Joel Alden Schlosser

Out this morning in the Los Angeles Review of Books! This essay with Tommaso Bardelli joins a growing conversation about the emergent microcollege movement, including the recent reflection by my friend Frank Eccher in The Point. With his Microcollege Podcast, Jacob Hundt (founder of Thoreau College ) has done tremendous work to organize and articulate the microcollege movement. So too have microcollege organizers and founders at Gull Island Institute , Outer Coast , Tidelines Institute , and elsewhere.  When I moved to Deep Springs sixteen years ago to begin my tenure as the Julian Steward Chair of Social Sciences, I intuited that living and working there would transform my life as well as my teaching and writing. But I could not have anticipated what would come of the Deep Springs Model. It's a thrill to contribute to this movement and to work alongside the visionary members -- founders, leaders, professors, and especially students -- comprising it.

I was delighted to see Michal Leibowitz’s essay about Deep Springs in the New York Times. I appreciate its admiring portrait as well as its call for institutions to learn from the Deep Springs model. However, there’s a significant omission in Ms. Leibowitz’s treatment, an omission of something fundamental to Deep Springs’ longevity and its transformative effects on students: self-government. The word does not appear in Ms. Leibowitz’s essay and while it mentions some activities of self-government – admissions, curriculum, and hiring – it understates the students’ leadership roles in these activities. The Student Body does not just “help” with these key functions: The Student Body runs the College with student-chaired and student-majority committees. Before I was hired as a long-term faculty member, I was interviewed for an hour by the student-led Curriculum Committee and then, when on campus, for two hours by the entire Student Body; the student chair of the Curriculum Committee made m...

An open-access special issue on Earthborn Democracy has been published in Democratic Theory. Ali Aslam , David McIvor , and I assembled a terrific group of scholars engaging some of the questions and themes of Earthborn Democracy ; we also gathered critical responses to the book in a symposium and composed a dialogue with Anne Norton about her Wild Democracy and its earthly significance.   This publication caps off over a year of rich engagement with the book, at academic conferences, campus talks, and even the Seminary Co-op Bookstore . If you're wanting more, you can also tune into podcast interviews with Lilly Goren (on the New Books Network) and Jeff Church (on the Political Theory Podcast) or a recording of a presentation I gave to Carleton College alumni last fall.

 Another year begins! Although I can't help wishing summer were longer, I love the thrill of fall semester, with its rites of convocation, first day butterflies, and rush at the bookshop. This semester, I also return to my own first semester of college, since I'll teach texts I first read then -- Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise  -- in my Modern Political Philosophy course. Here's the title page of the Hackett edition of Hobbes' Leviathan that I first bought at the Carleton Bookshop in September 1999 for Laurence Cooper's Introduction to Political Philosophy course. Twenty-six years ago -- and it's still a challenge! (You'll note that I haven't taught with this edition every time I've taught Hobbes; I've also used the Cambridge from time to time.) I'm also teaching another iteration of Governing the Self and Others this fall. I begin with Rousseau's Social Contract, but then go in many new directions, including Mic...

 I'm delighted to announce that I have received the Fairbank Professorship in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College . This honor is especially meaningful as I mark fifteen years since I finished my PhD at Duke University. I'm in the process of updating more of this site's contents -- to reflect, for instance, the publication of Earthborn Democracy (co-written with Ali Aslam and David McIvor) this year! For now, I have posted links to nearly all my syllabi under "Teaching" above. If something interests you, please reach out.

Tenure, a sabbatical, and -- most important -- the arrival of two new members to my family have pulled me away from regular updates to my site here. I'm now adding course syllabi, so under TEACHING above you can find the following, which I've taught since 2018. Living a Democratic Life (Summer 2020). A special seminar for Outer Coast , a nascent two-year institution of higher education in Sitka, Alaska. Energetic and thrilling discussions of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Reflecting on Black Lives Matter protests organized by Anchorage-based students. Facilitating reflection on “the power of the people” embodied – in virtual form – by the Student Body. Through this course, I delighted in helping to construct a self-reflective community, not just teaching students about the meanings and possibilities of democracy but collaborating on a more democratic way of being together, be that through playing Scribl.io or talking about the politics of ancient Athens. Anti-Poli...

 Don DeLillo’s The Names begins with what feels like a long camera take, trailing a character from behind as he walks around the streets of the Plaka, the central market district of Athens. The longer the shot continues, however, the more you realize that the man who’s leading you is not the central character. There’s someone, something else. You keep glimpsing it between the blocks, above the antennas and awnings and electrical wires. It’s apparitional, a massive presence that seems to hover in the middle distance, glimmering and impassive beneath the bright Mediterranean sunshine. At long last the character stops in an open plaza, pauses, then looks up. The camera follows. The Acropolis rises like a brilliant white column shooting skyward, its pillars and pediments strident yet effortless. The high city. I gasped when I first glimpsed the Acropolis. I was stepping onto the balcony of an apartment I’d rented for six weeks in Kolonaki, a wealthy neighborhood in central Athens. My h...