The Great Books seminar method is of great importance when one considers that instructors in each of the courses will necessarily be non-experts in most of the disciplines dealt with. This particular method of conducting a seminar is very well fitted-out for educating at the general level. This applies not only to students but also to faculty. The seminar method, admittedly different from the lecture or professorial methods, provides an instrument for doing just this-advancing one's own education along with the students. Consequently, an instructor in these courses would rightly be regarded, not as an expert in each particular field, but as the 'leading student' in a group of students, one who is more familiar with the texts and the questions they raise.
Faculty are understandably leery of teaching in fields outside their own expertise.
The seminar method proposed here does not expect the impossible. It affirms the possibility of learning in common and allows an instructor to participate in the education of students in a different way, not as an expert, per se, but as a leader among learners, who is in the position of knowing more about the matters being dealt with than do the other students. Learning how to teach in this fashion is a practical matter. The Great Books Seminar Method itself has been around for decades in its present form and arguably for millennia in some form or other. It begins with the assumption that students can be well-introduced to the subjects and methods of the various academic disciplines through a careful reading and artful discussion of foundational works in each of them.