Building a New Kind of Department at Clemson
For the last 50 years, serious academics have lamented the indoctrination, censorship, and bureaucratization of American higher education. Rarely have they been able to do anything about it.
Those days are over. At my school, South Carolina’s Clemson University, we are pushing back. The Clemson University Board of Trustees recently approved the creation of a new kind of academic department. Over the course of the next year, we will hire faculty, create courses, and build a degree program. I have the honor of serving as acting department chair.
The name of our new department, The Lyceum, is borrowed from Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens. Our mission is simple: to revolutionize American higher education. The Lyceum will use a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American Founding, and the principles of moral character. Together, our faculty and students will explore the relationship between ideas and action; the history of human accomplishment; the political and cultural architecture of free societies; the economic principles and institutions of the free-enterprise system; and the requirements of character formation. We aim to inspire our students to pursue intellectual and moral excellence through a rigorous engagement with the great philosophical, literary, historical, and economic texts of Western civilization.
