This continuing interest led Buchanan in 1925 to accept a position as Assistant Director of the People's Institute, an affiliate of the Cooper Union in New York City that was dedicated to adult education and other forms of cultural enrichment for the city's workers and immigrants. It was there that Buchanan met Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon, and the three of them conceived an ambitious program for reviving American education and democracy through mass training in the traditional liberal arts by means of the Socratic method and the Great Books curriculum.