Tocqueville Lecture Series - Mark Bauerlein

Every year, the Tocqueville Program sponsors a course and brings prominent public intellectuals to Furman's campus with the aim encouraging serious and open engagement with the moral questions at the heart of political life.

The program takes its name from Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest student of modern democracy, who understood both the difficulty and the necessity of reminding citizens of a decent and prosperous regime about questions of truth, nobility and eternity. These questions are not always comfortable to discuss and are never easily resolved; but, as Tocqueville understood, these questions cannot be ignored by human beings who seek to live lives of freedom and dignity.

For the next two years, the Tocqueville Program will focus on the theme of Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy. From the beginning of the American Republic, our best statesman and thinkers have seen an essential connection between liberal democracy and liberal education. According to Thomas Jefferson, the extensive educational plan he proposed for his native Virginia was a necessary means for "rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty." The rigorous education in politics and history Jefferson envisioned, however, has little relation to what is taught in American universities today. In spite of a price tag that strains the limits of middle-class credulity, our universities and colleges often offer curricula with little apparent coherence and seem increasingly incapable of articulating the high and noble purpose of liberal education in a democratic society. Now is thus an auspicious moment to take up the question at the heart of this year's program, "What is liberal education?"

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University, and has recently served as Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. His scholarly essays have appeared in PMLA, Yale Review, Wilson Quarterly, and Partisan Review, and his commentaries and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TLS, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Weekly Standard, Reason Magazine, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, Civil Rights Chronicle, and the galvanizing The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Furman
• Furman University
• Tocqueville lecture series
• Mark Bauerlein
• politics
• political science
• liberal education
• liberal democracy
• dumbest generation

[DjuraHedonism]

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