Welcome from the Chair
Welcome to the Program of Liberal Studies, Notre Dame’s Great Books department. 
The Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) has its roots in the Great Books movement that began in the early twentieth century at Columbia University in New York and at the University of Chicago. The curriculum is built around classic works in literature, philosophy, theology, social science, and natural science. Our students take an integrated series of Great Books seminars and disciplinary courses. We ask them to be active learners, to take part in rigorous and vigorous conversations about complex books and ideas. A glance at the seminar lists and disciplinary course descriptions elsewhere on this website will give you some idea of the challenges and excitement you will find in the Program.
There are other Great Books programs in the United States, most notably at St. John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, but the Program of Liberal Studies is the only such program housed in a research university (and the nation’s premier Catholic research university at that). What does that mean for our students? It means that they are taught by a faculty composed of active research scholars; faculty members are not only current in their fields of study, they are helping to define those fields of study. At the same time, my colleagues are enthusiastically committed to undergraduate education. PLS offers small classes and extensive student-faculty contact.
Because we are an unusual major, we draw an unusual body of students. Conventional wisdom might suggest a safe major, while PLS might seem to represent the road not taken. Our students believe that it makes sense to devote their college years to reading and discussing what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” from Homer to Milton to Dostoevsky to Ralph Ellison, and from Plato to Augustine to Aquinas to Kant and Wittgenstein. As a result, we attract more than our share of intellectually engaged and even voracious students. They are known around campus for their tendency to carry seminar discussions with them to the dining halls and dormitories. They trust that the skills that they acquire—skills of critical thinking and clear oral and written expression—will prepare them for a variety of successful career paths. The experience of our alumnae and alumni suggests that this trust is well placed.
While intellectually curious, they are not only bookish. Our students are also athletes, actors, musicians, activists; in other words, they have interests as broad and varied as those of the Notre Dame student body.
The Great Books movement originally was designed to open the walls of the university, to make the works of the great authors available to working men and women. We continue that spirit at Notre Dame, with a continuing Great Books seminar at South Bend’s Center for the Homeless, which depends on the help of PLS student volunteers, and with PLS student volunteers teaching junior great books courses in local schools.
John Milton wrote that “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them ...; they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” In the Program we are privileged to carry on conversations with the men and women who have left us some of the wisest and most beautiful works of the human mind and spirit. They live in their works, and their works enrich our lives. If this sounds like an adventure you’d like to join, don’t hesitate to visit us at 215 O’Shaughnessy Hall.
Thank you,
Stephen M. Fallon
Chair, Program of Liberal Studies