From Animal House to the Academy

From Animal House to the Academy follows a series of seminars to college freshmen, designed to help them understand themselves, their environment, and how to effectively flourish in the modern university. Chapter one offers a description of how leadership works in society, how leaders influence the structure of institutions, and the various character dispositions that women and men bring to institutions. Chapter two explains the importance of understanding the human soul in order to understand the influence that the soul has on the environment, as well as what threats exist in our culture that could lead us to perhaps too easily forget about the importance of shaping one's soul from a young age. Chapter three gives practical advice to young men about what they can specifically do during their university years to transform college from a vacation from life into a preparation for a vocation. Chapters four and five put the struggle of today's young men within the context of an age-old struggle that involves the likes of Socrates and the early Christians. Chapters six and seven offer very practical guidelines for dealing with food, drink, and the social life of a college student. Chapters eight and nine examine friendship and relationships. Chapter ten discusses the history of how virtue-building customs were removed from the university, and chapter eleven finishes with a practical outline of how individual and small groups of young men could challenge each other to re-insert the understanding and practice of virtue into their own lives as well as the life of their university and society as a whole.