Re #19, based on the OP’s lack of interest in Penn, Duke may not match all of her stated preferences either, at least as described in *Excellent Sheep/i:
Another vote for the Claremonts - you will find everything you say you’re looking for there, including the intimacy of small-LAC classes but the expansiveness of a 7000-student consortium. Scripps has the best merit-aid potential, and offers a great pivot point to access course offerings throughout the consortium while experiencing the supportive environment of a women’s college. Most of the partying is based on the other campuses (among which Scripps is situated right in the center) which means you can pick and choose among many social options but always have someplace relatively peaceful to come home to. Foreign languages are excellent and geared toward dual majors. Anthro and English/Lit are great too.
Think about applying to the College for Creative Studies at UCSB. You could do Writing/Lit as your CCS major https://ccs.ucsb.edu/majors/writing-literature and round out with foreign language and social sciences coursework from the wider university to add a dual major or one-or-more minors. You’d get more of the liberal arts experience this way vs. the typical UC pathway.
I was going to suggest Wesleyan too but see that case has already been made above.
I am not sure Duke meets her criteria either, but ill-informed speculation by a failed academic who’s made a career of bashing elite universities is hardly grounds for including or excluding a college.
The Hamilton professor’s observations regarding Stanford seem to be supported by even long-standing Stanford faculty:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/get-rich-u/amp
Apologies to the OP for this continued sidebar related to Stanford. I will bow out after this entry.
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David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has taught at Stanford for more than forty years, credits the university with helping needy students and spawning talent in engineering and business, but he worries that many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”
The university has committed to, and officers of the university have specifically and directly addressed, the continued commitment to fully supporting, expanding and integrating the study of the humanities with the growing digital and technical applications possible in today’s world.
Such "notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship and mega-success” that Kennedy speaks of are part of the lure the university holds for so many - low income, needy, upper-middle-class and uber-wealthy alike. This modern day call is, yes, “… in the air we breathe…” everywhere across the globe.
While it "…can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake,” the university has not abdicated its mission to being merely the breeding ground for those interests at all. One would be hard pressed to find that there are not similar interests for success along the American entrepreneurial route in every group of students, and among every group of parents (both those footing the bill and those hoping the educational pedigree will help their own children to one day be able to) at every college in this nation.
Stanford has committed itself to the continued investment in preparing young minds who have at their core such visions as serving in the classroom, the foreign service, the symphony orchestra, the halls of Congress; to bridging the public-private sector and working toward the betterment of society, preserving and conserving archives, contributing to the canon of critique and translation…and so on and so on.
For an updated view of the university’s continued mission to provide a wide springboard for its students, a broad exposure across the spectrum of the liberal arts and humanities, and an invitation to begin a deep, lifelong investigative relationship to thinking about life and ‘how’ we live it, see the new freshman curriculum re-design, set to be implemented in the fall of 2021.
I’m having trouble finding the new freshman curriculum. Would you mind either posting a link or explaining the change? Thanks so much!
Stanford appears to be still considering proposals for changes to its first-year curriculum at this stage: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/03/05/faculty-senate-discusses-first-year-core-curriculum-coronavirus/.