Not all college and university faculty in the humanities spend their time worrying about “publish-or-perish” or their insufficient pay. There’s a group of faculty who live and breathe one thing: teaching their students the classics.
They are members of the Association of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC), and they met last month at a Holiday Inn in Memphis, Tenn. More than 250 faculty members and devotees of literature, philosophy, and science discussed “core texts,” sometimes known as “Great Books.”
In small seminars, they plunged into intense discussion, analyzing such works as The Divine Comedy, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Bible, Don Quixote, Plato’s Republic, and Augustine’s City of God, to name a small sample. Several seminars (and one plenary session) were on “bridging the gap” between science and the humanities.
ACTC members know what others in academia sometimes forget — that teaching and learning are intertwined and that studying a text in order to enhance teaching is a valued activity. Most of the seminar papers seemed designed to deepen the authors’ understanding of a text in order to teach it more effectively.
For example, her desire to bring classics to life — specifically, The Odyssey — led Barbara Stone of Shimer College to consider pairing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with The Odyssey. She has found that some students, especially women, have trouble engaging with the themes of The Odyssey. Perhaps a “woman’s odyssey” or life journey, as Their Eyes is, might help them appreciate it more.
Steven Epley of Samford University told about his multifaceted approach to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. He wants to help his students apply to Austen’s novel the insights into Platonic values that they learned at the start of the semester of classic readings.
To illuminate these values, he uses film versions of Sense and Sensibility, both because film communicates to students and because the films downplay Platonic values, thus providing a foil for the novel.
The participants’ enthusiasm was sustained and infectious. Incoming ACTC president Richard Kamber, a philosopher at the College of New Jersey, observed that attendees often say that they like ACTC programs much more than their professional meetings (such as the Modern Language Association). Stephen Zelnick, ACTC’s founding president, commented that ACTC is a far cry from academic meetings where the focus is on finding a job or winning status in a field of specialization.
ACTC has been around for 15 years; it started at Temple University, where Zelnick, then the director of the Intellectual Heritage Program, a yearlong core course in the Great Books tradition, wondered how many other schools were still teaching classics. He thought that bringing those faculty together might enrich their teaching.
The first meeting in 1995 convened faculty from 23 universities — and Zelnick figured he had tapped most of the programs in existence. But the group has been growing ever since, with 126 colleges and universities represented in Memphis.
Most of the schools are small, and most private. Many are Catholic, since a lot of Catholic schools retain a respect for the tradition of Western scholarship reflected in a required sequence of classical readings. Few large public universities sent faculty, however. The most prestigious schools were also underrepresented, although next year Columbia University, which has had a Western-civilization-based core curriculum for over 90 years, will help sponsor the conference.
Clearly, the Association of Core Texts and Courses helps humanities faculty hone their understanding and skills and gain emotional support as they defend the value of their teaching against constant threats in the academy. Can programs like these grow? Or does ACTC represent a mere holding action against the erosion of deep reading and thinking at our universities?
The evidence is mixed, but based on the enthusiasm and the caliber of conversation, there may be hope for the future. How to restore the classics is an enormous challenge, but the effort is well under way.
Jane S. Shaw is a contributor to Carolina Journal.