About the project

A transparency tool for families who want to know what ideas are being served in the classroom.

About

The Intellectual Nutrition Label is a way to summarize the intellectual ingredients in a professor’s public work. It is designed to help parents and students understand the worldview, values, influences, and likely classroom emphases before enrolling in a course.

The goal of this project is to teach you the skills needed to evaluate any professor or class for yourself. You will learn to identify a professor's presuppositions about knowledge, reality, and value.

How the project works

The Intellectual Nutrition Label is a transparency tool for parents and students. It evaluates publicly available information such as university pages, CVs, published articles, books, podcasts, syllabi, and lectures. The goal is not to smear professors, but to make the intellectual contents of a class easier to understand before families pay tuition. Even if your particular professor or class is not discussed here, you will be able to apply the insights from the Intellectual Nutrition Labels to your own setting.

This project is maintained by Owen Anderson, Ph.D., Philosophy. Professor Anderson is a tenured full professor of philosophy and religion at Arizona State University, where he has taught for 26 years. He is also a Christian pastor.

Professor Anderson teaches in the Socratic style, drawing ideas out of students through discussion. He believes that creation reveals God to all persons and that the Bible teaches the means of redemption through Christ. He believes that government has a limited purpose in human life and that a healthy society must have healthy families, churches, businesses, and schools in addition to government.

His published research includes books with Cambridge University Press about the natural moral law that is written on the human heart and the clarity of God's existence.

You can contact him through his Substack page at https://substack.com/@drowenanderson