Are the great books gone?
Dominic Green
Of the unmaking of great books, there is no end. Such is life. Only in fiction does the plot resolve in a tidy closing of narrative threads. Life is messier. If it does not dribble to a close, it ends with banging and whimpering. The “Great Books” course, a one-stop humanities shop, was born at Columbia University in 1919. After 1968, the banging and whimpering of the culture wars sent enrollments into decades of decline. This week, the New Yorker announced that enrollment in humanities courses at Ivy League colleges is dribbling to a close.
The American century was just beginning in 1919, the young centurions of America setting out on their short march to global eminence. As the new civilization strode into the mainstream of history, the great books were a map to unknown territory, the new psychological and political terrain that comes with power. Their message was that of the slave who held a laurel crown over the head of a Roman general as he received his garlands and triumph. “Memento mori,” the slave said. “Remember, you are mortal.”
As America became a world empire, its leaders grew deaf to the slave’s whisper. A realistic understanding of human nature and history leads to realistic policies. Vanity and delusion, the hallmarks of our most educated, lead to disaster. Robert D. Kaplan’s latest, The Tragic Mind, is a brilliant study of how, as foreign policy often comes down to a search for the lesser evil, self-knowledge is a better guide than the CIA Factbook.
The humanities originate in the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman with the time and money to cultivate a philosophical view. But the American humanities were always more practical and active. The goal was always to make citizens and voters, and that made the American humanities more democratic and commercial. The real university of 18th-century America was the newspaper. The real university of 19th-century America was the lyceum circuit and the public lecture. Only after 1945 did a university degree become inseparable from upward mobility. When it did, the university turned into a business.
In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, called the modern university the “multiversity.” It offered specialized training and integrated its laboratories into Cold War research, but history, literature, and languages remained at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. The ideal of humanity, itself a legacy of Renaissance humanism, was under threat, not least from the mechanized warfare in which the United States had lately excelled, but also from the Soviets, those pioneers of the art of cancellation for wrongthink.
The humanities, a uniquely Western inheritance, became a shield in the arsenal of democracy. The boomers turned this weapon on their teachers. The American university had professionalized on the German model, which prized technique and specialization over the English model of the all-rounder. The American university had also become a refugee camp for European leftist intellectuals. The American university was thus perfectly placed to replicate Europe’s intellectual failure at scale. Angela Davis, meet Herbert Marcuse.
The students of 1968 attacked America’s liberal ideology as zealously as Marx, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche had attacked the liberalism of 19th-century Europe. This was no fun for the students, so humanities enrollments declined at once. Only in America, as Allan Bloom observed, does the customer expect “nihilism with a happy ending.”
The New Yorker article obscures the chronology because that might imply who the guilty parties were. Enrollments did not decline until the conversion of the humanities into a boot camp for what we now call identity politics, in which the great books were filleted for evidence of sexism, racism, and capitalism. The disgraceful rise in the cost of an undergraduate degree, ahead of inflation every year since 1980, came later and accelerated the decline. The humanities, at least on the Ivy League campus, are now dying as they were born, as a leisure pursuit for the rich, only without the content.
All is not lost. One, the New Yorker notes that immigrants are prominent in enrollments for online humanities courses. Market forces encouraged the bubble in education and priced out the humanities, but market forces are also creating a new market for the humanities. Immigrants understand that America, more than any other society, is built on the humanities because America, more even than France, is built on an 18th-century ideal of education.
Also, “Great Books” courses are still there if you look for them, and they still work. I’ve just spent two weeks as a guest lecturer at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The syllabus is the classic American syllabus. The students are articulate, well-informed, energetic, and polite. Hillsdale is giving them more than value for money. It is giving them something priceless that used to be considered a universal inheritance. This year, the battle to retake the campus has finally begun, with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) remaking of the board at New College in Sarasota, Florida. Again, market forces will do the rest if we let them. Who do you want to teach your children, and what do you want them to learn?