The review of Truth On Trial: Liberal Education Be Hanged, Robert K. Carlson, Crisis Books, 1995, written by Scott W. Dorsey, Music, Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, gives a misleading impression hat the Great Books program at the University of Kansas (KU) has been destroyed. In fact what Carlson discusses is the KU Integrated Humanities Program of the seventies, which did not survive, but also did not supplant, KU's core Great Books program required of undergraduates. When I asked James Woelfel, the director of KU's Western Civilization Program and a colleague, about Carlson's book, he carefully distinguished the IHP from the Western Civilization Program, the core of liberal arts education at KU that currently enrolls about 2,200 students per semester in intensive study of the traditional Western Great Books. Woelfel noted (in a letter to me): "The object of the IHP was to be a 'classical' alternative which allowed students to take its courses to fulfill all their humanities requirements." It was never the only option for core courses in the Great Books at KU.

The KU Western Civilization Program is highly esteemed for its coherence, excellence, and longevity. It was identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as one of about twenty model programs for 1990-92 and awarded grant funding to mentor other Core programs, such as ours, in a national project, "Engaging Cultural Legacies." In 1991-92, faculty of the University of Montana--Missoula Introduction to Humanities core sequence worked closely with faculty of the University of Kansas Western Civilization Program and studied its curriculum, consisting of selections from over 60 authors of the "classics," from ancient Mesopotamia, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Sophocles through contemporary writers, with strong emphasis on philosophers and historians. We were impressed with the rigor and wide-ranging intellectual vitality of the KU Western Civilization Program. It did not seem to us that the study of the Great Books has been destroyed at the University of Kansas.

Julia Watson
Liberal Studies
UM-Missoula