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Cato Policy Report, January/February 1998

Cato Launches Cato University

Learn philosophy from Locke and Smith

The Cato Institute has launched Cato University, a program designed to give Cato Sponsors a concise but comprehensive introduction to libertarian political thought. Enrollees in the home-study program will receive 12 audiotape sets over the period of a year, six books, and a study guide. Cato University students will also be able to participate on an on-line seminar that will be updated daily. There will be 12 different discussion areas--where students can post essays, letters, and comments on the audiotapes and the readings--as well as a current events section. In addition, Cato University will sponsor weekend-long seminars on "Economics and History" and "Philosophy and Law" and an annual essay contest, with awards in various categories.

Donald Boudreaux, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, says, "Cato University is really a great innovation in learning and a boon to busy people with a thirst for knowledge. The curriculum offers a valuable opportunity for every friend of liberty to boost his or her ability to articulate the case for limiting government power over the individual." And Cato Sponsor Ross Levatter says, "Cato University is fantastic! I have previewed the material and found that I learned more in 12 modules than I did in 4 years of college."

Cato University is available exclusively to Cato Institute Sponsors. For those who are already Sponsors, the program costs $240. For those who are not yet Cato Sponsors, the program costs $290, which enrolls you not only in Cato University but also in the Cato Institute's Sponsors program at a 50 percent discount. Sponsors receive six issues of Cato Policy Report, bimonthly memos from Cato Institute president Ed Crane, and more than a dozen papers and studies.

Tom G. Palmer, director of special projects at the Cato Institute and architect of the Cato University curriculum, says that through enrolling in Cato University, "We hope that Sponsors will come to see the work of the Cato Institute as a lifetime project. And we hope that the program will enable them to communicate their knowledge of individual liberty more effectively to others."

The 12 audiotape sets that Cato University students will receive cover

1. The Ideas of Liberty

2. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government

3. Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence

4. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (Part I)

5. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (Part II)

6. The Constitution of the United States of America

7. The Bill of Rights and Subsequent Amendments to the Constitution

8. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman

9. Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator

10. The Achievements of 19th-Century Classical Liberalism

11. The "Austrian" Case for the Free Market

12. The Modern Quest for Liberty

The books that will be included with the program are Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz; The Libertarian Reader, edited by David Boaz; Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni; Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt; How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr.; and From Magna Carta to the Constitution: Documents in the Struggle for Liberty, edited by David Brooks.

To find out more about Cato University or to enroll, visit the Cato University Web site.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.