I think the point of the liberal arts is that ALL classes should impart the skills required for a good orator. If the particulars of our major truly matter, employers would care whether they are getting a history major or a government major--but it is clear that the thinking skills acquired are far more valuable than the major itself. A liberals arts degree should teach abstract thinking, writing, and analytical skills; the subject matter is simply the vehicle through which these skills are taught. I certainly don't remember much detail from Dr. Tulis' Constitutional Thinking class, but I have adopted the way in which he approached the texts and have been able to use it in other classes: that is the mark of a good teacher and good liberal arts class. I think Quintilian would agree that to understand virtue means to understand how to think about virtue, not to memorize everything everyone has ever said about virtue.

Furthermore, I support the core curriculum. I believe that it will give students a common language that is so lacking in a massive university, and impart the thinking skills and understanding that is necessary for a good citizen (and particular a good orator), regardless of major. It will help UT become one of the best universities, because the best universities transcend the simple training of skills to the training of the soul, so to speak.

While not an undergraduate major at UT, I believe that the various public policy programs at the LBJ School train students to be effective, ethically knowledgeable, and able to apply abstract theories about what is best to specific situations. From public health policy to international relations research, the courses and training at the LBJ school develop the student as an effective speaker through comparative discussion and thesis development, make them ethically knowledgeable through extensive and opposing research, and creative analyzers through their attempts to apply abstract theories to these fields.

I suppose I am about to “toot my own horn,” which I am not apt to do, but I feel that my own degree plans will live up to Quintillian’s standards. I am pursuing a Rhetoric & Writing degree, as well as a Humanities degree with my foci being Politics, Philosophy and Economics. This succeeds in making me an effective orator, but also allows for the other two qualifications. First, I believe the philosophy classes I have taken/will take have given me insight into what is ethical. Second, I believe that my Economics and Government classes allow me to apply abstract theories to general situations. Case in point: I recently took a Government exam that I did reasonably well on. In my opinion, I didn’t necessarily know the material better than others in the class, but my ability to take the knowledge that I did have and formulate an argument with it is what allowed me to do well. Here we can see the synthesis between Rhetoric and Quntillian’s qualifications. The downside is, it is going to take me six years to graduate. But lets not talk about that.

I'd say that a degree in rhetoric and probably philosophy would best meet those ends.

And, while studying for a test I have today, I came across this little gem in one of Pliny the Younger's letters. I think it provides a nice glimpse into the divide between the esteem of orators and rhetoric teachers in ancient Rome.

"Have you heard-I suppose, not yet, for the news has but just
arrived-that Valerius Licinianus has become a professor in Sicily?
This unfortunate person, who lately enjoyed the dignity of praetor,
and was esteemed the most eloquent of our advocates, is now
fallen from a senator to an exile, from an orator to a teacher of
rhetoric. Accordingly in his inaugural speech he uttered,
sorrowfully and solemnly, the following words: 'Oh! Fortune, how
capriciously dost thou sport with mankind! Thou makest
rhetoricians of senators, and senators of rhetoricians !'
A sarcasm so poignant and full of gall that one might almost imagine he fixed
upon this profession merely for the sake of an opportunity of
applying it. And having made his first appearance in school, clad
in the Greek cloak (for exiles have no right to wear the toga), after
arranging himself and looking down upon his attire, he said 'I am,
however, going to declaim in Latin.' You will think,
perhaps, this situation, wretched and deplorable as it is, is what he
well deserves for having stained the honorable profession of an
orator with the crime of incest."

There is no one course that I have taken part in or have heard of that could possibly contain each one of those elements. To achieve such a wide array of skill sets, a student would have to go beyond the university requirements and actively seek out classes and groups which promote those ideals. Say a major in Rhetoric with a minor(or double major) in Philosophy. Then add in a healthy dose of debate team and/or informal public speaking classes and maybe you could achieve that goal.

At UT, a Liberal Arts degree would be the closest you get while sticking to a basic degree plan. I spent a year and a half in Mechanical Engineering, everything was formulaic and you knew exactly what the professor wanted to see from a given problem. Then entering into a rhetoric class and encountering my first open-ended question that required I take a position and argue it, I was damn near useless.

I took Advanced Writing over the summer with Dr. Alice Batt. This class really emphasized the revision process. We would bring in a draft, have everyone in a group of about 4-5 people macro and micro edit it and take turns discussing individual papers as a class.

After taking this course, I felt like I had a much better understanding of how to get started writing, and more importantly how important it is to revise papers! I saw my work evolve significantly, sometimes revising up to four or five times.

We wrote a total of five papers in this class: amateur sociologist, rhetorical analysis, an article for The Sun, an argument, and another article for NPR radio. It was a wide array of assignments that showed us different takes on writing.

Our grades for papers were based on Mechanics, Active Voice, Topic and Treatment, Economics, and Style of the paper. With the chance to exchange papers with our peers and get feed back we were able to make revisions to our papers for improvement. We had style and grammar books to look back on and check for proper punctuation use.

A particular exercise we did focused on identifying flawed arguments, for example, arguments that begged the question. She made this exercise fun by turning into a game of Jeopardy.

One philosophy she taught us was borrowed from Betty Sue Flowers. It divided the writing process into four different energies: madman, architect, carpenter, and judge. The madman was getting your first instincts down on paper, disregarding grammar and spelling. You have to try to suppress the judge from being too critical at this point. Once you are done letting the madman say all he wants, put your writing away for some time. Then, let the architect come in and select chunks of the writing that make sense and put them in an order will make an effective argument. The carpenter nails the ideas together with style. Finally the judge can come in and take a look and begin revising.

I think that taking “basic” courses and electives supplement classes that may not cover all aspects of what constitutes good oratory.

I have not taken any classes here at UT which has embodied all three characteristics of Quintillian’s “good orator”. Rather, they all focus on one aspect in depth. I think that specificity is more valued than it has ever been before. Since there are so many engineers, it is important to be a good civil engineer or mechanical engineer. Nobody can do everything great, but everyone can do one thing great.

Granted the necessary funds, I would amend my degree program by adding majors in rhetoric and history. If anyone will pay for this I will get started next semester. Spanish and even psychology would also be helpful, but I am open to adding other majors too, and would choose to stay in school for the duration if someone would just fork over the $.

I agree with Niki that it would be impossible to have a major or class embody all of the criteria for a virtuous orator according to Quintilian. But I would say that in most colleges today, the Liberal Arts degrees are the closest things to fulfilling his criteria. Compared to most other degrees, it offers a broad and well rounded knowledge into many important fields such as philosophy and writing whereas other majors offer structured degree plans leaving very little room for personal choice. With the Liberal Arts majors, there is more of an opportunity to reach all of Quintilian's goals of being a virtuous orator because of the vast array of course options left open for students to choose from. Perhaps, in order to create an even more validated approach to Quintilian's criteria, schools could take after the typical Liberal Arts theme and leave more room open for student's to pick and choose their courses which could in turn broaden their knowledge.

I took a class in my sophomore year called Revolutionary Russia. It was a 3 hour discussion seminar and we covered the period from the assassination of the Czars to the beginning of Stalinism. Out of all my classes, I think it came kind of close to fulfilling Quintilian's requirements.

1.) We had to become proficient and persuasive writers. The professor placed a lot of emphasis on our technical ability to write and create a convincing argument. Since the class was a discussion seminar, we were required to argue our viewpoint and defend it.

2.) We learned about a lot of the philosophies that were floating around at the time and were expected to evaluate them.

3.) It was a history class so of course we used some degree of inductive reasoning based on historical examples to discover abstract truths. In turn, we also tried to use abstract truths to see what we would do if we were presented with that particular situation.

I also think debate is a good exercise for these methods. Of course it is necessary to be a persuasive orator, but it is also necessary to have an ethical standard that people can accept. Lastly, the typical debater may use the abstract idea they are supporting and apply it to a specific circumstance in order to clarify their position or show the purpose of the abstract idea in concrete terms.

There is no class at UT (or, probably, anywhere) that actually imparts all three facets of Quintilian's "good orator." However, I would argue that this is exactly the point of a modern college education. Each class offers a part of the whole, and it is the students' job to create a complete picture from this knowledge. If a student could take one course and receive all of the necessary information, no student would leave college truly well-rounded and knowledgeable. The best degree program that I can think of is one that covers different facets -- rhetoric classes, ethics and logic classes, etc.