Dean’s Lecture Opens Academic Year at St. John’s

Michael Dink, dean of St. John’s College, will open the college’s academic year by delivering the first lecture in the college’s Friday-night series. Mr. Dink’s lecture, “Rhetoric and Liberal Education,” will be held in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium on Friday, August 24, at 8:15 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The college’s dean traditionally delivers the first Friday-night lecture at the beginning of the academic year. In his lecture Mr. Dink will explore the place of rhetoric in a liberal education. “A liberal education is often said to be education in the liberal arts. Rhetoric is included in the traditional list of the seven liberal arts, along with grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Yet rhetoric is often regarded with suspicion and distrust, and its place in a liberal education and at St. John's College is unclear,” says Mr. Dink. 

Mr. Dink says this distrust of rhetoric can be traced at least as far back as Plato's “Gorgias,” in which Socrates criticizes rhetoric as an artless and corrupt practice, whereby unscrupulous politicians gain power for themselves by appealing to the passions of the multitude.  In his lecture Mr. Dink will begin by examining Socrates’ treatment of rhetoric in the “Gorgias,” followed by a brief look at Aristotle's “Rhetoric.”  He will then explore the question of the role of rhetoric, as an art of persuasion, in the kind of liberal education that is pursued at St. John's College.

Mr. Dink began his five-year term as dean in July 2005. A 1975 graduate of St. John’s, he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. Friday night lectures are free and open to the public.