the permanent questions of human life, equipping them with the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for living as citizens of a free society, and inspiring them to pursue truth and excellence wherever it leads.
Faculty in The Lyceum will not devote themselves to writing meaningless scholarly articles and books that no one reads or cares about. Instead, we will spend our days teaching students about eternal questions concerning the nature and meaning of truth, wisdom, justice, courage, friendship, freedom, limited government, and capitalism. It is still possible for young minds to be intrigued, charmed, and improved by a good book, a great conversation, a provocative question, or a heated debate discussed in an environment of civility. We want to encourage that possibility.
Nothing less than the future of Western civilization rests on the fate of liberal education and its quest for truth, wisdom, freedom, and greatness. This is what higher education once was—and, we hope, what it will be again.