Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/04/06/great_books_make_a_comeback.php
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Higher education reform has become a popular topic amongst both pundits and intellectuals; ever since Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, books on what is wrong with the university and how to fix it have flooded the market. Of the many critiques offered by these books, one in particular is in the process of being addressed at Dartmouth: the curriculum.
Curriculums at universities and colleges have been a popular source of criticism for more than the last century. There was a time when the raging debate in academia was whether or not to teach living foreign languages, e.g. French. By 1920, however, John Erskine, first of Columbia University then of the University of Chicago, had come to the conclusion that the university was straying too far from its foundational texts, the ‘great books.’
Erskine’s crusade met with varying degrees of success. Both Chicago and Columbia still have core curricula, while other schools have done away with any requirements at all, Brown for instance. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Brown is St. John’s College, which even uses the great books to teach things like chemistry and mathematics, i.e. learning calculus by reading Leibniz and Newton.
Dartmouth’s current system of distributive requirements falls somewhere in between Columbia and Brown. The system tends to encourage students to go about fulfilling their requirements freely but haphazardly. Professor James Murphy has set up an initiative called the “Daniel Webster Program” to provide a good alternative to the often incoherent set of classes used to satisfy the current requirements.
Murphy explains that part of the genesis for the Project came from his time on the Committee On Instruction. “There are 1600 courses in the ORC [Organization, Regulations, and Courses] and the distributive requirements give you very little guidance. You could meet them in any number of ways. I served for four years on the Committee On Instruction that oversees curriculum. We were presented with a survey that Dartmouth did in the late 90s of graduating seniors. That survey was very disturbing and troubling because the majority of graduating seniors expressed high dissatisfaction on how they were advised in choosing courses. The results were so disturbing that the college even set up a new position, the dean of advising, that Cecilia Gaposchkin holds. She’s done a lot to try to re-vamp, re-invigorate, re-energize the advising process so that students feel a closer connection with their faculty advisor. She’s got faculty involved in the orientation process. The College in a sense recognizes a real serious problem here.”
The realization that the College was doing a poor job of advising its students, was driven home to Professor Murphy by his own in-class experiences. “And in my informal experience teaching Government 6—our introduction to political ideas, our kind of great books introduction to political science—I always get a couple dozen seniors in it every year who say, ‘I want to take this because I’m about to graduate from college and haven’t read these important books.’ What we find among these seniors and recent graduates is a kind of buyer’s remorse, ‘now I realize the courses I should have taken but now it’s too late, college is over.’ There’s a lot of that remorse out there. I don’t think students are getting the guidance they need to put together a coherent education.”
Professor Murphy was quick to sympathize with students, pointing to flaws in the design of the ORC that make choosing classes—and a coherent set of classes—difficult. “No wonder it’s very difficult and incredibly confusing,” he said. “1600 courses and you only elect to take 36 of them. That’s a huge challenge.”
One glaring fault is that the ORC doesn’t mark out classes that teach based on canonical texts. He said, “I don’t think students are aware that parts of the ORC are relatively permanent, the same course have been there for centuries—the calculus, physics, Greek, Shakespeare, Homer. There are a lot of courses in the ORC that are unchanged; they are changed very slowly over eons, kind of a permanent curriculum.”
Murphy went on to contrast these with other kinds of courses: “But then there are other big parts of the ORC that are constantly turning over and changing—on the frontiers of knowledge that are constantly turning over and changing. But students don’t know which are which. They aren’t marked that this is permanent, this is a change in curriculum. Students, I think, end up taking classes that are ever-changing, so even though they might seem up to date, turn out to be out of date quickly and would have rather focus more on the part of curriculum that isn’t changing, so that their college education isn’t that out of date.” This is the place, he claims, for the Daniel Webster Program, “I think that’s what our curricular initiatives attempt to do—give students who want it, a kind of road map through the ORC to help them put together a more coherent general education.”
The Program has more than just one focus though, as Murphy explains, “It’s got a curricular focus and sort of an enrichment thing that has a conference-lecture focus. That’s what our first event is, the Janus Lecture on April 4. [Anthony] Kronman is coming on April 4, and that’s going to be about education reform and in particular an argument about the importance of the great books of humanities in education. I’ll be responding to Kronman’s talk and then introducing some of the initiatives in the Webster program.”
Kronman is a former Dean of Yale Law School and now teaches in Yale’s “Directed Studies Program”—an optional set of core classes for Yale freshman, which focus on the great books. Kronman will in large part be talking about subjects that he touches on in his recent book, Education’s End: Why Colleges and Universities have Given up on the Meaning of Life.
In the back of his book, Kronman lists the works the students in the Directed Studies will read in a year. The list is enough to set any humanities student drooling. But that might be why it’s not an ideal set of courses, according to Murphy. “[The Program is] Directed Studies inspired, but it’s different. You know Directed Studies is very much humanities focused. One of the courses deals with history and politics, but even that is largely humanistic in orientation. My sequences, if you go on the website, are much more comprehensive with natural science and social science sequences—which Directed Studies never really attempts.”
When I pressed Professor Murphy on what kind of texts the course would teach, on whether it would focus on the Western Canon, he noted that the “program is not exactly a Western Civ. program. It has a kind of great books focus but not really in the Western Civ. We include some classic books from Asia as well.” He went on to explain how the new Program would relate to the current two-term humanities sequence offered to freshman. “We now have a two term humanities sequence—the great books of world literature. This would be a six course sequence with a humanities sequence, a social science sequence, and a natural science sequence. So that those freshman interested—it’s an optional freshman core—those freshman interested have the opportunity to have a kind of comprehensive core experience in the liberal arts.”
At the Program’s website (at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~websterprogram/) Murphy has compiled reading lists from schools like Yale, Columbia, Chicago, St. John’s, Notre Dame, and others. He also has preliminary suggestions for minors based on great book courses already offered at Dartmouth. Those would be the second aspect of the Program’s curricular focus. “The other curriculum thing is called the Touchstones in Liberal Arts, and that’s a proposal for a new minor. . . .I’ve culled out about 30 great books courses from the 1600 in the ORC and set forward some examples of ways to group them thematically.”
Dartmouth’s curriculum is not the only focus of the Program. As previously alluded to, the second component of the initiative is an annual lecture and conference. The Janus Lecture will occur during the spring term and an ancient-modern conference every fall. Professor Murphy’s own background is in contrasting problems from both ancient and modern perspectives. I asked him about his areas of research: “My first book was about theories of labor and work, comparing ancient and modern theories. My second book was on the theory of positive law from, again, an ancient and modern perspective.” The first conference next November will look at education through Socrates and Rousseau, an ancient and a modern.
The Hopkins Institute, an alumni group, has long been looking to have renewed priority placed on the Western Canon. Though Professor Murphy’s program doesn’t strictly cover just Western thought, he remarked that the Institute was a great example of how alumni groups can constructively engage the College. The Institute has also provided the Daniel Webster Program with financial support; the Manhattan Institute and other College sources have also contributed funds.
Interest in emphasizing the great books has been simmering for some time, but where did Professor Murphy get the idea for the fall conference? It “was a faculty seminar led by Ned Lebow. He had a seminar about five years ago called ancient and modern perspectives in international relations. His own work in teaching often involves Greek and ancient perspectives. We’d get together and present our own work, and talk about the great themes of War and Peace from these ancient and modern perspectives—people from History, Religion, Philosophy, Government, and Classics. I thought, ‘Wow, that was really fun. It really provided a unique forum to talk to our colleagues in other departments. Maybe we could generalize this. It doesn’t just have to be international relations. We can get ancient and modern perspectives on a variety of issues.’ So, that was the inspiration.”
The Program is not meant as a replacement of the current system, whose defining feature is the freedom it gives to students. “It’s a system that promotes freedom, but like all freedoms they can be well or poorly used. So you have the freedom at Dartmouth to get a great education, and you have the freedom to get a less than great, or incoherent, education.” More than anything, the Program will add a welcome voice when it comes to student guidance. Professor Murphy continued, “That’s the price of freedom, but I do think students can get better guidance to use that freedom more wisely in selecting courses—and that’s what we’re trying to help with.”