Great Books program implements three-year diversity plan

Mandi DeLong at The Cluster, Mercer University.

"The new director of the Great Books program, Charlotte Thomas, is working on a three-year plan to incorporate more works written by female authors and authors of color into the Great Books curriculum. ...

"In each Great Books course, there’s something that Thomas referred to as a eighty/twenty rule: 80% to 100% of the texts from the course must come from the Great Books core. But up to 20% can be added in by professors, as long as those texts come from the same chronological period as the rest of the texts and had an effect on the western tradition.

"As early as next semester, Thomas is encouraging professors to utilize that 20% to incorporate texts from diverse authors. She wants to be able to see how those texts are discussed in classroom settings so she can better understand how new texts would work with the currently-required texts. ..."