The gift of books

Pepperdine's distinctive vision of the liberal arts

I want to talk about the history of the liberal arts at Pepperdine, but first I need to tell you about 65 presents I received the summer after I graduated from high school. Dr. Steven Lemley, who had served as Pepperdine’s provost in the 1990s, was making room on his office shelves, and he offered me his hand-me-downs. So one day I met Steve in the CCB, and he gave me several bankers boxes of books, which I lugged home. Only later did I come to realize how much of the story of the liberal arts at Pepperdine could be told through the particular 65 books I received that day. So what were the books, exactly?

Eleven of them were The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, the husband and wife team with the audacity to attempt the whole history of human civilization, which they published one volume at a time from 1935 to 1975. The other 54 books were the Great Books of the Western World, a set of classic texts from Homer to Freud, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1952 under the guidance of Mortimer Adler.

Great Books of the Western World and The Story of Civilization

Your eighteen-year-old author was overcome by such an embarrassment of riches. I would enter Pepperdine’s Seaver College as an English major later that year, and I was already registered to take the Great Books Colloquium. So you can see why I would be excited to get my hands on so much Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dante and Dostoevsky. I knew I was happy to have those books, but I didn't know what Adler and the Durants had meant to Pepperdine.

The Durants and the unity of knowledge

Will Durant first made his name as the author of The Story of Philosophy, a book tracing the course of that discipline from Socrates through Dewey. Published in 1926, it sold millions of copies.¹ The success of this work funded a life of relative leisure for Durant, freeing him up to devote the next several decades to compiling an even more ambitious work: a history of civilization.

Durant’s The Story of Civilization is a massive undertaking, covering the history of Eastern and Western civilization in eleven volumes totaling over 13,000 pages. It is a work of history, but it delights in literature, philosophy, and the arts. It covers Caesar and Napoleon without neglecting Portuguese poets and Italian painters of even middling achievement. The first six volumes were published under Durant’s name, with the last five also crediting his wife Ariel as a co-author.

The Durants had a long association with Pepperdine. Will gave lectures on campus in the 1940s and 50s on the lessons of history and philosophy.² In 1975, the Durants received honorary doctorates from Pepperdine, and in 1977 they were honored at the first Pepperdine Associates dinner.³

Will and Ariel Durant receiving honorary doctorates from Pepperdine president William S. Banowsky, 1975, Pepperdine University Commencement Collection.

What was it about the Durants that so appealed to Pepperdine? They embodied the liberal arts by undertaking refined, leisured study for its own sake. But even more important, I think, was the Durants’ contribution to celebrating the unity of knowledge. The Story of Civilization challenged a popular view of academic life: one of increasing specialization and carefully policed borders between disciplines. By synthesizing history with philosophy, literature, and art, the Durants made themselves popular with liberal arts schools like Pepperdine, where the curriculum aimed for breadth as well as depth.

In the early 1970s, Pepperdine had designed an innovative new curriculum for the launch of its Malibu campus, requiring courses across all six of its academic divisions: natural science, social science, humanities, communication, religion, and fine arts. Among the plan’s aims were “unifying knowledge around Christian truth” and “avoid[ing] the limitations of over-specialization.”⁴ The interdisciplinarity of the curriculum was built into the physical environment, with all the academic buildings clustered tightly to encourage cross-pollination.⁵

It was in this context that the Durants were embraced as figureheads of Pepperdine’s curriculum, with its focus on the unity of knowledge. Pepperdine probably also hoped that it would derive some measure of reputational benefit from its association with such prominent scholars. In the 1970s, the university had some success in attracting scholars of international renown to raise its academic reputation, including Nobel laureate Willard Libby and nuclear pioneer Edward Teller.⁶

Adler and the Great Books

Mortimer Adler was not as involved with Pepperdine as were the Durants, but his influence on the university’s understanding of the liberal arts has certainly been greater. Adler was a product of Columbia University, where he took a course in the Great Books under John Erskine in the 1920s. At the urging of president Robert Hutchins, Adler started a Great Books program at the University of Chicago, which gave rise to the Great Books movement in American higher education and to the Great Books of the Western World (edited by Hutchins and Adler) that I lugged home from Dr. Lemley’s office.

Adler made only one visit to Pepperdine that I’m aware of, in December 1984. The reason for the visit was ostensibly to allow Adler to promote his book The Paideia Proposal, but at the invitation of GSEP dean Bill Adrian, Adler also met with a young professor named Michael Gose, who would go on to launch Seaver’s Great Books Colloquium.⁷ Started in 1986 with help from professors Victoria Myers, Norman Hughes, and Royce Clark, the colloquium consisted of small seminars where students would read and discuss classic works of literature and philosophy.

Much like the Durants’ work, Adler’s Great Books of the Western World brought together philosophy, literature, history, science, and more, and the Great Books program at Pepperdine has inherited this broad interest.

The Great Books program has now been running for nearly forty years, introducing generations of students to a treasury of human thought. When I took Great Books, I didn’t appreciate the role Adler and his Great Books of the Western World had played in bringing the program to Pepperdine—I didn’t need to know that history in order to benefit from an unmediated encounter with the great works of the western tradition.

Teaching the Great Books makes a lot of sense at Seaver College, where part of the school’s mission is to transmit “the noblest ideas of Western culture—the achievements of science and technology as well as the artistic, intellectual, and ethical heritage of the Western world.”⁸ As the Great Books program embodies this mission more directly than much of the rest of the curriculum, I hope the college will redouble its investments in this direction, especially as the Western Civilization requirement has been dropped from the core curriculum.⁹

This is an exciting time for Great Books–style education in the United States. Classical schools are booming, even as the number of school-aged children declines.¹⁰ By Pepperdine’s hundredth anniversary in 2037, there may be 1.5 million K–12 students in classical schools across the country, many of them at Christian schools, and that number doesn’t include many more in classical homeschool programs like Classical Conversations.¹¹

Pepperdine stands to win many of these students if it can further establish itself as a leading Great Books institution. It recently took another step in this direction with its announcement that Seaver’s admissions department would accept test scores from the new Classical Learning Test (CLT), an alternative to the SAT and ACT that uses passages from classic literature for its reading comprehension section.¹²

Great Books isn’t the only kind of liberal arts education. But I think Mortimer Adler and Will and Ariel Durant would be pleased to know that Pepperdine was still devoted to a broad-based vision of the liberal arts that insists on giving students unmediated experiences with the best that has been thought and said. I think George Pepperdine, who envisioned a Christian college providing a first-class liberal arts education, would be pleased as well.

1. “Teachers: The Essence of the Centuries,” TIME, 13 Aug. 1965.

2. “Famed Durant To Speak at Campus Forum,” The Graphic, 11 Feb. 1949: 1; cf. “Forum Event Will Feature Philosopher,” The Graphic, 4 Mar. 1955: 1.

3. “Historians to receive degrees at luncheon,” Inner View, 31 Oct. 1975: 2; cf. Lyn Martindale, “Durants honored at event,” The Graphic, 10 Nov. 1977: 1.

4. David Baird et al., Opportunities for Liberal Learning in the 21st Century, 1997: 9.

5. W. David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepperdine Univ. Press (2016): 310.

6. Cynthia M. Horner, “Pep establishes science position,” The Graphic, 7 Nov. 1975: 1. Cf. Patti Mazza, “Spitzer Chair sponsors Pep energy symposium,” The Graphic, 16 Jan. 1976: 2.

7. Michael Gose to Sarah R. Fisher, 20 Sept. 2011, Folder 1, Box 11, David Baird Papers, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives: 1. Cf. Michael Gose, Great Books: Everyone’s Inheritance, Rowman & Littlefield (2024): xiii–xiv.

8. Mission of Seaver College.

9. For more details on the recent changes to Seaver’s general education curriculum, see my essay Toward a more general education.

10. See Child Stats from the Forum on Child and Family Statistics.

11. A 2024 report from Arcadia Education projects that the number of students in K–12 classical schools will reach 1.4 million by 2035 if current growth rates continue.

12. See Pepperdine’s tweet from 5 Mar. 2025.