Structured Liberal Education
Structured Liberal Education (SLE) (pronounced "slee") is an academically challenging program at Stanford University that offers an alternative three-course sequence for FreshMen to fulfill their Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) and Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) requirements. With a year-long schedule of nine units in the fall and winter quarters and ten in The Spring quarter, SLE is unique in its intellectual rigor, multi-disciplinary approach, and residence-based structure.
All SLE participants live, dine, and attend class in the same residence hall, Florence Moore. They live in either The All-freshman dorm, Alondra, which is made up of half SLE students and half IHUM students, or in one of the two four-class dorms, Cardenal and Faisan. Many of the upperclassmen in Cardenal and Faisan are former SLE students, which helps maintain a SLE community spanning the different years. In the main lounge of Florence Moore, known as the SLE lounge, students attend lectures given by professors within many departments at Stanford and by visiting guest lecturers. In addition, students participate in small-group sections, in which they discuss the lectures and assigned literature from SLE's extensive, diverse, and ever-evolving reading list. Films, often relating to the material of study, are screened weekly, and student-produced plays are regularly part of The Syllabus. Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" is traditionally performed in the fall. SLE also provides freshman with intensive individual writing tutorials.
Structured Liberal Education was the brainchild of Stanford history professor Mark Mancall, who is still the program's faculty director. Internationally-renowned political theorist Hannah Arendt also played an instrumental role in SLE's creation, having been one of the original proponents for the program's enactment. In some respects, Stanford's SLE is comparable to other notable "Great Books" programs, such as Directed Studies at Yale University, the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, and the curriculum at St. John's College, but SLE's reading list is more internationally diverse. With Mark Mancall retiring at the end of this year and Suzanne Greenberg, the other mainstay of the program, scheduled to retire at the end of next year, the survival of the program has been called into question. Many students, valuing the tight-knit community formed by the shared experience of SLE, are deeply concerned about this possibility.
Recently, Roland Greene, a faculty member of the English and Comparative Literature departments, was named The New program director 1, to serve concurrently with Mark Mancall for Autumn Quarter 2007, and take full control upon the resumption of classes in 2008. This was first announced to students at the final SLE dinner for the 2006-2007 class.
SLE will be moving under the auspices of many Humanities departments at Stanford, drawing upon prior connections with faculty in these departments, many of whom were one-time or even recurring guest lecturers for students in the program.
The bueracratic cover provided by SLE's adoption should compensate for the loss of Mancall, ensuring the program's relative safety for at least a few years.
Citations
1 http://ual.stanford.edu/AP/univ_req/IHUM_SLE/SLE.html
External links
- Official SLE Website
- Article on SLE culture in Stanford Magazine
- Article in The Stanford Daily touching on the implications of the SLE "nerd" stereotype
- Editorial in The Harvard Crimson imploring Harvard to create a "Great Books" program similar to Stanford's SLE and Yale's Directed Studies programs
- Taiwanese academic journal article describing SLE and citing it as an exemplary American model of how to promote residence-based academic learning
- Berlin's European College of Liberal Arts announcement of Structured Liberal Education, an international summer university emulating Stanford's program
- YouTube video of student relieving exam stress by singing "Cabaret"
- YouTube video of another student relieving exam stress in another way