A&S Pilots Classical Liberal Arts Program

For more than a decade, Angel Adams Parham has taught and written about the liberal arts and the enduring value of reading great books and classical texts closely. 

She has long thought the University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences could be a natural setting for making that kind of education available even more broadly. So, about a year ago, the associate professor of sociology put those ideas into a proposal for a new classical liberal arts program at UVA. 

She pitched the idea of building on the University’s existing Engagements program to give interested first-year students a year-long opportunity to study enduring texts together and then to create additional opportunities for students who want to continue that pursuit in more advanced courses. 

However, Parham did not envision leading the initiative herself. Instead, she suggested bringing in Jennifer Frey, a philosopher and internationally recognized scholar of virtue and moral psychology who had previously served as dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which also featured a Great Books curriculum focused on the study of enduring texts and questions. 

As of this fall, Frey, who is a visiting professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, is helping turn Parham’s idea into a reality as the Director of the Program in Classical Liberal Arts. The Program will offer an optional “Great Books” experience within the Engagements, with plans to engage other faculty at UVA to expand the courses and opportunities to participate in the program over time. 

A Deeper Dive into the Engagements 

The program is not a new major or minor. Instead, it is an optional pathway for students who want to pursue a deeper study of classical liberal arts during and beyond their first year. 

The starting point is the Engagements, a central component of Arts & Sciences’ general education curriculum. The program gives first-year students a series of small, discussion-based courses organized around four broad areas: ethics, aesthetics, empirics and difference. The Engagements are designed to introduce students to cross-disciplinary ways of thinking that can inform their subsequent studies. 

The Classical Liberal Arts Program will build on that structure by offering students a cohort experience centered on sustained reading and discussion of enduring texts that have shaped human thought for centuries. 

This fall, Frey is teaching an Engagements course called “Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem,” which features readings from Homer, Sappho, Plato, the Hebrew Bible and Marcus Aurelius, and she will offer another Engagements course in the spring. Beginning next fall, the College plans to pilot a larger cohort, with faculty teaching across the four Engagements areas from a classical liberal arts perspective. 

The approach will be intentionally collaborative. Faculty participating in the program will work from a shared syllabus and will have input on which texts are included. 

“We are planning to bring together the foundational faculty who are interested in doing this to talk together about what kinds of books should be on that syllabus,” Parham said. “We want to build diverse voices into the syllabus while also having the classic texts that many people are going to expect to be there.” 

The goal, Parham added, is not to prescribe what every student should read, but to give them more options. 

“Not everybody's going to want their Engagements to be about reading Plato,” Frey said, but for those who are interested, the program will give them that chance. 

Reading Together, Thinking Together 

What makes the program distinctive is not simply the texts students will read but the way they will read them. 

Frey describes the approach as a Socratic, Great Books-style education in which students engage texts as participants in an ongoing conversation rather than simply studying them as historical artifacts. 

“Not just to read Homer, and to write about what Homer said, but to think about and with Homer,” Frey said. “To think about what Homer has to say to us today.” 

The program will ask students to wrestle with questions that have no easy or final answers: What does it mean to be human? What is freedom? What constitutes a good life? What is justice? 

For Parham, that shared intellectual experience is one of the program’s most important goals. 

“The goal is to bring a sense of cohesiveness and intellectual community so that students and faculty who are opting into this will have a shared basis of conversation around great enduring questions,” she said. “There's a lot of power in having read and grappled with the same text,” Parham said. 

That shared experience is also intended to connect intellectual inquiry with the formation of the individual. “I think we really believe that an education is very much about the formation of the human person,” Parham said. “What kind of life do you want to live and why?” 

Similarly, Frey sees classical liberal arts education as an opportunity for students to cultivate habits of mind that extend beyond disciplinary knowledge. 

“The liberal arts have to do with cultivating freedom,” she said. “So, we're thinking about habits of mind that help us to pursue not just knowledge but wisdom.” 

A Conversation That Keeps Growing 

Parham’s own understanding of what a “great text” can do is reflected in one of the books she returns to repeatedly: W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. 

She first encountered the 1903 work as an undergraduate in a large African American history survey course. Over time, she came to see it as an example of the kind of intellectual encounter the Classical Liberal Arts Program hopes to foster. 

Du Bois, she said, brings together classical texts, African American culture and history, music and philosophy while asking fundamental questions about injustice and the possibility of a better life. 

“Sometimes people view reading great texts as just reading these stodgy old books that are frozen in time,” Parham said. “But I think Du Bois is an exemplar of what it means to read great works and weave them into your understanding of who you are…weave them together with the tapestry of your own life and history and culture and create something vibrant and new.” 

That vision also informs the program’s longer-term ambitions. The initial pilot is expected to be relatively small, but Parham hopes that students’ experiences will generate interest in expanding the program. She envisions a future in which many students share some common experience of reading and discussing enduring texts, creating connections that extend beyond individual classrooms. 

The program could also give faculty opportunities to cross disciplinary boundaries, teaching texts they might not otherwise encounter in their courses, and engaging in conversations with colleagues as well as students. 

Frey is currently working to recruit current UVA faculty and develop the program’s curriculum. The initial pilot is expected to include about 60 students across three sections, taught by three or four faculty members. 

A&S Dean Christa Acampora, Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy, said the initiative represents an investment in strengths already broadly present in Arts & Sciences. 

“This effort is less about starting something brand new than it is about creating a platform for it to flourish,” she said. “We're incredibly fortunate to have Angel Parham among our colleagues already thinking about advanced learning opportunities. We were also lucky to have the unique opportunity to recruit a nationally recognized leader like Jennifer Frey to help us build on the foundation UVA has developed over its 200-year history.” 

According to Fotini Kondyli, Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology and director of the Engagements, “The Classical Liberal Arts Program is a welcome addition to the Engagements, offering students another pathway through a curriculum already centered on sustained inquiry, close engagement with texts and ideas and meaningful intellectual exchange. Across the Engagements, students are invited to ask big and enduring questions about human experience, values, knowledge and difference in small, discussion-based classes. The Classical Liberal Arts Program is therefore a natural fit within this intellectual community, particularly our Cohort model, where students pursue a shared theme throughout the year from multiple perspectives and disciplinary lenses.” 

Frey and Parham are now inviting faculty members who are interested in the project to learn more and consider participating. 

“We would welcome faculty who want to reach out and might want to learn more and even consider teaching in the program,” Parham said. “We'd be very happy to hear from them.”

This is part of a series on the vibrancy of the study of classics at UVA.