The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: the Focus and Gerst Programs

Acad. Quest. (2007) 20:177–210 DOI 10.1007/s12129-007-9020-z The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: The Focus and Gerst Programs Russell Nieli Published online: 17 November 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract Small programs can make a big difference on college campuses. At Duke University, a few dedicated people, with the support of college administrators, exploited the all-too-evident liabilities of curriculum fragmentation, political correctness, and the lack of direction felt by undergraduate students to create intellectually valuable and stimulating new offerings. Russell Nieli tells how the Gerst and Focus programs have influenced that university and others across America. Keywords Liberal arts education . Duke University . Focus . Gerst . Cohesive curriculum . First-year programs When a student arrives at the university, he finds a bewildering variety of departments and a bewildering variety of courses. And there is no official guidance, no university-wide agreement, about what he should study.... The net effect of the student’s encounter with the college catalogue is bewilderment and very often demoralization. It is just a matter of chance whether he finds one or two professors who can give him an insight into one of the great visions of education that have been the distinguishing part of every civilized nation.... The teacher, particularly the teacher dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft. Allan Bloom (from The Closing of the American Mind)1 1Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1987, pp. 21–2, 338–9. This essay was originally published by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina. R. Nieli (*) Politics Department, Princeton University, Princeton, USA e-mail: [email protected] 178 Acad. Quest. (2007) 20:177–210 The À La Carte University: A Brief History Contemporary higher education in America is faulted on many grounds but no criticism has been more enduring over the past 50 or 60 years than the charge that the typical college or university curriculum in the United States offers students little more than a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life. “Over-specialization,”“fragmentation,” “supermarket sweeps,”“incoherence,”“alienating irrelevance,” are but a few of the terms that have been employed to describe this situation, and such terms are just as likely to be applied to the education offered at some of the better liberal arts colleges as to that offered at the larger universities. Even the most prestigious and venerable of America’s older institutions of higher learning—including Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, and Yale—come under the same indictment. The alienation, disappointment, and confusion that this situation can produce among sensitive undergraduates came to light in a dramatic fashion in the spring of 1964 with the ugly student uprising at Berkeley, California, where the demand for “relevance” from the college curriculum became the watchword of student protest. The modern university’s inability to cultivate the character and intellect of its undergraduate students—a long-time complaint of humanist intellectuals going back to the earliest decades of the 20th century—reached its culmination in an outburst of nihilistic and destructive student rage that brought the issue of university education to the attention of the entire nation. If the student protests at Berkeley proved ultimately anarchic and without constructive achievement, blame for the situation lay as much with the university and its inability to educate or inspire the young as it did with the nihilistic protesters.2 A quarter of a century after the Berkeley uprising the issue of higher education in America again became the focus of national attention with the publication of political philosopher Allan Bloom’s explosive bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. American higher education, Bloom charged in his book, was aimless, soulless, and failed to cultivate the higher existential yearnings of the nation’s most gifted and intelligent youth. Bloom’s critique clearly struck a nerve among large segments of the college-educated public and touched off a protracted national debate on the state of liberal arts education in America. Originally issued in a first printing of 7,000—a substantial press run for a learned book of its kind— Bloom’s indictment of post-1960s higher education in America would eventually sell more than half a million copies in hardback before being issued in an even more popular paperback edition. Bloom would later remark that the unexpected success of his book in terms of sales and national attention had made him into something like the academic equivalent of a rock star. Many who had recently attended our nation’s better colleges and universities apparently found in Bloom’s disdainful critique of the state of American liberal arts education a trenchant and provocative explanation for their own educational frustrations and disappointments. This report will seek to describe one small but hugely successful set of programs at one elite educational institution in the United States—Duke University in North 2 On the Berkeley student protests see Seymor Martin Lipset and Sheldon Wolin, editors, The Berkeley Student Revolt, Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1965. Acad. Quest. (2007) 20:177–210 179 Carolina—which has tried to respond to the kind of complaints that Bloom and so many other critics have leveled at undergraduate education in contemporary America. It is based on a series of extensive interviews and discussions carried out in late March of 2006 with several of the people most responsible for bringing these programs into existence. The present writer, a Duke graduate of an earlier generation (B.A. 1970), spent 3 days on Duke’s beautiful Durham campus learning as much as he could about both the Gerst and Focus programs that had been commended to him by knowledgeable academics concerned with the sorry state of American liberal arts education. Gerst and Focus have clearly had a major impact in improving the educational experience of those students at Duke who have availed themselves of their offerings, and in telling the Gerst and Focus stories it is hoped that these programs can be duplicated elsewhere. From Christian Liberal Arts College to Modern Research University Duke is the youngest of the elite national universities, being established only in 1924 through a huge endowment from the family of Washington Duke and his two sons, James and Benjamin. The Duke family acquired its wealth in the tobacco business after the Civil War and in later years through the manufacture and sale of electric power. In one very important respect, however, Duke differs from the newer national universities like Stanford, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, which were also established by wealthy private benefactors. Unlike these other institutions, Duke was built around an existing institution, Trinity College, which already had its own beautiful campus in Durham, North Carolina, and a well-established regional reputation as a serious Christian liberal arts college. The Duke family, in fact, was an important financial supporter of Trinity College for many decades before there was any intention to transform the college into a national university. Trinity College itself grew out of a smaller institution—the Union Institute Academy—which was established in 1838 under the leadership of Brantley York, a largely self-taught Methodist minister, who had been asked by local Methodist and Quaker farmers in rural Randolph County, North Carolina, to establish a local school of higher learning for their children. York’s school was chartered twice by the State of North Carolina, first as the Union Institute Academy (1841), and later as Normal College (1851). In 1859 Normal College began its long financial and trusteeship relationship with the United Methodist Church, at which time it changed its name to Trinity College to reflect its new religious affiliation. Free tuition was also granted at this time to all students studying for the Methodist ministry. From its official founding in 1859 to its transformation into Duke University in 1924, Trinity College reflected the vision of liberal Protestant educators who combined a serious Christian religious commitment with a strong desire to create an educational environment that was open to the best in both ancient and modern learning. The pattern can be seen even in Trinity’s first president, Braxton Craven, an ordained Methodist minister, who held teaching professorships in the college in a host of areas both traditional and modern. Craven was professor of American constitutional law, Biblical literature, mental and moral science, rhetoric and logic, ancient languages, and metaphysics. No narrowly conceived denominational college, 180 Acad. Quest. (2007) 20:177–210 Trinity from early on sought to establish itself as a Christian progressive institution that would encourage Christians of various denominations to teach, study, and worship together, and to combine the best of both “education and religion.” This latter phrase, in its Latin form, Eruditio et Religio, became Trinity’s official motto— the words having been lifted from a hymn by the early Methodist evangelist Charles Wesley. Under the leadership of John Kilgo, who was president between 1894 and 1910, Trinity established itself as one of the South’s most distinguished liberal arts colleges, and one of the few small colleges in the South to become known outside the region. Kilgo was a preacher of great power, and during his tenure one can see at work the faint stirrings of the kind of progressive Christianity that would become such an important force in the South during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s.

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