Enduring Texts: Resources and Beyond

The Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative aims to revitalize the role of the humanities in general education.

At OCC we believe in the power of a Liberal Arts education! In 2021, we began participating in the Cornerstone: Learning for Living project, an initiative co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Teagle Foundation. Our project, called “Enduring Questions and Liberal Arts Pathways at OCC,” is anchored in a diverse array of enduring and transformative texts. All across campus, students engage with these texts, develop a more complete sense of themselves and how they relate to the world, and strengthen their capacity to read carefully, write clearly, and participate constructively on a wide range of issues.

The Great Questions Foundation seeks to promote liberal education and core-text and discussion-based learning at the community college through supporting faculty development and course redesign and helping to establish and support core-text programs and courses.

The Skä•noñh – Great Law of Peace Center is a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Cultural Center focused on telling the story of the native peoples of central New York. The history is told through the lens of the Onondaga Nation and covers topics such as Creation, European Contact, The Great Law of Peace, and more. The Onondagas, or People of the Hills, are the keepers of the Central Fire and are the spiritual and political center of the Haudenosaunee.

Skä•noñh, is an Onondaga welcoming greeting meaning “Peace and Wellness.”

An easy-to-read PDF version of Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” translated by Shawn Eyer.

The full version of Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” where it appears in The Republic.

This YouTube video animates, without analysis, "The Allegory of the Cave" for easier understanding through narrative visuals.

The School of Liberal Arts, in association with the Lillian Slutzker Honors College, hosted a Microsoft Teams talk with Dr. Roosevelt Montás in the spring of 2021. His talk was primarily aimed at students who were in attendance and is an excellent introduction to how the NEH-Cornerstone grant views its overall goals.

Teagle Foundation president Andrew Delbanco makes the case for why colleges need more programs where students of different backgrounds can wrestle together with the big questions posed by the humanities in this essay for the Wall Street Journal.

Syracuse Speaks podcast, featuring Jaques, Smoke Santiago, Coppola, and more, as they discuss indigenous culture and how to grow and expand the knowledge within Central New York.

This piece by Professor Ted Hadzi-Antich, Jr. in the October edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education where he positively mentions our Teagle-Cornerstone project. The article also links to the story OCC's Team wrote about us that went up on the school website in May 2023.

This article chronicles the development of Introduction to Liberal Arts, LBL 101 at OCC.