Structured Liberal Education

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Structured Liberal Education (SLE) (pronounced "slee") is an academically challenging program at Stanford University that offers an alternative three-course sequence for freshmen to fulfill their Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) and Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) requirements. With a year-long schedule of nine units in the fall and winter quarters and ten in the spring quarter, SLE is unique in its intellectual rigor, multi-disciplinary approach, and residence-based structure.

All SLE participants live, dine, and attend class in the same residence hall, Florence Moore. They live in either the all-freshman dorm, Alondra, which is made up of half SLE students and half IHUM students, or in one of the two four-class dorms, Cardenal and Faisan. Many of the upperclassmen in Cardenal and Faisan are former SLE students, which helps maintain a SLE community spanning the different years. In the main lounge of Florence Moore, known as the SLE lounge or "slounge", students attend lectures given by professors within many departments at Stanford and by visiting guest lecturers. In addition, students participate in small-group sections, in which they discuss the lectures and assigned literature from SLE's extensive, diverse, and ever-evolving reading list. Films, often relating to the material of study, are screened weekly, and student-produced plays are regularly part of the syllabus. Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" is traditionally performed in the fall. SLE also provides freshman with intensive individual writing tutorials.

Structured Liberal Education was the brainchild of Stanford history professor Mark Mancall, who is still the program's faculty director. Internationally-renowned political theorist Hannah Arendt also played an instrumental role in SLE's creation, having been one of the original proponents for the program's enactment. In some respects, Stanford's SLE is comparable to other notable "Great Books" programs, such as Directed Studies at Yale University, the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, and the curriculum at St. John's College, but SLE's reading list is more internationally diverse. With Mark Mancall retiring at the end of this year and Suzanne Greenberg, the other mainstay of the program, scheduled to retire at the end of next year, the survival of the program has been called into question. Many students, valuing the tight-knit community formed by the shared experience of SLE, are deeply concerned about this possibility.

While the commonly held view of SLE is anything but correct, it does indeed have its own traditions and culture. One emerging tradition is to refer to certain terms with an "sl-" inserted at the beginning of the word, such as "slecture", "slessay", and "slection". These three, along with "slounge", are being accepted by much of the community, including Resident Fellow and section leader Greg Watkins; the attempt to extend this pattern to other words has largely failed. The "SLE song" has been passed around for the past few years. Written by SLE student Jamie Poskin, it is called "We Didn't Like the Lecture" and is a parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. An instant classic in SLE is the YouTube video of a student relieving stress during last quarter's 24-hour final by singing and dancing to his own version of "Cabaret".

[edit] External links

• Official SLE Website
• Article on SLE culture in Stanford Magazine
• Article in The Stanford Daily touching on the implications of the SLE "nerd" stereotype
• Editorial in The Harvard Crimson imploring Harvard to create a "Great Books" program similar to Stanford's SLE and Yale's Directed Studies programs
• Taiwanese academic journal article describing SLE and citing it as an exemplary American model of how to promote residence-based academic learning
• Berlin's European College of Liberal Arts announcement of Structured Liberal Education, an international summer university emulating Stanford's program
• YouTube video of student relieving exam stress by singing "Cabaret"
• YouTube video of another student relieving exam stress in another way

	Leland Stanford Junior University
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