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Structured Liberal Education Program (SLE)
Program Overview
Structured Liberal Education is one of Stanford's most distinctive opportunities for freshmen: an intensive, residential experience that encourages students to cultivate a capacity for critical thinking, a tolerance for ambiguity, and a life of ideas.
SLE asks students to confront central questions that have perplexed and confounded humankind throughout the ages: What is knowledge? What is the relationship between reason and passion? How does the concept of justice change over time? What kinds of meaning are possible in the modern era? Can one live a spiritual life in the contemporary world? These questions and many more provide the foundation for a chronologically structured course beginning in the ancient world, including foundational works from many cultures and eras, and ending with the modern period. The SLE curriculum is guided and taught by many of Stanford's most distinguished scholars, whose lectures frame the weekly agenda, as well as a team of instructors who conduct discussion sections in which freshmen probe and extend the insights of the lectures. With about eighty students, SLE combines the atmosphere of a liberal arts college with the paradigm-changing scholarship of a major research university.
Not only academically rigorous, SLE is a community, fostering close student-instructor relationships and encouraging freshmen to develop friendships that sustain them throughout college. Together with other students, SLE freshmen live and learn together in three houses (one freshman and two four-class) in one residence hall, the informal setting for lectures, small-group discussions, films, and plays.
This community promotes the active and often passionate exchange of ideas in the classroom setting, in the dining room, and in the dorm late at night. Stanford faculty and SLE instructors participate actively in the intellectual life of the dorm, regularly dining with students and holding individual writing tutorials. Each week culminates with a film chosen as a commentary on the written texts studied in lectures and discussion sections. In addition, each quarter students organize and produce a play, which not only concludes the term with great fun for everyone but offers another vantage point for viewing the period under study.
Students receive individualized writing instruction from SLE instructors and upper-class writing tutors. Because of its intensive concentration on both the analysis of texts and the written and oral communication of ideas, SLE is a nine-unit course in autumn and winter quarters and a ten-unit course in spring quarter.
Please note that while enrollment in SLE is a significant portion of a student's academic load each quarter, the year in SLE fulfills at once the IHUM requirement, the Writing and Rhetoric I and II requirements, and one General Education Breadth requirement in the humanities. SLE students regularly take two additional courses each quarter, so they have as much opportunity to explore other Stanford courses as do their peers in IHUM and PWR. Finally, SLE students go on to major in a variety of academic disciplines, from engineering to social sciences to humanities.
Several peer institutions maintain programs that resemble SLE, but no major research university offers as much as Stanford does: the small student population, the residential setting, and the renown of the faculty combine here in a unique opportunity that has defined this kind of education for over thirty years.
Course of Study
Autumn Quarter: We concentrate on texts from ancient Greece, Israel and India, reading works of classical literature, religious thought and philosophy.
Winter Quarter: Investigating classical culture and literature permits us to examine the social, political and economic transformation that produced the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, colonization and capitalism.
Spring Quarter: Through attention to works of fiction, political theory and social criticism, we focus on the powerful forces that have shaped the modern world.
Texts
The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist Sutras. Works
by Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Sappho, Homer, and Confucius. In addition,
works by Chuang Tzu, Mencius, Augustine, Dante, Descartes, Machiavelli,
Saikaku, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Woolf, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Arendt and
Salih.
SLE places an intensive concentration on both the analysis of texts and the written and oral communication of ideas. Because of this, SLE is a nine-unit course in Autumn and Winter quarters and a ten-unit course in Spring quarter.
Enrolling in SLE
Students who are assigned to SLE are enrolled in all three quarters. Since SLE is a residentially based program, students submit course choice in conjunction with housing preferences through Approaching Stanford.
People and Contact Information
General Information
(650) 725.0102
Faculty Director
Roland Greene, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
(650 725.1214
Coordinator
Suzanne Greenberg, Lecturer
(650) 725.0102
Coordinator
Greg Watkins, Lecturer
SLE FAQs
Coming soon!