01 MTH2 CAC 12267 SILVER HC-S126
Rutgers's First Textbook
For its first fifty years, the Rutgers University curriculum was designed around a single eighteenth-century book: Robert Dodsley's Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education (1748, reprinted 1763). The Preceptor contains 12 parts, each one written by a leading poet, scientist, philosopher, or intellectual luminary of its age. Each part focuses on one topic, which could almost be the names of departments at our university, today: rhetoric, history, poetry, logic, economics, law, and so on. It is not an exaggeration to say that Dodsley's book is the best summary of the intellectual history of its moment. The critical copy of the Preceptor, with Harlan Rutgers's name penned on the inside cover, is in the Library's special collections. Holding it is like laying your hand on the heart of the whole complex intellectual and social experiment that Rutgers University has become.
The goal of this seminar is to understand that book—as a window into the eighteenth-century arts and sciences, colonial New Jersey, and our own intellectual heritage. We will develop the skills to learn about Robert Dodsley and the authors of the essays he commissioned; we will reconstruct the history of the disciplines his book contained; and we will establish the intellectual history of our own university in its formative years. The goal will be individual research papers, each on one aspect of the Preceptor—turning ourselves into experts on that books—which we will summarize and distill as an entry for Wikipedia.