The Villanova Center for Liberal Education (VCLE) and the Department of Political Science have received a $24,600 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to offer a new course entitled, “The Question of Justice: From Piraeus to the Mountaintop.” The NEH is funding the course as part of a new initiative called “Enduring Questions,” a nationwide experiment in building intellectual community through courses in which students and teachers “join together in a deep and sustained program of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.”

The course is designed to situate political science within the context of a general education in the liberal arts and sciences. The grant was written by Dr. Peter Busch of the VCLE, who will teach the course in collaboration with faculty from Political Science and other departments in the College.

“I’m thrilled that we will be offering this course,” Dr. Busch said. “It will show why political science matters – not only for political scientists like me, but for everyone. From time to time, we are all forced to wonder about justice: what it means, what it demands, and whether it brings us happiness. Students in this class will learn to ask the question as it needs to be asked, as a political question.”

The course follows the lead of Plato’s Republic, the dialogue in which Socrates stays down in the Piraeus (the port of Athens) for an all-night conversation about justice. Each unit of the course will take as its starting point one of the major views of justice offered by the men with whom Socrates converses at the beginning of the dialogue. Rather than taking that conversation for granted, however, students will illustrate, complicate and challenge it with texts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sophocles, and Frederick Douglass, among others. The course ends with a perspective perhaps very different from that of Socrates: the view of justice taken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

Dr. A. Maria Toyoda, incoming chair of the Political Science Department, sees the course as a promising way of introducing students to leading subfields within the discipline. “In thinking through these seminal works on justice,” she said, “students can see how justice theory as a lens can be applied to relevant problems in international relations, comparative visions of justice and law, elections, local politics, and globalization.”

The grant marks the fourth award that the NEH has given to VCLE in recent years. This one was particularly competitive, as approximately 120 applications were submitted, only 20 of which received funding.