“The secret ingredient behind the most successful great-books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force. I might be accused here of advocating that students be put inside a bubble and disconnected from the real world, and I would answer that yes, that much should be obvious. It is precisely the world, understood as the social and economic structures into which we are born, through which we secure the necessities of survival and which hedge the boundaries of our social worlds, that an educational community must shut out, for the same reason that a monastery must do so: there is common work to be done that demands the cooperation of free and equal human beings.

“This is why a really good college is a little bit of a cult—not because we ought to ignore the world but because there are encounters between persons that the world does not allow…This world does not afford us space to work out and rehearse the relationships that we could and ought to have with one another in the world that has yet to come: those spaces must be claimed and built and defended.”

—Daniel Walden, “The Left Case for Great Books,” The Point 36 (February 1, 2026)