Participants discuss five books in the course of that single week, having been expected to have read most of them in advance. Colby's choice of books is themed. Recently, all 150 participants discussed the influence of Eastern approaches on Western thought and science, by reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Frijthof Capra's The Tao of Physics, and Barrett's Irrational Man. Another summer, participants read Proust's Swann's Way, Shakespeare's King Lear, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. A recent participant has described the Colby program to me as a serious week of hard but rewarding work, and yet in a convivial, high-spirited atmosphere.
Participants continue their debates over the lunch time table in the school's dining hall.
The Great Books summer program there is now in its 42th year. That program, in turn, is the summer manifestation of a year-round discussion of Great Books by some 2,500 private study groups across the nation. The Great Books Foundation. The theme, usually, is political morality, values of the West, as they emerge from great works of the Western culture. Books reach participants 60 days before the start of each seminar, and must be read before the start of class.