In early 2015, Governor Scott Walker’s administration aimed for a dramatic shift in the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement. Gone was flowery talk about “public service” and “the search of truth”; such goals must bow to the imperative to meet “the state’s workforce needs”. Students of ancient Greek philosophy and their apparently hopeless job prospects have been a punchline in Senator Marco Rubio’s stump speeches, Such attitudes show a disregard for the conservative imperative to pass on a cultural inheritance. But they also speak to a larger shift, the rise of a technocratic and utilitarian approach to education that alarms conservative, Marxist, and liberal writers alike.
Liberal arts education is frequently defended by appealing to its contribution to critical thinking, social progress, and the common good. These are undoubtedly valid ends. However, set by themselves, we risk losing confidence in the oldest aim of the liberal arts education: to cultivate personal character through an engagement with the Great Books, through the “the best of what has been said and thought” in the words of Matthew Arnold. This is hardly a pinning of nostalgia. Numerous American colleges still have core Great Books seminars asking students to take great literature and philosophy seriously. It’d be hard to count as backward institutions like the UChicago or Columbia,
Admittedly, a 21st Century Great Books program will look different from an Oxford or Cambridge curriculum in the 1800’s. It will be concise in a time when more students major in the physical and social sciences or want to enjoy a range of electives. Calls for greater diversity of voices should not be dismissed as political correctness. It would be inconceivable for a study of the human condition to not include Eastern or Islamic philosophical traditions. No curriculum today would be complete without drawing from voices like Wright, Márquez, Morrison, or O’Connor.
There must be a balance between necessary adjustment and preservation, however. Certain Western writings, such as Plato, Kant, or Marx in philosophy or ancient Greek dramas and prose, the Hebrew Bible, or Shakespeare in literature, dramatically shaped the entire history of ideas and the nature of our own culture, in both its virtues and weaknesses. To keep alive these texts in core seminars is not “Eurocentric” but an act of humility.
A Great Books program today need not be a systematic reading list universal for everyone on campus. Rather each professor would choose certain works for seminars clustered around Great Questions. What is the good life and ideal community? What do we mean by social justice and freedom? How does one understand both religious and secular views of the world? How do we make sense of and live through evil and suffering? These are the questions a liberal arts education needs to take seriously.
This proposal might come across as too “ivory tower”. Should we not direct more core requirements into learning as much as we can about pressing political and social problems? Does all this talk about Great Books and Great Questions come from an extinct time when privileged colleges lay far too isolated and aloof from the world’s crises? Perhaps - but Tolstoy grasped a profound truth when he wrote that “everybody thinks about changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.” Individual transformation of leaders precedes their contribution to lasting social change.
Just look at history. Movements like American abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement brought lasting change because their members immersed themselves in older, deep wells of moral thought and right living. Conversely, those who lacked any appreciation for the past or concern for the interior life often saw their idealism descend into destructive ideologies. The French guillotine and the Russian gulag need only remind one of this final point.
A great error is to assume that such literary or philosophical texts would impose a particular ideology upon students. Irving Howe points out in a fabulous New Republic essay why a course on social thought including Nietzsche, Plato, Machiavelli, Jefferson, or Dewey would be a source of “a variety of opinions, often clashing with one another, sometimes elusive and surprisingly, always richly complex. These are some of the thinkers with whom to begin, if only later to deviate from.” The goal is not treat past authors as infallible oracles but to wrestle with important ideas.
It is critical for more colleges to restore towering past works of world literature and philosophy into an essential, if inevitably more limited, part of today’s curriculums. Those works save us from the “tyranny of the present”, assuming that the end of history directs to those who think and act like ourselves. They show how our assumptions about liberty, justice, or human nature are not obvious but lie atop a rich, contentious history. Their wisdom can teach us how to order our emotions and values as we enter a “real world” of tragedy and moral complexity. A few might count this position as reactionary. I’ll end with Roger Scruton’s words: “We have inherited collectively good things that we must strive to keep.”