In academia today, Shakespeare has given way to feminist theory, while Plato has been reduced to a paraphrase, and the Aeneid to a footnote. But a few scholars and teachers still love Great Books.
About 300 of the enthusiasts gathered at the annual meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses in April in Plymouth, Mass. They talked about such classics as Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Symposium, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy — and how to teach them to today’s students.
They ranged from graduate students and young assistant professors to experts such as keynote speaker Theodore de Bary, the Columbia University guru of Eastern classics who is approaching age 90. They represented community colleges, honors colleges, residential communities, core curriculum programs (especially at Catholic colleges), and even master’s programs.
By teaching the works of “dead white males,” the faculty members are resisting the trends engulfing the humanities today — even though they incorporate modern works and non-Western classics as well as the more traditional core texts.
What keeps them at the task is not just their love of literature but evidence that these books can grab the attention of today’s students — those earbud-wearing, intellectually indifferent teen-agers who are often academically unprepared for college. The following example from the meeting illustrates how.
Marcia Smith Marzec, an English professor at the University of St. Francis, a Catholic school in Joliet, Ill., discussed changes in the “core curriculum” course that she and her colleagues teach to sophomores.
Initially, this class introduced “classic Western thought” through a series of excerpts from an anthology. Three weeks on Greek culture, for example, included selections from Homer, Aeschylus, Herodotus, and at least four others.
But students hated the course. Evaluations were “abysmal,” said Marzec; the class was “boring,” “confusing,” “disconnected,” and “too hard.”
So they redesigned it. They stopped reading excerpts and chose 10 complete texts, ranging in time from the Sumerian Myth of Gilgamesh to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
They organized the works around the theme of the “good life.” Instead of beginning the course with a classic, however, they asked the students to write informal essays on how they define happiness, after reading a short modern essay on the topic. Class discussion introduced the issues that would dominate the course — “happiness, joy, free will, evil, and suffering,” as Marzec summarized them.
The class, said Marzec, became a “phenomenal success.” Complaints dried up. The students read as much or more as previously, but it was no longer too much or too hard. Their discussions related one work to another. The most popular book was the relatively obscure Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. “I was on the wheel of fortune in my own life until we read Boethius and Chaucer,” wrote one student in an evaluation.
In other words, this redesigned course, relying on complete works, not snippets, and organized around a theme that connects with the interests of today’s teen-agers, became a hit.
Other speakers at the ACTC meeting had uplifting stories, too. A professor from Norfolk State, a historically black college in Virginia, said that Francis Bacon’s “four idols” helped her students think about the idols misdirecting their lives. An honors program at Kentucky State, another historically black school, not only teaches liberal arts through Great Books but teaches mathematics and science using Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia.
Villanova’s honors program uses popular evening lecturers to inspire students to discuss the texts outside the classroom as well as within it. And at several schools, faculty members are in the process of starting or rejuvenating a Great Books program.
Great Books (to use the term made famous by scholars Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler) are not just old works. There is the possibility of new classics, too. One presentation focused on the “graphic novel” — what we used to call comics. “Fun Home” is a drawing-based autobiographical book by Alison Bechdel. Its drawings vary from the spare simplicity of traditional comics to the more subtle style of etchings, and the content is a story about suicide and its impact that also reveals the author’s intense personal involvement with literature.
Of course, studying core texts, a label presumably chosen to avoid the “dead white male” stigma attached to Great Books, does not necessarily mean honoring the Western origins of individualism, limited government, and freedom of conscience. In academia today, some faculty members want to undermine the heritage of the West, via Marx and Rousseau, rather than confirm it, via Adam Smith and David Hume.
A session at the conference on “Peering through a Veil to See Women” had papers that seemed to undermine the value of core texts. One compared Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir. Austen was deemed to be more “revolutionary”. Another was a relentless attack on John Milton for disparaging female-ness in Samson Agonistes.
But the people at this conference, by and large, love classics and want their students to be in touch with them. Their experiences offer hope for those who are trying to involve disengaged students.
Jane S. Shaw is president of the Pope Center on Higher Education Policy.