Great Courses, Great Profits – A Curriculum in Human Thought
Breaking up my comment because it was &quot;too long&quot; to submit as one (that&#x27;s a first).<p>----<p>There are so many factually incorrect claims and contradictions in this piece that I don&#x27;t even know where to begin. I write this as someone who owns nearly 100 Great Courses (between DVDs and digital copies). I&#x27;m also someone who has had the pleasure of taking an in-person college class with a professor whose course I first watched through The Great Courses (abbreviated as TGC from here on down).<p>-------------------------------------------<p>&gt; Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording then goes to the company’s most valued customers. If enough of them like it, the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.<p>&gt; The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm’s 200-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims Guelzo, that “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses.<p>I&#x27;ve spoken with multiple professors who have had their college courses adapted into TGC. For the professor whose class I took in person, their TGC lectures were literally structured identically to their syllabus. Some of the same jokes in TGC lectures made their way into the classroom (lol).<p>The in-person filming process for TGC may require multiple trips down to their Virginia studios, especially if we&#x27;re talking about longer 48+ part courses that reach 24+ hours of screentime. Then there are the occasional re-shoots and restructurings necessary if the their customer focus groups (similar to an Amazon Vine&#x2F;early reviewer program) finds the content not great.<p>The idea that professors are creating courses from scratch for TGC is in the overwhelming majority of cases not true. A professor who has normal teaching, research, and service requirements is generally not going to have time to create a whole course from scratch for what the author herself notes is typically a $25,000 royalty per year. A religious scholar who I spoke with (eventually decided not to go forward with submitting an audition tape) said that in his mind the biggest value prop of TGC is that you can minimally adapt existing materials to earn a healthy royalty.<p>-------------------------------------------<p>&gt; True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools.<p>This article was written in 2011, but even then there were already courses available about Voltaire, &quot;The Great Ideas of Philosophy&quot;, &quot;The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas&quot;, &quot;Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition&quot;, Alexis De Tocqueville, &quot;Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition&quot;, &quot;The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida&quot;, &quot;Legacies of Great Economists&quot;, &quot;The Conservative Tradition&quot;, &quot;American Ideals&quot;, etc. And yes, I double checked my order receipts to make sure these were actually available at the time. In fact many of these courses were on their 2nd or 3rd edition.<p>Since then, they&#x27;ve added quite a few STEM courses in multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistical computing, complexity theory, college chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.. Several of these are taught at a 2nd year undergrad or beyond level.<p>&gt; The most striking thing about the Great Courses’ humanities curriculum, however, is how often the same thinkers appear across a large range of courses. The canon has been “problematized” in the academy, but it is alive and well in these recordings. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Erasmus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Pope, Swift, Goethe, and others are foregrounded again and again as touchstones of our civilization.<p>Again, TGC content is largely carbon copied from college courses&#x27; syllabi. If these subjects are &quot;problematized&quot;, where is TGC finding these lecturers? Keep in mind that TGC is not plucking unknown professors from lonely heterodox institutions. A majority of their professors teach at &quot;liberal&quot; (in the American sense) campuses.<p>Just a cursory look at my digital courses shows (in terms of course title and institutional representation):<p>* Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition (Oxford &#x2F; Georgetown)<p>* Voltaire &#x2F; Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries (UPenn)<p>* History&#x27;s Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach (University of Wisconsin)<p>* Fall and Rise of China (Cal Berkeley)<p>* Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition (Grinnell)<p>* Turning Points in Middle Eastern History (Johns Hopkins)<p>and so on, and so on...