Exciting New Initiative Grants Auto-Admit for CLT Score | Andrew Ellison and Amber Dyer

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Andrew Ellison, Vice President of Enrollment at the University of Dallas, and Amber Dyer, Head of School at Great Hearts Irving. Andrew introduces the exciting new University of Dallas–CLT Auto Admit Initiative, which grants automatic admission to students who score 88 or higher on the Classic Learning Test. The three also share insights on how to choose a college that values and cultivates a classical education. Finally, they reflect on the enduring legacy of former UD professor Louise Cowan, under whom Amber studied. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.428)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchored podcast. For a very, very special edition, an announcement edition, it'll be coming about two thirds of the way through the podcast. You're have to keep listening. We have with us here the Vice President of the University of Dallas, one of our closest CLT partner colleges, Mr. Andrew Ellison. We also have the head of school at Great Hearts, Irving, Dr. Amber Dyer. Andrew, Amber, welcome. Thanks for being on Anchored with us.

Andrew (00:27.544)
Thanks so much, Jeremy. Great to be here again.

Dr. Amber Dyer (00:29.902)
Thank you, nice to see you.

Jeremy Tate (00:30.356)
Andrew, you've been a previous guest on Anchor before. It's great to have you back. We've had President Sanford, who's on the CLT board as well. We are pretty diehard at CLT UD fans. We're really excited the announcement that you have in store for us today. We will kick it off here. I wanted to invite Amber to join us as her school may send a higher percentage of students to the University of Dallas than maybe any other school. I'm guessing that's true. Andrew, can you verify that?

Andrew (00:59.158)
Yeah, well, I can verify that of all the high schools that sent us students for our current freshman class, great heart serving was number one as far as the largest quantity from any particular school. So that was very exciting.

Jeremy Tate (01:14.676)
It's amazing. So Amber, you've got you had an incredible career and you studied under Louise Cowan at the University of Dallas. A question I love to ask as I get to know folks is how did you discover this great, amazing, beautiful tradition in the first place? Is this something when you look back that you kind of grew up with or did you discover it later in life?

Dr. Amber Dyer (01:37.518)
Great question. I definitely discovered it later in life. My own mother, I grew up in Oregon and of course I didn't have access to this kind of classical liberal arts education when I was a kid. And my mom heard Louise Cowan on the radio doing an interview with Oz Guinness and she said, honey, you should read the classics.

And I ended up going to a small liberal arts college in East Texas, Laterno University. And it was there that I met one of Louise Cowan's students, Dr. Martin Batts. And he taught me Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis and philosophy. And it was my first encounter with the classics. And I was in fact intending to go to law school. And after that transformative experience, it was really during my senior year of college, I decided I was going to go on and I was going to.

with whom ever Dr. Batts had studied with. And he said, well, you must go study with Louise Cowan at the University of Dallas. And then it sealed the deal. I was going to teach teachers for the rest of my life instead of sue them. And that's how I ended up at UD. And I'm so incredibly grateful for this incredible university right down the street where we're sending about 20 to 25 % of our

Jeremy Tate (02:44.414)
Mm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (02:57.828)
of our seniors to continue their learning. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (03:01.428)
Amazing. That's amazing.

Andrew (03:02.926)
Well, Amber, you're so lucky. I'm super envious, right? Because I came late. Late have I loved the University of Dallas. I did not have the chance to meet Louise Cowan in person, although I did become aware of her while she was still with us, walking among the living, shining her light.

But of course her son, Dr. Boehner Cowan is here. I had a good conversation with him just the other day. And there are some Cowan grandchildren who are here very much carrying on the legacy and carrying on the spirit. Although I imagine it's challenging to do so with the last name of Cowan, I think it's harder if your last name happens to be Sanford as our president of the university sends his kids here.

and they bear an unmistakable resemblance to him physically, so it's kind of hard for them to hide. Maybe it might be better to be a cow and grandchild here at UD these days.

Jeremy Tate (03:59.476)
Thank

Dr. Amber Dyer (04:06.592)
happy to tell you that the Cowens and the Sanford's both go to my school.

Jeremy Tate (04:10.388)
Ha ha ha ha.

Andrew (04:10.976)
It's small world.

Dr. Amber Dyer (04:13.4)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (04:14.814)
Now, Andrew, I don't know too many folks that are our age. I think we're kind of the same age-ish. I'm 40, almost 44 here. That really can say they did receive this kind of education growing up. I did not. I discovered this in seminary. But you did. And that is unique. I wonder if you could do a refresher on what your K-12 education was like and then how it has maybe equipped you to go into a brand new arena. You didn't come from the world of enrollment.

Andrew (04:34.083)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (04:42.662)
And now a year into this, UD is setting all kinds of enrollment records, which is incredible. I'm wondering if there's a connection there.

Andrew (04:50.766)
Yeah, well first of all Jeremy, I've got a few years on you. You're just a young lad. Let me just say I wish I was still 44. There was a lot more spring in my step back then. yeah, so look, I grew up in Indiana, Northern Indiana, in the shadow of the Golden Dome. Mishawaka, not South Bend, Mishawaka. We a real point of pride there that we weren't in the South Bend.

Jeremy Tate (04:58.836)
Awesome.

Andrew (05:20.888)
I had a typical American public school education, small district, Mishawaka City schools up through seventh grade. But my parents, you know, God bless them, it's sort of like the founding fathers, right? They built better than they knew. My parents had heard about this private school that was in South Bend because a number of folks at our family church that we attended.

also were sent, they were professors at the University of Notre Dame, a number of them. My parents ran in some pretty brainy circles. My mom was a public school teacher, my dad is a commercial realtor. But they had friends who were in the Notre Dame professorate. And some of the friends were telling my parents about this crazy school called Trinity School at Green Lawn in South Bend, Indiana. And my parents didn't know, you know, great books from

from great white sharks, right? As far as they knew, it was just a good private school where people they liked, yeah, where people they knew were sending their kids. And so they enrolled me. And for those of you who are not familiar with it, Trinity School was built very early on in the, 1981, 1981, founded very early on in the Paideia movement.

Jeremy Tate (06:23.764)
A very pithy way to put that.

Jeremy Tate (06:36.764)
Is this the first Trinity? This is the first...

Andrew (06:45.462)
Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren, Jacques Barzan, folks like that. So founded as a secondary school in the liberal arts great books tradition, all the way back in 1981. So, you the school was only eight years old when I started attending it, but I had the benefit of learning from teachers, learning Latin and history, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, writing a senior thesis.

So yeah, I'm one of the lucky ones for whom classical education was just education. I didn't have any other name for it. It just was the kind of school that I went to. And by the time I made it off to college, I found it a little strange that people hadn't read these same things that I had in high school. Because at the time I thought it was just high school. This is just what you do.

Jeremy Tate (07:40.148)
that is fantastic. Dr. Dyer, I'd to talk about great hearts for a bit. My experience of getting to know great hearts came in many ways through Dr. Tracy Gardner, her and

her kiddos go to Great Hearts in San Antonio, I'm a big believer in the idea that the very best argument for classical education is simply meeting the young people that have received this kind of education. I mean, it is unreal. And I always say that, you I'm not bashing public school students. I taught in public schools and I went to public schools myself, but there's the maturity, the eloquence. I mean, they have been formed in really, really beautiful ways. And Great Hearts, as I understand it, has been around now since about 2000.

How would you say a great hearts education is distinct from even some of the other classical options out there?

Dr. Amber Dyer (08:30.84)
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more that the greatest success for us is our graduates coming back. In fact, just in December, had those students who graduated last year who are now studying at the University of Dallas. They came back and they were an alumni panel. And they joked as they passed the microphone down one to another, college is easy, college is easy, college is easy.

college is easy. And we all laughed about it. And then one of our remarkable young men just took the mic and he said,

Dr. Amber Dyer (09:13.639)
If you're studying at Greger Heart, the reality is that college is going to be easy for you. But that's not the best part about this education. This education teaches you how to live. It teaches you how to be a human being. I think one of my most glorious points every semester is when we bring our parents of our alumni, of our seniors, our high school kids up on the stage and we say,

Jeremy Tate (09:19.931)
huh.

Jeremy Tate (09:29.416)
Mm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (09:42.34)
What's the best thing about sending your child to Great Hearts? And you would think they'd say, okay, just got, last night we just got the Ivy League admissions and so we know who has a seat at the Ivy's. You think, well, is it the Ivy League admissions? Is it the 100 % college placement? Is it the highest AST scores or high CLT scores? Is it the millions of dollars of scholarship money? It's not.

What the parents tell me consistently, year after year, is this, I like being around my kids. Family dinner, even in my own home, family dinner can sometimes last until 10 p.m. Because at Great Hearts, we are spending two hours per day in Socratic conversation, not becoming just great minds, but

Jeremy Tate (10:21.16)
Mm, wow.

Jeremy Tate (10:29.63)
Hmm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (10:40.58)
the name of the institution says everything. This is about the development of the soul. And so we aren't just a great book school, and there's place for that. Our focus is not just on citizenship. There's a place for that for sure. But at Great Hearts, we're truly after a child's heart. And we're doing that in conversation over the Nicomachean Ethics and Republic and

And we're asking those questions. What is friendship? What is justice? What is goodness? What is love? How to love? And I think that is probably the most special part of being part of this project. And certainly it's that thing that our students, once they've graduated from here, that they hold, I think, most deeply forever. And they discovered this is really just the beginning.

Jeremy Tate (11:15.497)
Hmm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (11:38.702)
you know, this is just the beginning of my intellectual journey of my seeking after wisdom and truth.

Jeremy Tate (11:46.452)
That's beautiful. Every classical school I know, the head of school also serves, even if you have college counselors, the head of school still serves as one of the college counselors as well, and just being with families as they navigate this journey. So I have to imagine, you know, a big 25 % of your graduating class is going to the University of Dallas, anyways, is born as well out of your own love for the school and the formation that you receive there as well as a teacher working with Louise Cowan. I'm wondering, you

students and I've been part of these conversations before that say, mom, dad, I had a classical education, know, since kindergarten. I'm a senior. I love it. It's been great. I want to go, you know, to the big, you know, SEC, you know, experience or whatever it may be. Well, what would be your advice? And I want to hear your thoughts on this question as well. What is your advice as you kind of talk with parents about that?

Dr. Amber Dyer (12:40.846)
So many of our families are choosing the University of Dallas and schools that have a classical core curriculum over some of the flashier, bigger opportunities that are certainly available to students with this kind of academic profile when they graduate. They're doing that because they love the vision and the mission of

University of Dallas and they know that their child is going to continue to have adults investing in him or her in the things that really matter. So for example, the other day one of the University of Dallas admissions representatives came and had lunch with myself and 10 of our students who are considering going to UD next year and we had such a wonderful time discussing what it

what it would look like for a couple of them who are interested in the business world. We have some real entrepreneurs in our community here in Irving. Dallas is a major business center, and so it's not uncommon for students at my particular academy to start businesses and to do entrepreneurial work. so we're just sitting around the table talking about what that would look like to really have the best of both worlds. World class business faculty.

but also learning the best that's been thought and written and said for 3,000 years, diving into that at UD. And so those prospects are really exciting for our families because you don't really have to choose one or the other. You can really have it all in an institution like UD. And I think Mr. Ellison can probably speak to this more than I can.

Jeremy Tate (14:22.324)
Hmm.

Andrew (14:31.47)
Yeah, yeah, I think you described it very, very aptly, right? You know, before the University of Dallas had its, you know, now famous nationally regarded core curriculum.

epic poetry and fiction and drama and things like that. When UD was founded back in the 50s, just the intention was to be a great American Catholic university with departments of physics and mathematics and natural sciences and history and foreign languages and all those things, those bones of the University of Dallas absolutely remain in place to this day.

Biology is always one of our top three majors. Business is right up there too, right? So we got a great computer science department that's really burgeoning. We have a college of business that offers master's programs in cybersecurity, analytics, starting some new business AI programs this upcoming August as well. So the University of Dallas is of both ends.

Jeremy Tate (15:15.732)
Okay.

Andrew (15:39.776)
institution of higher learning. I have nothing but admiration, deep admiration for institutions like St. John's College or the Thomas Aquinas College, both of which now have two campuses, East and a West one. I have nothing but deep, deep love and admiration for institutions of higher learning that do very intense liberal arts only for four years.

That's a strong taste. And some students find that that's right for them. But there are a lot of students who have, I think, good and healthy and legitimate desires to go deeper in studies of particular subjects, to major in biology or major in psychology or things like that. And the UD enables students to have both that.

and an amazing core curriculum that really claims two full years of an undergraduate education.

Jeremy Tate (16:43.358)
No, there's this great paradox or irony with, you know, UD education and great hearts education. No great heart at tennis school. Our job here is, you know, career preparation, right? You're forming hearts. You're in minds. But the irony is an employer is, we hire well over half of our employees at CLT are graduates of UD or Hillsdale or Patrick Henry. The irony is that they make the very best employees. And I think companies are beginning to discover that because the aim of the education is so much higher. These are our

you for I

Jeremy Tate (17:43.242)
Andrew, what do you have in store for us,

Andrew (17:45.89)
Well, Jeremy, we are super excited to be able to launch together in partnership with CLT a new initiative that we are calling the U Dallas CLT Auto Admit Initiative. So any student nationwide, whether homeschool, private school, don't care what kind of school you've gone to. You could be from Argentina, you could be from Kiev in Ukraine.

Jeremy Tate (18:00.02)
name.

Andrew (18:14.836)
Any student who gets an 88 or higher on the CLT, and I don't think I would have gotten an 88 had I taken the CLT as a high school junior or senior, automatic admission to the University of Dallas if you can get an 88 on the CLT. We know that college admissions are so high pressure. We're confident enough in the quality of young people who are, first of all, interested in the classic learning test.

Jeremy Tate (18:32.34)
Amazing. Amazing.

Andrew (18:43.054)
And secondly, anyone who can score an 88 or higher, whether you know about us or not, you are a University of Dallas material. And we want to take the pressure off of competing for college admissions and give a path to auto admission for those students.

Jeremy Tate (18:59.732)
Andrew, that is huge news. I have a sneaking suspicion when other colleges hear this, they may want to copycat that as well because I think it is brilliant. And I think you're right. It's very sensitive to the amount. I've got a girl at James Madison University. I've got a girl who's a junior right now. A lot of pressure for parents and students as they navigate, you know, 2,000 options. I remember when I was a college counselor 10 years ago.

meeting with a dad who grew up in Europe and he said, in Europe you just went to the university, like the local one, the one next to you. He in America you gotta navigate 2,000 different options. One of the things we're also trying to do at CLT is kind of make it a little bit more clear where we think would be a good fit.

I think of UD, again Hillsdale, Benedictine, some of these schools as super missionally aligned. A huge thanks for you and UD and President Sanford for just being leaders here and saying hey, know, if you're doing well here, you're gonna do well at the University of Dallas. Super fantastic news and we hope it makes it a bit easier as well for those Great Heart Irving students.

Andrew (19:59.502)
We yeah, certainly we hope so. You Jeremy, the type of student who is inclined to take the CLT is is a student who's looking for something outside the mainstream, right, who for a variety of reasons is choosing a path that didn't exist 20 years ago for for placement in high school or for placement in colleges. You know, the kind of student who's getting, say, a great homeschool education in the liberal arts.

or the kind of student who's getting a great classical education at a private school or a public charter where, know, Dr. Dyer, you certainly know this, you know, when you're the headmaster of a fairly new school, a lot of times parents come to you and say, well, your school's great, Dyer, but are you actually gonna get my kids into college? I'm worried that this great book stuff, that they're gonna be too smart or that they're gonna...

be thinking and talking about things that don't mean anything to colleges and universities. CLT has long been, from its inception, it's been a pathway for students who are getting that kind of an off the mainstream education to show their strengths and to demonstrate their capacities for higher learning. So by, I think of its very nature, the CLT is a good predictor. Whoever's taking it is right for a,

college like the University of Dallas. So we're excited to see, we're excited to just get maybe on more kids and more families radar, you know, that you might not know about the University of Dallas. And then you're going to take the CLT and you'll find out about us. And we'd love to see those kids soon.

Jeremy Tate (21:43.411)
Yeah.

I got to experience a day at the UD Rome campus as well. And I even got a bottle of the UD, the only college in the US that has their own vineyard, makes their own wine. I think it's a study abroad experience second to none. I love everything about that experience. I wanna talk for a minute about homeschool students. You mentioned, we've got at CLT a lot of students coming out of these great classical charters like great hearts or classical Christian schools.

Andrew (22:06.808)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (22:15.51)
13,000 homeschoolers in the US in the early 70s to over 5 million today. I remember talking to one gentleman in your seat, Andrews, a VP of enrollment as well. He said 20, 25 years ago, we didn't know what to do with these students or what to make of them. And now the secret's out. These are some of the best students participating in classes. UD, I'm guessing you're 20-ish percent homeschool students. Is that about right?

Andrew (22:42.072)
I was gonna say our current freshman class about 20 % homeschool students and we anticipate the same if not more with this upcoming fall 25 cohort.

Jeremy Tate (22:53.266)
Okay, okay, fantastic, Amazing. Amber, question for you. We love talking about books on the CLT Anchor podcast. Do you currently teach a class? A lot of the folks at even administrators head to school, you teach a class in addition to your administrative duties at Great Heart Serving?

Dr. Amber Dyer (23:10.968)
Yes, well, I'm teaching a class right now on leadership, an APEX leadership course, but we're reading Oedipus and we're reading Antigone and those were works that we taught at the Dallas Institute. long before me, when Donald and Louise Cowan established the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, they offered these.

courses to superintendents and principals on school leadership. And they would bring in these public school teachers, and we still do that at the Dallas Institute, but they taught thousands of public school teachers and principals and administrators the classics. And so I get to carry on that tradition for great hearts. And I teach a course for school leaders. we, you know, there are...

There are, think, over 50,000 books on leadership that are on Amazon, available on Amazon right now. And I read a lot of those. They're available for free at the public library. And I just, I find that it's, that there's nothing new under the sun. You know, you can find most of what you need in, as Louise would always say, the Greeks and the Romans and the Bible, you know. And so we're going back to those really ancient sources of truth, even as we're,

Jeremy Tate (24:22.803)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (24:28.548)
even as we are training school leaders to manage their resources and most of all, love and serve the people that are in their care.

Jeremy Tate (24:40.318)
Love that. The culture of UD, this strikes me because I go to a lot of college campuses and if you just eavesdrop a little bit on student conversations, it's not like this at most campuses. But it really is, know, with these few, you know, your UD, TAC, you overhear students talking about what they're reading together when they're outside of class. You know, they're debating these ideas. So much of what happens at UD is this very

Dr. Amber Dyer (24:41.636)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (25:10.332)
intensive common core. I believe it's the same for everybody freshman and sophomore year. Is that accurate?

Andrew (25:14.348)
It basically, yeah, basically the same sequence of courses at the same time for freshmen. The bulk of the core is what's called the literary traditions sequence. And basically every freshman is reading the same books at the same time. know, every freshman starts with the Iliad in the very first week. You know, by the time students get to a second semester of literary traditions, they're

the entire class is reading Dante together, right? And you can't have that kind of common conversation in every dorm room, on every floor of every dorm, unless you have a real core that is keeping everybody together, literally on the same page or close to it, for such a large portion of their studies. And that's really the condition. Not to, I mean,

Jeremy Tate (25:53.779)
Yeah.

Andrew (26:11.66)
The books are fantastic. But if you don't all read the books, the great books and study philosophy and Western theological tradition, art history, you don't all go to Rome together. You don't have nearly as tight of a bond. And I do think that is really one of the miraculous things about UD, that tightness of the.

Jeremy Tate (26:33.012)
You know, we see this on a micro level at Great Hearts and UD and CLT. CLT, we started about six years ago now reading out loud. Every Monday, we read a classic for 40 minutes together. We're reading out loud. There's 55 of us now, you know, and we're just, we're doing abolition of man right now.

And the way this has shaped culture, because we're reading the same thing, has been even way more powerful than I expected. And I think as we're trying to figure out as a nation why we're so fragmented and can't have real conversations, in large part goes back to education, being fragmented and not having

common basis. Amber, I'm wondering, know, at the great hearts level, in terms of forming culture, how do the reading lists play into that and shape that?

Dr. Amber Dyer (27:22.472)
They have so much to do with it. mean, as do the other parts of our curriculum, which every senior is going to take physics too. Every student as they travel through great hearts, take. They don't know any differently than that everybody takes calculus one and calculus two. They think that that's just what normal kids

in high schools do. And so there's a true bonding that takes place in those other classes as well. by the time a student graduates from Great Heart Soho have encountered, they will have experienced over 1,000 hours of human letters conversations.

And those courses, we have a one track curriculum. The choice that families make is to trust us with their child's education and to teach them the very best things. And so all of our freshmen are reading the same works of literature and philosophy and history together, same with our sophomores, juniors and seniors. So I was just in a junior HL today, he made letters today and we are reading the Republic together and

in discussing how an oligarchy becomes a democracy together. And our students are learning in this process not only to really look deeply at the work itself and to learn from that ancient wisdom, but they're also learning how to look deeply at one another. And that's one of my very favorite things about

Jeremy Tate (28:34.494)
Mm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (28:54.542)
Great Heart's model is that it's not just the book list alone, but it's also the pedagogy. It's the way in which we encounter these works in conversation with one another.

Jeremy Tate (29:06.932)
There we go.

Andrew (29:06.99)
Yeah, I, Jeremy, can I jump in? I'd love to say a word about that, right? So actually confession, I have a couple of kids at Amber's school right now. I have an eighth grader. I have a senior who is defending her thesis on Evil and Wallows Brideshead revisited next Monday. yeah, it was amazing. I still think she's too young to have read the book, but it doesn't really hit you I think until you're at least in your mid thirties. But you know, a lot of classical,

Jeremy Tate (29:14.375)
I'm

Jeremy Tate (29:22.12)
One of my favorites, wow.

Andrew (29:36.077)
educators, a lot of different school systems, school models say, oh, we're great books. Well, it turns out that there are lots of different ways to do great books. Pretty much universally, people say in the classical ed movements, say, oh, Socratic method, we do Socratic method. Well, gosh, mean, what does Socratic method look like? There are a lot of different conceptions of it that are out there.

And I can say this from experience, the great hearts, humane letters approach is a wonderful mixture of, think, really attentive study to literature, careful reading of philosophy and theology, distinguishing between genres, right? Hamlet isn't a philosophical treatise in the same way or even at all as say Aristotle's Ethics or

You know, and kids aren't ready to just talk without guidance and without leadership. You know, I don't know about you all, you know, the great books movement had a certain manifestation in public elementary schools back in the 80s. I actually remember that. I remember the junior great books forum where the teacher would ask one question and then the genius was supposedly, oh, the fifth graders all talking together.

with no interventions from the teacher for 45 minutes. Well, I mean, you'll learn a lot that way, but the way Great Hearts does humane letters calls for, it really is the best of both worlds, right? Yes, it gives space for the students to speak to each other, to express their ideas, formulate their ideas in speech, but under the active guidance and mentoring and coaching of a teacher, right? Let's not pretend

that high school students are the same as, have reached the same level of reading and understanding and liberal artistry as a well-educated teacher. So the Great Heart's method really, I think achieves a great balance in Humane Letters between freedom for the students and rigorous guidance, coaching and discipline from the teacher.

Jeremy Tate (31:53.652)
I'd to spend our last few minutes here speaking just about Louise Callan, the Callans, her legacy in particular. Once heard, and it really stuck with me, that one of the things you notice about a saint is that they're, a Canaanite saint at least,

their influence begins to grow after they die when it's typically the opposite for most of us, unfortunately. Certainly the influence of a giant like C.S. Lewis, far greater now than when he died in 1963. I wonder if you could speak about her influence in particular on UD and it becoming now kind of this flagship program for students who want a serious deep dive into this tradition.

Andrew (32:35.938)
Yeah, you know, I'll go ahead and start with that. And again, I'm just someone who gets to come along and, you know, in the footsteps and the trail blaze, the pathway paved by Louise and Donald, let's not forget Dr. Donald Kallen, long-time president of the University of Dallas. You know, a great proof of when you've built something is when it sticks around even long after you're gone. And...

know, Donald Cowan, when he and Louise were together at the university starting in the 1960s, they really refounded it in many ways by establishing the core program and, you know, Louise shaping the literary traditions program with its emphasis, you know, the tragic, the comic and the epic genres of poetry. That has long outlasted them, right? And it's not called the Cowan

sequence, it's just called the core, right? That's a good sign that it was built really well and built to last. And that, I don't think, that will never change here at the University of Dallas. That will never change.

Jeremy Tate (33:35.198)
Thank

Dr. Amber Dyer (33:48.132)
To piggyback off of that, was sharing with you, Jeremy, before the podcast began that, I I like to call Dallas, Texas, Irving, Irving, Texas, specifically, really ground zero in my mind for much of the classical revival that we are seeing today. There was a time that Donald and Louise stepped away from the University of Dallas for about 10 years.

to establish the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. And it was during that time that they met with Mortimer Adler and Jacques Barzun. Louise told me that they would meet every few months and they would meet in different various locations. A lot of times they met at the Institute or they met here in the DFW area. And that was when they wrote that three volume.

a PIDEA proposal to reconceive what American education ought to be in a democracy. that little, know, back when the Cowens were doing that work and they were inviting these tremendous thinkers even before that to come and join them at the University of Dallas, they were only about

from my estimation, there only about 300 young people nationally who had access to this kind of classical liberal education that has so grown in my lifetime and in your lifetime as well. And I think that serves as a true testimony to their vision for wanting to return to something that was very, very old.

Jeremy Tate (35:04.862)
Mm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (35:25.264)
and do it in a fresh and innovative way. And one of the things I loved about working with Louise and being her student and being her assistant in her later years was that she was always that professor who was so anchored and so rooted in the tradition. And yet she was the most cutting edge and innovative as well. And she was always looking forward

Jeremy Tate (35:49.588)
Hmm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (35:53.694)
prophetically into the next age almost saying to us, we who were her students, she would say to us all the time, we must change the world. We must change the world. she chose particular people who she said, you you have a business mind and you have a multiplier mind and you have an entrepreneurial mind and you have a mind for literature and poetry. And she would gather us

Jeremy Tate (36:11.348)
Mm.

Dr. Amber Dyer (36:22.628)
close to her and say watch and learn from the tradition, always with a mind of an epic sensibility of carrying forth that to the next age. So I'm incredibly grateful to the for all that they did to establish the University of Dallas.

But even further, that 10 years that they stepped away from the university and focused on K-12 education has, I think, shaped what is so exciting that is going on right now in classical liberal education, K-12.

Jeremy Tate (37:04.952)
Such a beautiful note to end on. Andrew, what is the name again? is the UD automatic admin.

Andrew (37:11.15)
So it's the UDALIS CLT Auto Admit.

Jeremy Tate (37:16.016)
UD CLT Auto Admit, fantastic. And students, we're going to work to get this built into your CLT dashboard so you can see right away when you get that score in 88, automatic Admit. Truly incredible, truly innovative. Love this. It's been a great partnership. Now, I think UD was about the 10th college to adopt CLT. It would have been the very end of 2016. we're going on nearly a decade of a partnership together. So very grateful for you, President Sanford.

Andrew (37:18.508)
Right, see ya.

Jeremy Tate (37:45.222)
leadership. And we're here as well with Dr. Amber Dyer, head of the largest Great Heart School in Texas, Great Hearts Irving, and is a UD fan and former professor herself. Andrew, Dr. Dyer, thank you both so much for being with us on the Anchor Podcast.

Dr. Amber Dyer (38:04.964)
Thank you.