Somewhat Suspect Sages

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Tuesday, November 17, 1998

Tom Stoppard's last play (Invention of Love) had one really terrific line. 'The Oxford Education,' says one decrepit Oxford curmudgeon to another, 'is the idea that knowledge consists in studying three texts in Greek and three texts in Latin, though not necessarily the same three texts every year.'

The classic conception of liberal education (put forth by Stoppard's fictional Oxford dons) is literary in nature. The fundamental unit of education, in our tradition, has been the text. We learn to read first, and all else — analysis, historical consideration, humane discussion — follows from there. The Western Canon emphasizes a certain set of authors — Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare — but perhaps more important is that it emphasizes authors at all. This central conception, that literature is universally appealing, that it is intellectually inspirational, and that it is artistically vivid, is the driving concept of the Western Canon and the Core Curriculum.

Columbia's Core Curriculum sets a distinctly textual tone for the College. It is consciously intellectual, it is consciously analytical, it is consciously humane — concerned not with the mass movements of history and sociology but with the private functions and dysfunctions of the human mind.

We learn that the Student Assembly is proposing an extension of a system of learning at Dartmouth quite divorced from both Columbia's core and our distinct tradition. The Student Assembly hopes to add an Identity, Race, and Ethnicity requirement, an ethnic studies requirement, to Dartmouth's requirement system — already a confused amalgam of post-leftist social philosophies and petty departmental politicking. The Identity, Race, and Ethnicity requirement will supplement, its sponsors suppose, the existing Non-Western requirement.

The practical dispute in all this is as much disciplinary as it is political. What the sponsors of the Identity, Race and Ethnicity requirement want to do is hand in the literary basis of our learning for a sociological basis. Understanding things like cultures and movements is more important to the current requirement curriculum than is understanding things like people and texts. Bigger is better.

The Identity, Race and Ethnicity requirement does not want to make the campus intellectual or to make the campus artistic or to make the campus analytical. It wants to make the campus political. And 'political' is often directly prohibitive of intellectual, artistic, analytical — really, of thought.

The traditional emphasis of attacks on the Western Canon is that it is unduly faithful to a closed set of somewhat suspect sages — the Dead White Male thesis. Columbia's core curriculum, however, has changed over the years to include several writers from this century, women and minorities conspicuously included.

The fundamental element of the Western Canon and the Core Curriculum is not any strict reliance on a set of authors. It is a strict reliance on literature. Literature is the defining jewel of Western culture — one bookshelf can house the culture's knowledge, art, and inspiration. No other culture can boast the same condensation and easy perpetuity that Western culture's literature allows it.

These contemporary criticisms of the Western Canon miss the point — it is a disciplinary question (literary v. sociology) and not a political question (liberal v. conservative). Any institution that picks sociology over literature isn't worthy of the intellectual mantle of Western Civilization.

Somewhat Suspect Sages

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