While flipping through my latest edition of Chronicles — a magazine I recommend to you, by the way — I came across an article by Jack Trotter entitled “Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!” It was a good article, and while I didn’t agree with all his criticisms of the other colleges he discussed, I really appreciated his conclusion.
“At least two colleges have begun to recover the full scope of the classical and Christian traditions in higher education: New Saint Andrews College (founded in 1994) in Moscow, Idaho, and the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (founded in 1978) in Merrimack, New Hampshire. At both these institutions, the core curriculum is the curriculum; there are no majors, or, rather, every student shares the same concentration in classical and Christian liberal arts, and classical languages are required of all. Just as importantly, both colleges are closely affiliated with religious establishments. New Saint Andrews is very much a work of Moscow’s Christ Church, a large and dynamic congregation of traditional Calvinists who also run a pastoral-training program featuring rigorous study of biblical Greek and Hebrew . . .”
I browsed the syllabus and found it intriguing; I like the pass/fail approach.