In his recent book The Battleground of the Curriculum: Education and American Experience, WB Carnochan of the Stanford Humanities Center chronicles several of the major curricular debates that have been fought throughout the history of American higher education. As his starting point Carnochan chooses 1869, when Charles William Eliot became the president of Harvard and proceeded to dismantle a prescribed curriculum and install a free elective system in its place. Carnochan concludes that contemporary debates over the content and structure of liberal arts curricula—and recent polemics (like ED Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American