Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/06/02/two_roads_ever_diverge_in_a_wood_a_call_for_a_core_curriculum.php
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Near the beginning of my time at Dartmouth, in the English Department from 1969-75, I proposed the comprehensive Liberal Arts Program described on page 12. My companions in this endeavor were Dain Trafton, since a translator of Tasso and Chairman of English at Rockford College, and Carnes Lord, since a member of President Reagan's National Security Council, the translator of Aristotle's Politics, and now professor at the Naval War College. Dain and I had had good courses in the old General Education program at Harvard; Cary had had the intense experience of the old Directed Studies Program at Yale. Meeting together weekly to read Xenophon and pleased with our first teaching duties, we thought nothing could be better for our students than to read some great books together.
Although a number of senior faculty, including Ted Chick in German, said they would like to teach in the proposed program, and others supported it, although it garnered some favorable public discussion, and although President Kemeny assigned us money to teach a pilot course from the program, a two course, two teacher pilot of the program was nevertheless rejected by the Committee on Instruction. This rejection brought all progress to a halt, and warned younger teachers away. In The Hollow Men, Charles Sykes regards that rejection as Kemeny and Dartmouth's last chance.
Any such list as we proposed provokes calls for the inclusion of other authors. Academics who are not concerned that the vast majority of students graduating have not studied Shakespeare or Plato, have not taken calculus, have not learned a foreign language, and cannot write a thoughtful letter about an important experience in their lives, suddenly become concerned that their favorites: Halifax or Marvel, Vauvenargues or Simone Weil, Hölderlin or Keller, Münter or Morley, Fibonacci or Leuveenhook, do not appear on a proposed list.
There is usually some sense in their suggestions. We should rejoice that there are more than a hundred great souls, and be glad that there are a thousand good ones as well. One can only add: "Not all good things can be done at once, there is later life after college, and an enhanced Junior and Senior life would follow our program." Once such a program is in place such critics are brought around not by the inclusion of favorite authors, but by the pleasure of having students in their classes who have already read great works. The Greek professor who objected that no one could possibly study Plato without Greek, would soon find that students from such a program not only swell but enrich his Greek classes.
Such a program as ours offered what college curricula once provided, a coherent, sequenced order of study, but it provided more than a core or a distributive requirement, for it was communal. Living together and eating together, our students would have had more than housing and food to discuss, and if the program had endured, alumni and alumnae from different decades would share their studies, and be able to converse with current students. Faculty, too, would have enjoyed the enlarged conversation. "That's not my field" they often say, feel understood only by fellow specialists, and sometimes only once a year at the national meeting, but most faculty when they were young chose a life with teaching because they thought their teachers had good conversations together. Great books require such conversations, and whatever is great elevates as well as broadens those who look up to it. Crossing the Hanover Green one summer, Lionel Trilling said to me, "All that I am to this day comes from the chance to teach in such a program."
Some of the opposition was based on scholarly probity. Thus, the Committee on Instruction claimed no one at Dartmouth was competent to teach such a program, and in a public meeting, one professor asserted none of us three had a right to teach most of the authors, since we had doctorates in only one field. In reply, I asked him if would he agree that our list included the master spirits of humanity. He agreed. I asked if it was true that many of the later authors grew great by studying some earlier one. He said they had. And then I asked whether any of them had doctorates. Forgetting that Heidegger did and that Goethe had a higher degree, he said none did. So I asked him, "Then what gave any of these great souls the right to learn from the others?" He was silent, but not, I think, persuaded.
Some supporters were not either. Word reached us that one muttered "What is this wisdom s***?" As Socrates suggests, although oligarchs tend to be "conservative," they also tend to neglect education. They hold that the "old is the good," but may think the old is privilege and wainscoting. (I hope Sanborn always has tea.) They may praise learning, but they truly love their horses, dogs, shotguns, and vehicles. One once stopped during his lecture to ask students: does anybody know who the Norse god of thunder is? A hand at the back shot up, "Thor, sir." And the teacher shot back, "Now that's an educated man," for he had not noticed that it was the student's only appearance in class that winter, which he had spent reading Thor comic books. The two most famous conservative lecturers on campus lifted not a finger in support of our program.
From a wider angle, Vico observed that if you want to equal the scope of a single ancient mind, you would have to assemble a whole modern university. He did not mean that assemblage would equal one ancient; however many specialist mediocrities you add together, the sum is the same, and Vico went on to compare the modern university to a city ruled by a tyrant very concerned to make all the boroughs mistrust each other. More profoundly, Nietzsche spoke against the emancipation of scholarship from philosophy, from philosophy understood not as an activity done M-W-F at noon, but as a way of life, which counts nothing alien to its immoderate and yet disciplined ardor. As a senior at the time, Algis Valiunas '75, observed, the contention of the Committee on Instruction that no one at Dartmouth could teach the proposed courses was an insult to all the teachers who said they'd like to teach in the program, but if true, a confession of intellectual poverty, all the worse for being unashamed.
Public opposition to our proposal was, then, mostly based on good things, subordinate things I believe, but still on good things. The most potent opposition to our proposal came from something seldom mentioned in public, the departmental arrangement of the modern college and the competing interests it splits the community into. Although we fashioned our proposal to fit with any departmental major and even with pre-medical studies, the departmental mind was not assured.
To all visitors to Dartmouth, the Green in the middle suggests, "Here is innocence, here is happiness, and here is peace," but the reality is the war of all departments against all others. Crossing the Green one day, the head of Comparative Literature jested to me: "I'll meet you here and duel it out for students." I learned that this joke was serious one winter when I taught in a good Bible course (not as Literature but for Literature Students, thank God) with the senior professor who had pioneered it; when I had graded bur not yet returned my students' hour exams, he invited me to lunch. I could tell he was concerned about something, and since it is proper for a junior teacher, even with some experience, to defer to a senior teacher, I volunteered, "I would be very happy if you would look over how I marked and commented on my students' work." Gesturing that aside, he said "It is not so good if a major gets less than a B." I suppose he understood himself to be supporting the department in the silent but unrelenting effort to win and to retain numbers of students. Since I was not about to be unjust and dishonest, I can well understand why he passed up the chance to teach with me again.
It is to the credit of Dartmouth then that in public the opposers of our liberal arts proposal spoke in the name of knowledge, of language skill, and of disciplinary integrity, all good things, however secondary. I suspect that today such opposers would speak differently. At many colleges, the dearest wish of the faculty is that the students adopt their opinions and their feelings, their discontent, their indignation, and their self-love. Naturally those who want their students to think they are great resent genuine greatness anywhere near, in their classroom, in their course, in a curriculum, or a colleague. However much such resentment was at work against our proposal, it was never voiced in public, and looking at the departmental curricula of that time, you would have to say that what the faculty deemed the best was pretty much what was taught, which in English meant Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, etc. And it is to be remembered that our proposal had supporters. Indeed, all around American Academe in the late sixties, despite the national and campus tumult, there were similar proposals made and adopted, for example Joseph Tussman's at Berkeley and John Senior's at Kansas. Has any such program been initiated anywhere in American Academe in recent times? (If so, please write me.) Old ones have been maintained, for example at Columbia, at Yale, at St. John's, at Deep Springs, and at the University of Dallas, but it is only new institutions, such as Thomas Aquinas and George Wythe College that have newly founded the like. Where reform of existing institutions is unlikely, hope must turn to new ones. To start, the friendship of five or so fellow teachers is the one thing necessary.
For the student in an old institution, the question is: how much of such greatness can I get here, by selecting courses and teachers carefully, and, I would add, by sharing as many courses with friends. Does the atmosphere at Dartmouth today support such studies and such friendships? I am unable to say.
In the summer of 1988 I returned to Dartmouth, this time to teach in Government. Although some of the students were as good as the old days, still most students that summer were not very willing to talk together. Although few things can equal the power of Plato's Republic to provoke thoughtful conversation, these students would not risk it. That they were intelligent and did have opinions was easy to detect from their journals and papers, but they did not want to speak about them in class to each other. They did not think the convictions by which they lived and measured things, often quite confidently, judging from their indignations, were rationally discussible or even grounded in reason.
Though rejected at Dartmouth, a version of our Liberal Arts Program was instituted at Queens College, by Prof. Hilail Gildin with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities; since it was just when City College was altering itself through open admissions, many aspiring students around the city found what they wanted in this program which exists to this day. Graduates of Dartmouth since 1970 may judge whether their education would have been enhanced by studying the authors on our list. Present-day students may wonder.
The significant additions I would now make to our list are more Aquinas, some Rembrandt, a section on America, the founders and Lincoln, and some Mozart. Although I urge students to read the works of the East that make a similar claim to greatness, I do not recommend them to begin with. The motive is too likely to be a shallow dislike of one's own. I would not expect much good from a young Japanese student who, declaring an ardent desire to study the great Western books, turned out never to have memorized poems from the Manyoshu, read the Tale of Genji, or taken in the quenching teaching of the Buddha. And nobody who shouts, "The great must go" can study anything. Study the great works of the West and you will come to see that they are both the ground of the mæurs, practices, and institutions around you, and their best criticism. Socrates, the originator of philosophy, and Christ, the teacher of Christianity, are somehow the founders of Western Civilization and at the same time such great critics of it that if they reappeared one would be hemlocked and the other crucified. The study of them and their many students offers the liberation of understanding, and may lead to higher duties than you dreamed of.
An old hand at Dartmouth, Arthur Luehrmann, once told me, "Tenure is only given to those who will never use it." The corollary is that those who are perceived as likely to use tenure, will be denied it. Although proposing this Liberal Arts Program was my political unmaking at Dartmouth, it was my intellectual making, thenceforth and forever. And it should be noted that Dartmouth gave me a six year horizon, first to attend wholly to teaching and then in the later years to writing as well. Young teachers today, stubborn or unstubborn, are not so well treated. My readiness for the happiness of teaching and the proposal of our Liberal Arts Program was, however, prepared by a rare and blessed experience, which no institution can supply, yet no institution can prevent. Only at the end of graduate school did I meet a man equal in heart and in mind to the authors I was beginning to read, especially Nietzsche. Meeting him turned all one's weak suspicions, which one had allowed others to make one feel guilty for, into one, single, firm, whole conviction. Teaching with that conviction made a classroom a place to learn in, one of the best. In the Freshmen Seminars at Dartmouth, no one minded if you read great books not in "your field;" the reason why the best writing addressed to students was not in the Course Catalogue but in the Freshman Seminar booklet was because the teacher was trying to get the best crew, the most gifted and the most desirous, for the intellectual voyage he was planning, none but true Argonauts. In those Freshman Seminars, I began anew my education. And the pilot course President Kemeny provided for (enduring thanks to him), entitled "The Origins of Modernity," allowed something in addition. It meant students from a Freshman Seminar could continue our studies together. When you do that, you don't start from scratch.
Classes with such fine, alert, and ardent students are one of the three things most instrumental to the life of the mind, friends and solitude being the others. I recall with happiness our many times together, our studies, our meals in Thayer, our extra classes, our extra-curricular reading group Friday nights, and also our parties. One day, early in my time at Dartmouth, as I sat in my office, one student, and then another, and then another, would come in a little sad, saying they did not feel they fit at Dartmouth. By the tenth one, I began saying, "On Saturday, at a party I am having for you, I will introduce you to nine of other students like yourself." After the party I heard students especially remarked on the walk we'd taken in the rosy twilight, and it pleased me to think they had discovered that part of the good life. I still stroll with some (Mark Burgess '75 and Bob Fastiggi '75, and once a decade Vernon Chadwick '75). It was at Dartmouth that I found time spent with students is almost always better than with colleagues. Exceptions during my time at Dartmouth were, in addition to my companions Dain and Cary: Ed Yonan in Religion, George Young in Russian, Joe Galloway, who held the permanently junior and permanently impermanent position in Continental Philosophy, and Roger Masters in Government, ever-ready for good conversation.
Another exception among senior faculty, a very good teacher of Shakespeare, Robert G. Hunter, left at the end of my first year; before he did, he gave me some advice: "There are two ways to succeed here. Either you go to the coffee room or you publish." I asked, "You did not mention teaching" and he replied, "I did not mention teaching." Well, I had been to the coffee room; my interviews there led me to expect more good conversations about literature and teaching; upon arriving what I found there was talk of investments and taxes; insofar as teaching was discussed, it was complaints about students; no one ever spoke of a happy discovery in class, or even of the pleasure of reading. So I taught, and, as it happened, I did publish, one book and six articles, and, as it happened to me, I did leave, finding my way to a place that had such a curriculum as we had proposed, and a graduate school to match, whose Literature Program I led. So although it often seems we must choose between good and gain, it sometimes happens that when we choose the good, we also gain. In the tragedies we proposed to read in our program, human beings pay the full price and then some, and for their virtues as much as their flaws, and yet in the comedies they often receive no punishment commensurate to their vices, and are even rewarded despite them. Both seem unjust and yet, grosso modo, are they not just? For a just judge might well be both hard to satisfy and yet easy to please.
When I, together with my friends, proposed this Liberal Arts curriculum, I was filled with the happiness of teaching, of having found in the classroom a wonderful place to learn, and because I met with such good students, I was sanguine about human nature, unobservant of it in the faculty, and complacent about the support institutions like Dartmouth gave to teaching and learning. The discoveries about these things that I have mentioned were sometimes more than disappointing, and they were injurious, but they were most powerfully and beneficially illuminated by the authors in our program, who are not as sanguine as I was about how much human beings can learn, even about themselves. Madison said, "Where men can do evil, they mostly will," and so he constructed a good institution to restrict the evil and promote the good. Among the things that recommend the books we listed, great and deep as are the differences among the authors, are their combination of sobriety and ardor. Without the one, life would not be worth living, and even with the other, it is sometimes very hard. Thus I think even more than I did then that such a program would be as good for students at Dartmouth now, as it was when we proposed it long ago.