User:Czar/drafts/Directed Studies

The experimental Directed Studies program was adopted after World War II as an honors undergraduate track. The program was conservative and reactionary in its attempt to revive the tradition of teaching a classical curriculum and its accompanying "community of intellectual experience". A 1951 article in Time magazine brought the program national prominence as "Yale's boldest attempt to make education whole"—a leading effort to revitalize the practice of teaching "universal knowledge" by uniting studies in history, literature, and science through philosophy. Only open to a few freshmen, it began as a four-year program before dropping to a single-year course with an optional second year. The program had continual funding issues and was at one point rescued by a grant from Paul Mellon. It evolved into a single-year program with three yearlong seminars in literature, philosophy, and political philosophy.

In 1995, Yale expanded enrollment from 85 students to 125 as part of a gesture to affirm the importance of Western civilization studies in the college amid pressure from alumni.

Western canon

Directed Studies served as a model for the common curriculum shared between first-year students at Yale-NUS College, Yale's partnership with the National University of Singapore. The faculty of the college, which opened in 2013, expanded the great books program to include Asian literature, scientific inquiry, and quantitative reasoning. The required, common nature of the courses was expected to foster community.

mentions
 * Directed Studies is a Great Books curriculum at Yale. As of 2008, the program was limited to 125 students a year. Journalist Charles Lane praised Yale for offering the program as an alternative to nihilism in the humanities.
 * optional program (compared to Columbia), solely Western texts
 * if needed, NUS's first-year required curriculum\
 * if needed, NUS's first-year required curriculum\

Program alumni include art historian Kermit S. Champa, rhetoric scholar Richard A. Lanham, former Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead, Frederick Crews, David Frum, and T. K. Seung. Instructors associated with the program include Charles Hill,[cn] Anthony Kronman, Donald Kagan, and historian Thomas Corwin Mendenhall,


 * context re previous programs footnote 9: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/45423
 * fn 27 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/504013
 * cf. UT Core Texts