学术活动发布与订制系统

A former President of The National Book Critics Circle, the U.S. organization of more than 600 literary critics, scholars, book editors and book reviewers, Romano was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, cited by the Pulitzer Board for "bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics." Earlier this year, he published America the Philosophical, a 672-page study of the role of philosophy in America. The New York Times , in a cover review in its Sunday Book Review, called the book "ambitious....convincing....an encyclopedic survey of the life of the mind in the U.S."

Liberal arts education in the United States is often said to be in crisis for a number of reasons. Some point to the growth of student interest in subjects such as business and computers, and a supposed decline of interest in traditional subjects such as literature, history and philosophy. Others blame the so-called "corporatization" of American institutions of higher education, with its replacement of academic values by capitalist values. Recently a third possible threat to liberal arts education has been widely cited: the advent of the MOOC--an acronym for "Massive Open Online Course." Some fear that this kind of course--taught over the Internet by famous professors to an unlimited number of students, though rarely for credit--will undermine traditional teaching in small liberal arts colleges.

As a result of this atmosphere of crisis, many observers of American academe have come out with books pondering the current situation: they include Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities; Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; Andrew Delbanco's College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be; Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University; and Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids--and What We Can Do About It.

Addressing this issue, and drawing on the observations and claims in these books and my own recent book, America the Philosophical, I will argue that liberal arts education remains strong and vibrant, a special form of education with a special goal. One proof of that is that many countries, particularly in Europe, are trying to recreate the American liberal arts model in their educational systems. My own book, America the Philosophical, argues that the United States stands as one of the paramount philosophical cultures in the history of the world because it incorporates many of the values of liberal arts education. As such, it rejects the longstanding cliche of America as an anti-intellectual society. Along the way, I contend that Isocrates, the nearly forgotten Greek philosopher who rejected certainty and not Socrates--stands as the philosophical ancestor whom Americans should honor.