History of Great Books in American Higher Education

To understand Mercer’s current Great Books program, we must first understand where it comes from and what its purpose was. The Great Books program began at Columbia University in 1929, where Professor John Erskine implemented an elective Honors Course that would inspire later programs. In Erskine's class, students studied a list he had made of “Important Books” in small, discussion-based seminars. Erskine designed the class to address what he saw as a failing of contemporary higher education. He believed too many students were scared by the prestige of the classics and incorrectly thought they needed historical context to understand them. In his essay "The Delight of the Great Books," Erskine writes about his attempts to encourage students to see the Great Books both as art and as a way to understand humanity.

Erskine's educational philosophy had a profound impact on many of his students, including Mortimer Adler. Adler, a former "Important Books" student, brought this approach to the classics with him as a professor at the University of Chicago. There, Adler used a “Great Books” list in an undergraduate seminar similar to Erskine’s. He likewise joined with university president Robert Maynard Hutchins to create adult reading groups based on his list of “Great Books” beginning in 1931. Like Adler's Great Books courses, these groups engaged readers in small discussions about the texts. As the Great Books philosophy encourages decentralized, egalitarian conversations where all participants have an equal standing, Adler and Hutchins were able to start these groups without having to be active participants themselves.

Adler and Hutchins’ program formally became the Great Books Foundation in 1947. The two men marketed their fifty-four volume leather-bound collection "Great Books of the Western World" to post-war middle class Americans. Adler and Hutchins hoped to make the Great Books accessible to all Americans by selling them the texts and engaging them in the small-group discussions sponsored by their foundation. 

However, though accessibility was their stated goal, Adler and Hutchins soon received criticism because the translations included in their collection did not use modern, widely accessible language. Furthermore, because Hutchins and Adler believed individuals needed to experience the texts for themselves, these translations had no footnotes or historical context. This emphasis on the intellectual purity of the texts would become a defining feature of the Great Books program in later years, even as critics continued to argue that the lack of context made the texts inaccessible to many readers and therefore subverted the program's goal of making the Great Books accessible.

As the idea of “Great Books” spread across the country, universities implemented its educational philosophy in different ways. For example, as Adler and Hutchins were growing their Great Books Foundation, Great Books enthusiasts implemented their ideas at a small college in Annapolis called St. John’s College. St. John's exclusively offers Great Books-style classes for all subjects, from history to science. Its unique pedagogy made St. John's the center for Great Books in the following decades, and present day students still take entirely Great Books-style classes almost identical to the original offerings.

However, from the beginning, there was disagreement at different universities about which books to include on the list and how best to implement the program. As the committee in charge of defining the reading list for Columbia University highlighted in 1946, “any list is a compromise.” In other words, the program’s creators always recognized that there could never be an exhaustive list of “Great Books” because their time to teach these books was limited. Founders such as Erskine and Adler never intended to create a complete list of “The Great Books.” Instead, they hoped to introduce students to some of our culture’s most influential texts. Therefore, because any reading list of "Great Books" could inherently never be complete, universities had to make a series of compromises within their curricula. 

Notably, though the program began at Columbia and the University of Chicago, neither school has ever had a “Great Books” program per se. Instead, these schools offer programs modeled off of the Great Books philosophy without the Great Books name. At Columbia, students discuss the classics in small groups in the "Core," while University of Chicago students do so in their "Humanities" and "Civilization Studies" general education classes. These two schools have created a tradition of borrowing the philosophy, but not the name, of the Great Books program that can be seen at universities across the country. This tradition might have evolved because schools do not want the baggage or restrictions that have developed over time with the term “Great Books.”  

These Great Books-adjacent programs now exist at schools ranging from Yale to Notre Dame and Boston University. In these programs, as at Columbia and the University of Chicago, students participate in small, discussion-based classes focused on classic texts that are highly similar to the classes taught by Erskine and Adler . However, these schools do not identify themselves with the Great Books program. Furthermore, in many cases, they offer texts written by female or non-European authors that did not appear on the original "Great Books" lists.

On the other hand, institutions such as Thomas Aquinas College, St. Thomas More College, and Magdalen College of Liberal Arts chose to follow the example of St. John’s College. These colleges have implemented a curriculum entirely based around the Great Books philosophy. This decision seems to correspond with their mission as religious institutions first, and higher education institutions second, as their Great Books reading lists focus almost entirely on Christian authors. 

While the curriculum at these Christian colleges has remained consistent, other institutions offered Great Books or Great Books-adjacent programs in the past, but no longer do so. For example, Stanford began offering a course called “History of Western Civilization” in 1935. In 1980, this course was replaced by “Western Culture,” a Great Books Program by a different name. However, soon after Stanford implemented this program, faculty and students began to criticize the core list for being overwhelmingly “male-dominated and Eurocentric." 

Critics argued that the program was a vestige of an outdated approach to education and that Stanford needed to prepare its students for an “increasingly non-white, non-European and non-Christian world." While the Stanford protesters had their demands for change met when the university agreed to update the curriculum, they also inadvertently killed their unique Great Books-adjacent program. Instead of keeping the Great Books-style classes and implementing a more diverse reading list, Stanford chose to do away with the program entirely. Now, the school offers a standard general education program indistinguishable from such programs at other universities with no trace of its unique Great Books-inspired roots. 

The failed attempts for change at Stanford place the university on one end of the Great Books spectrum. At the other end is St. John's University, which continues to offer exclusively Great Books courses. In between, closer to the Stanford side, are universities such as Columbia and Yale that offer Great Books-style classes under a different name. And on the side closer to St. John's is Mercer University, with its "Great Books" general education track, which is discussed in the next section.