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National Review College Guide

Foreward

In his introduction to The National Review College Guide, William F. Buckley Jr. said that during the 35 years he edited National Review, many parents wrote him asking that he recommend a good college for their sons and daughters. "This guide," he said, "is an open letter to all such inquirers."

In selecting America's top liberal arts schools, the editors of the guide used three criteria: 1. the quality and availability of the faculty; 2. the quality of the curriculum, with special regard for schools with a liberal arts core that respects the tradition of the West; and 3. the quality of the intellectual environment.

In their preface, the editors concluded:

The independent, courageous liberal arts colleges selected by National Review are doing what the Ivy League schools (and the schools of the Big Ten, Pac Ten, SEC, and every other conference) ought to be doing. They are educating thoughtful Americans.

The guide's comments on Thomas Aquinas College follow:

"The true University of these days is a collection of books." Thomas Carlyle

So began a 1988 article in the Los Angeles Times describing Thomas Aquinas College. The school's philosophy is classically simple. "We read only the greatest minds and the greatest works in every discipline," the college's dean explains. That means that instead of reading the latest monograph on "Existential Meaning in Plato," the students actually read Plato; instead of "Gender, Class, and Meaning in the Middle Ages," the students read Dante.

Thomas Aquinas takes its Catholicism and its patron's philosophy of education seriously. "Thomas Aquinas," a college publication says, "is devoted to scholarship in the Catholic tradition....Rather than compromise the tradition, Thomas Aquinas College meets the secular challenge to Christian wisdom by offering an education that is carefully grounded in the fundamentals of that wisdom and thorough in the development of its parts. Reading the greatest works in this tradition and examining them closely; working in small seminars, tutorials, and laboratories; aiming at the intellectual life instead of activism; believing that education is not an experiment and that teaching without a claim to the truth is both empty and arrogant; giving the entire effort of the faculty to teaching; these things make Thomas Aquinas College unique."

The school's ringing restatement of the creed of liberal learning has proved successful: applications have risen sharply, and Thomas Aquinas has been acknowledged as one of the finest schools in the country by the Wall Street Journal. Despite its tiny size (it has only about 275 students) and its relative youth (it was founded in 1971), law-school deans describe its graduates as "sensational, top-drawer." Several dozen grads have moved to Capitol Hill to apply the values they learned at Thomas Aquinas to congressional staffs.

Classical Roots

There is no mistaking the traditionalism of campus life at Aquinas. Students address one another as Mr. and Miss in the classroom, adhere to a dress code, eschew drugs, and follow a strict moral code. The L.A. Times noted that when someone found a $10 bill on campus, he tacked it up on the wall of the cafeteria where it went untouched for two weeks, "a mute testament to the school's traditions and values." (Eventually, the money was placed in the chapel donation box.)

True to its medievalist roots, the curriculum is self-consciously modeled on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Students are introduced to the trivium through a two-year-long Language Tutorial and a year-long Logic Tutorial. The quadrivium is covered by a four-year-long Mathematics Tutorial (students are required to pass an exam demonstrating proficiency in algebra by the end of their sophomore year) and a one-year Music Tutorial. Students also take a three-year Philosophy Tutorial, a four-year Theology Tutorial and four years of Laboratory study, in addition to four years of seminars in various subjects.

The reading lists are impressive, clearly owing much to the Great Books curriculum formulated by John Erskine at Columbia in the early years of this century. A sweeping tour of the greatest and most influential works of Western civilization, it is surely one of the most rigorous curriculums of any school in the country, St. John's College included. And, like St. John's, it is not for the faint of heart. In their first year, for example, students read the ancient Greeks: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Plato's Ion, Republic, and Symposium; Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides; Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone; the Histories of Herodotus; Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric; Plutarch's Lives; and works by Euripides, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. In the Language Tutorial, students are assigned "Latin: An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors" and "Aids to the Study and Composition of Language." In the Mathematics Tutorial, they read Euclid; in the Laboratory, the reading list includes Aristotle (Parts of Animals); Fabre (Souvenirs Entomologiques); Tinbergen (Evolution of Gull Behavior); and works by Von Frisch, Galen, Harvey, Schwann, and Linnaeus. In the Philosophy Tutorial, students read and discuss more Plato, as well as Porphyry and Aristotle. The Theology Tutorial consists of readings from the Bible. And all this is for freshmen! It gives students a good taste of what lies ahead: at Thomas Aquinas, the pace does not slacken, nor are there "gut" courses in the "Theory of Rock 'n' Roll" to distract students.

In the second year, students move on to Ancient Rome and the Renaissance: Vergil, Lucretius, Cicero, Tacitus, Epictetus, St. Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and St. Thomas Aquinas in the seminar. In the Language Tutorial, the study of Latin goes on, including Thomas of Erfurt's Grammatica Speculativa and selections from Horace. More Vergil. Readings in the Mathematics Tutorial include Apollonius, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Plato, and Kepler; and in the Laboratory, students read Aristotle, Aquinas, Lavoisier, Avogadro, Couper, Gay-Lussac, Dalton, and Cannizzaro. The Philosophy Tutorial includes readings from the pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, and Aquinas. The sophomore reading list in the Theology Tutorial includes St. Augustine, St. Athanasius, St. Anselm, and St. John Damascene.

The third year's seminar requires students to read Cervantes, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Milton, Gibbon, Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Spinoza, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, Adam Smith, de Tocqueville, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and Comte. In their Music Tutorial they study Boethius, Aristotle, Plato, and Mozart; in the Mathematics Tutorial they read Viete, Descartes, Archimedes, Griffin, and Frege; in the Laboratory course, they read Galileo and Newton; in the Philosophy Tutorial they study (once again) Aristotle; and in the Theology Tutorial they read, of course, Aquinas.

In their senior year the reading list brings students to the very edge of the modern era, but retains its classical roots. Students read and discuss Tolstoy, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feuerbach, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Mendel, Nietzsche, Twain, Austen, James, Freud, Jung, Newman, Melville, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Keynes, Eliot, St. Pius X, Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, and, completing the circle, Plato. In mathematics: Taylor, Dedekind, Lobachevski, and Einstein; in the Laboratory, students are introduced to modern physics; while in Philosophy and Theology they continue their reading of Aristotle and Aquinas.

Reading and Writing

Students at Thomas Aquinas are expected to write often and well. Freshmen in need of extra help participate in a writing preceptorial. Moreover, all students must write a senior thesis, which is considered an integral part of the curriculum. The thesis provides both an opportunity and a challenge, since it demands considerable independence of thought on the student's part. In effect, the student is expected to join in what the University of Chicago's Robert Maynard Hutchins called the "Great Conver-sation" of Western civilization. "[The student] frames a question of the sort that the authors of the program frame," the College explains, "and, under the direction of a tutor, refines, explores, and answers that question. The student's answer need not be ultimate, but must not be superficial or simply the repetition of authority."

As an example of the close contact between faculty and students, all students meet twice a year with all of their tutors in what is known as the "Don Rags" to discuss their work. The close contact with faculty members is consistent with Thomas Aquinas's distinctive culture. This it traces to the Latin source of the word "college," which suggests a "sending together on a mission." Says a college publication:

If the campus itself is far from luxurious (new construction is adding to its amenities), Thomas Aquinas has succeeded in making itself an active intellectual center. A regular Friday lecture series brings in noted scholars from around the country on a regular basis to speak on subjects ranging from "Newman's Idea of a University" and "C.S. Lewis: A Literary Approach," to "Restoring the Constitution" (by National Review's Joe Sobran).

In 1982, Mother Teresa delivered the school's commencement address. Her advice to Thomas Aquinas's graduates: "You should be a new light." The school seems to have taken her admonition to heart.

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