ISI Faculty Resource Center

I participated at the one-day Lehrman American Studies Center Regional Seminar at Yale University about “The Founding and Re-Founding” of America

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As an art history professor at a state university attended by many first-generation students, I get the question “What can I do with a degree in art history” quite frequently from both my students and their parents.  I completely understand the rationale behind the question.

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I would like to propose two reasons that conservatives ought to take an interest in verse, one historical and the other ethical.  Following them, I should like to offer as a teaching resource a guide to verisification (prosody) that the reader may find of interest as a means of understanding this seldom taught craft and that the professor of good will is welcome to use as a booklet to distribute to students.

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Do we profess a certain mode of inquiry and discovery or do we profess a certain philosophical (and maybe even theological) commitment?

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“You’ve crossed over to the dark side, my friend.”  This was how one of my colleagues greeted the news that after a five-month national search I had been appointed to serve as dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies. Does academic leadership in such an administrative post mean going over to the “dark side?”

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These upperclassmen have not learned to think critically or to evaluate different viewpoints and come up with their own.  The entire idea that a class would ask of them to develop their own opinion on what something means is startling and uncomfortable.  Best to return to the soft breast of the social sciences and be succored and soothed with definitions that can fit on flashcards.

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For Sertillanges, philosophy and theology are not just for philosophers and theologians. For they are the queen and divine sciences respectively, and where either is absent or neglected or misapprehended in the intellectual life, the other sciences that are present, cultivated, and apprehended will suffer.

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American education fails to understand or achieve its purpose: to educate. Primarily, universities fail because they cannot define what it means to be educated.

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Mediocrity happens. At this very moment at an institution of higher education near you, a mildly hung-over student is finishing a mildly plagiarized paper on travel-industry marketing, for which he'll receive a B-plus. Across campus, an assistant professor is drafting a tepid scholarly article that will eventually be read by 43 people and cited by one.

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There are few professions in which one can interact in such a healthy way with young people. Though the life of a university teacher is full of work day in and day out, including weekends, I get to do what I love: converse about ideas and books!

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