Rhodes College is updating and expanding its long-established Search program with the support of a $25,000 planning grant for the 2023-2024 academic year from the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative. Jointly sponsored by the Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative seeks to revitalize the role of the humanities in higher education.
Search is a three-semester interdisciplinary curriculum focusing on ideas, beliefs, technologies, and cultural developments that emerged from societies around the Mediterranean, in the Near East, Europe, and Africa and that have contributed to the formation of modern America. Students read and discuss selections from the works of philosophers, theologians, political theorists, scientists, and artists. Texts include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, the Qur’an, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Established in 1945, the curriculum was originally called Man in the Light of History and Religion; in 1986, it became The Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion. The program influenced core courses at Davidson College, Millsaps College, the University of the South, and other liberal arts institutions and preparatory schools, and it had a substantial reconfiguration in the 2007-2008 academic year when the college revised its Foundations Curriculum. The three-course sequence fulfills the college’s Foundation requirements (commonly referred to as “F1,” “F2,” etc.). Courses that fulfill the F1 also must satisfy the requirement of the Bellingrath Trust to offer academically ‘sound and comprehensive’ exploration of biblical texts and traditions. In 2022, the program adopted its new, simplified designation: Search.
Now the Cornerstone: Learning for Living grant provided by the Teagle-NEH partnership will enable the Search faculty to advance the process of re-envisioning the curriculum in two substantive ways: (1) placing diverse contemporary voices and perspectives in conversation with historically transformative texts, and (2) developing an interdisciplinary humanities minor. In addition, funding will provide opportunities for designing off-campus, place-based, experiential-learning excursions; revising and expanding ways of introducing and contextualizing the readings for students on campus and beyond; and integrating Memphis Reads, which is a citywide program, into the Search curriculum.
Dr. Kenneth Morrell and Dr. Susan Satterfield, both associate professors of Ancient Mediterranean Studies, will serve as directors of the one-year grant.
“We are grateful and thrilled to be one of 60 colleges and universities that are contributing to the Cornerstone initiative to revitalize and situate the study of the humanities as one of the most basic and essential aspects of higher education,” said Satterfield.
“The support from Teagle and the NEH corroborates the recent efforts of Search to engage more dynamically with a wide spectrum of influences that have shaped the evolution of our culture,” added Morrell.
In 2022-2023, faculty began piloting this new approach of pairing contemporary and historic transformative texts. For example, some students placed the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey in dialogue with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor. Others discussed Plato’s Republic alongside Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground.” And still others set works of Stoicism alongside Buddhist suttas and the autobiography of Augustine alongside the autobiography of Gandhi. The planning grant will support further expansion of the library of these conversations for integration into the curriculum.
The work of designing a series of place-based co-curricular excursions to enhance the common experience and intellectual insights of the Search program will begin with a tour of sites in Mississippi and Alabama that played critical roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Future tours will focus on Indigenous cultures and the natural habitats of the Mississippi Delta as well as the artistic, musical, and literary landscape of the region.
Rhodes has been a partner with Memphis Reads since 2015. The city-wide reading program brings leading contemporary writers to Memphis. Authors who visited in recent years include Dave Eggers, Jesmyn Ward, Marcus Zusak, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Safron Foer, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Nnedi Okorafor.
This fall, reading and discussion of His Name is George Floyd, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, will be part of the Search curriculum. A panel of students from Search will serve as interlocutors with the book’s authors Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa of The Washington Post when they visit campus in October.
Updated Aug. 3, 2023