What I Saw at Ursinus College: A Core Curriculum Still Doing the Work

I recently traveled to Ursinus College, a small liberal arts school outside Philadelphia, to give a few presentations. The faculty who invited me did not pull punches on the agenda. They wanted me to address Israel after October 7, the future of DEI, the state of campus free expression and viewpoint diversity, and the institutional forces that have made all of these areas of debate so combustible. I said yes, but I went in apprehensive. I had no read on the students, no sense of the political temperature on campus, no signal about whether the room would treat any of this as an invitation to think or as an opportunity to perform. A talk like this one could have gone sideways in familiar ways. It did not. The day went, in fact, remarkably well. The students were sharp, attentive, and substantively engaged. They asked hard questions and were willing to hear hard answers. They disagreed with one another in front of me, and with me to my face, without any of it tipping into grievance theater. Several stayed after to keep arguing and debating, which is the surest sign that something real was happening. I left impressed, and puzzled. Why was this campus different? The answer is the Common Intellectual Experience , or CIE, the academic spine of an Ursinus education. Every student, regardless of major, takes a two-semester course built around a shared set of readings and four animating questions: What should matter to me? How should we live together? How can we understand the world? What will I do? The seminars are capped at sixteen, and a physics professor and an English professor and a business professor are all teaching the same texts in the same week. Students argue about Plato and Genesis in the fall , and in the spring they move through Frederick Douglass, Mill’s On Liberty , Adam Smith, Marx, Freud, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow , and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , among others. It is a curriculum that refuses to flinch from either the canonical or the contemporary. This is not a local invention. It is a continuation of one of the great traditions in American higher education. Columbia launched Contemporary Civilization in 1919, the first college general education program of its kind in the country, and built around it the Literature Humanities, Art Humanities, and Music Humanities sequences every Columbia College student still takes today. The University of Chicago, under Robert Hutchins, expanded the model and has revised but never abandoned it. The reading lists overlap with what Ursinus students encounter, for the same reason: a serious liberal education requires shared texts, shared questions, and shared time spent arguing about both. Many institutions walked away from this long ago. The standard architecture is now a buffet of distribution requirements, and the recent fashion is to paper the gap over with civil-discourse modules students complete before arrival. Harvard’s “ Perspectives ” training, developed with the Constructive Dialogue Institute and required of all first-years, is the most visible example. As I have written before , thoughtfully designed online frames can be a useful start. But a module, however polished, cannot do the work of a year-long seminar. What CIE does beautifully is build common ground over time. By sophomore year, every Ursinus student has spent two semesters arguing about the same texts, working through the same questions, learning the same habits of reading and disagreement. They have a shared frame of reference, which means that when something hard comes up, they can reach for it. They know what it feels like to encounter an argument they hate and still engage with it on its merits. They have learned that disagreement is the point of a liberal education, not a threat to it. I will admit a certain envy. I teach at Sarah Lawrence, justly known for its seminar tradition and commitment to small, intensive teaching. We have many of the raw ingredients Ursinus uses to such good effect. What we do not have, and what I increasingly wish we did, is the shared spine: a common course, a common set of texts, a common set of questions every student wrestles with before going their separate ways. This is structural. My talk at Ursinus could go where it went, and stay civil while it did, because the institution had spent a year equipping students with the intellectual and moral training a serious conversation requires. CIE is doing the work that Columbia and Chicago invented, that most of higher education has either outsourced or abandoned, and that almost everyone now wishes they had back. Ursinus has kept it alive, refined it, and made it central to what the college is. Anyone wondering where a serious liberal education still happens should visit Ursinus. The model works and it’s meaningfully changing lives and futures. The post What I Saw at Ursinus College: A Core Curriculum Still Doing the Work appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .