Cicero Versus Socrates: The Liberal Arts Debate in the 1960sat the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The liberal arts debate among the faculty at Regina Campus in the 1960s reflected the social and political movements of the day, especially the rise of student power and the New Left. At the same time, it revived a much older debate about the nature of liberal education, which historian Bruce Kimball traces back to the thought of Socrates and Cicero. Kimball’s typology of “orators” versus “philosophers” brings order and clarity to what otherwise appears as a jumbled mix of conflicting viewpoints. The “oratorical” tradition favors general education based on knowable truth as a means to prepare youth for responsible and active citizenship. The “philosophical” or “liberal-free” ideal emphasizes the freedom to search for truth, an eternal quest that never attains its goal, and has led to the dominance of scientific research and the fragmentation of knowledge. The “orators” lost the sixties debate, and the “liberal-free” ideal is now almost uncontested.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".