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Research,
Inquiry and Opinion |
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Please
direct all inquiries to: Prof. Bruce Gans. Wright College. Room L372. 4300 N. Narragansett. Chicago, Illinois 60634. Ph: 773 481-8014. Email: bmg1030@hotmail.com |
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Introduction
You
are resting your eyes on something very special. On one level, it is perhaps
the first scholarly journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences composed entirely
by students in the history of the City Colleges of Chicago. The focus of Symposium
is to publish annually student inquiry into the authors who collectively
compose the canon, the Great Books. Although student newspapers and journals
of poetry and fiction abound in community and four-year colleges, this journal
may well be the only scholarly journal
published by any community college in the country.
But the much more significant meaning of this document exists on several
other levels. It is the embodiment of a profound truth whose lonely existence I
have known of for many years of teaching, a truth whose establishment within and
beyond the scholarly community is essential. That is, that community college
students write about the best that has been thought and said in Western Culture
with proficiency, insight, intellectual excitement and with frequent
originality.
The papers herein were written under the guidance of several professors
in different classes. Almost all also received public recognition in the form of
two academic awards for scholarly work established by the Great Books
Curriculum—the Matthew Arnold Prize and the Socrates Prize for which they were
nominiated by various Great Books curriculum faculty. The quality of scholarly
work com studemmmattedees produce
work h beyond all possible doubt to any reader who takes the trouble to
read them.
Why is this so significant?
What immediately comes to mind is that this magazine lays forever to rest
all the objections raised by faculty and students themselves that real enduring
works of the mind are either beyond the abilities of community college students
or inconsequential to their interests or intellectual and personal needs.
Herein are scholarly papers produced, in some cases by people who have
always been indifferent to writing and were unaware of the canon or who had
avoided it phobically.
With the guidance of their professors, however, all of them were
intellectually transformed, broadened and stimulated by what they read and who
in the end gained a pride in their own capacity for intellectual and
compositional mastery that will be of use to them in their other classes and
which will enable them to cultivate a richer mental life than they otherwise
would have had at their disposal for the rest of their lives. And in the
process, their insights often opened up new perceptions to the faculty who were
to that degree taught by their own students. And why not? The Great Books are
nothing but people like you and me who are concerned about
the same things we all are---human nature, how to live, the meaning of
life.
It may come as a surprise, therefore,
only to those who have not encountered the Great Books that the the
papers in Symposium were edited far
less than those of many if not most magazines.
In
the future the Great Books Curriculum plans to publish student scholarly work
that centers around the semester long theme around which we are now organizing
our reading lists.
Bruce
Gans
Department
of English
Great Books Curriculum Coordinator