Alasdair MacIntyre’s three-stage framework for the concept of virtue is used to assess the Mary College at Arizona State University program. Mary College at Arizona State University is a partnership between the University of Mary and Arizona State University, universities with conflicting views of practice of education, narrative of self, and hermeneutic of moral tradition. Members of Mary College at Arizona State University achieve the internal good of initiation and engagement into these conflicting views. The Mary College partnership has the potency to reignite the historically extended, socially embodied argument about the purpose of a university education between rival institutions of higher education and thereby revive the decaying social significance of the university.

In this essay, I explore a claim that Socrates makes in Plato’s Gorgias where he professes to be the only true practitioner of the political art in Athens, the only true statesman. I argue that the Gorgias enables readers to have a greater understanding of how Socrates conceives his own purpose and relationship with Athens as a practitioner of the “true science of politics” as he calls it and as a skilled user of what he develops as the "true art of rhetoric." This ennobling art of rhetoric, which Socrates professes to be a practitioner of, is opposed to the sycophantic and flattering art propagated by Gorgias and others. Furthermore, I argue that the view of rhetoric and politics that Socrates develops in the Gorgias serves as a foundation for his actions and statements in the Apology of Socrates.