Higher Education's Canon Wars

What is the purpose of an education?:

Revisiting the Canon Wars, by Rachel Donadia, NY Times: Twenty years ago, ... a book arrived like a shot across the bow of academia: “The Closing of the American Mind,” by Allan Bloom ... at the University of Chicago. Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” it spent more than a year on the best-seller list...

Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the “relativism” that had replaced it had “extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”; ... that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism..., as well as war,” he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change “possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.”

“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. In early 1988, students at Stanford held a rally with Jesse Jackson, where they shouted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go,” to protest a required Western civilization course. ... Bloom’s book shared space at the top of the best-seller list with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” (1987), which argued that progressive education had left Americans without a grasp of basic knowledge. It also inspired further conservative attacks against the university, including Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals” (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991).

Although it had great popular appeal, “The Closing of the American Mind” did not go over well among academics. ... “The amazing thing about Allan Bloom’s book was not just its prodigious commercial success ... but the depth of the hostility and even hatred that it inspired among a large number of professors,” John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor and former proponent of the ’60s radical Free Speech Movement wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” ...

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

Debates over what an educated person should know go back to the 19th century in America, when teaching any literature beyond the Greek and Roman classics was still controversial. But today, there’s widespread concern that the humanities are losing ground — as well as intellectual cachet, students and financing — to the hard sciences on the one hand and business on the other. ...

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago... Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message..., “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” ...

But when college costs run as high as $50,000 a year, it’s harder to ignore questions like “What will this major do for my career prospects?” While humanities departments thrive at elite institutions ..., the high cost of college today exacerbates a ... strain that’s always made it hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America. According to the Department of Education, in the 2003-4 school year, only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates majored in English and 1.3 percent in history, compared with 20 percent in business, 16 percent in health, 9 percent in education and 6 percent in computer science.

Not all academics object to raising market questions. For Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College ..., “the introduction of economic criteria into the university is a good thing.” During the canon wars of the late ’80s, he said, scholars had an “imperious” idea that “if we want to argue about the curriculum we’re free to do that.” But now, most realize “we have obligations to the students and the parents and the taxpayers.”

According to Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University ..., the conservative critique of academia connects to an economic one. “The message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” said Fish, who was embroiled in these debates as chairman of Duke’s theory-oriented English department from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. “It’s easier for a state legislature to cut university funding when there is an unflattering view” of academia, he said.

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. ... In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. ...

But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of ... Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”

Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. ... Elaine Showalter, a feminist literary scholar ... who retired from Princeton in 2003, today urges a reconsideration of some of the changes made in past decades. “This period of discovery and recovery (for example, of women writers) has been stimulating, exciting and renewing,” Showalter wrote in an e-mail message. “But now it’s time for a period of evaluation and consolidation.” ...

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., ... denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Some say this kind of identity-based thinking is at odds with the true purpose of education — something canon traditionalists can misunderstand as badly as their multiculturalist opponents. “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion who just left the University of Chicago for Columbia. “That’s where the conservatives went wrong. The case for the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West.” Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is “the most alienating experience possible,” he continued. “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.” ...

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

Comments

[akatsu]

I would suggest that the affirmation movement combined with the agenda-driven politicization of education contributed to the decline of the humanities. Humanities courses are given short shrift because they are easy-"A" classes, undemanding and full of soft concepts lacking critical thinking. The literature chosen by academics is either obvious or obtuse without the goal of producing thoughtful and educated discourse, rather the goal is to point out the victimization and disenfranchisement of the authors. Perhaps the devaluation of the core curriculum at U of C will provide a case study, to see if their humanities program declines more precipitously or stops its descent.

[wally]

Is 'Green' included in Religious Studies yet?

[anne]

Oh dear or my; here I am all frazzled over the thought that there might be something to be learned from artists who chose to be, well, African or Asian or Latin American. Imagine the dread I have reading writers who chose to be, well, women. The thought of an Asian woman writer is almost too much to even think. African writers? OMG!

[btgraff]

I think a big problem with arts/humanites has been that these faculties have been the dumping ground for C students...

Engineering, Architecture, Medicine, and a few other disciplines with limited enrollment can cherry-pick the best and brightest. C students have little choice but to go into the arts/humanities, and schools effectively bell curve rather than maintain high standards and fluck out large numbers of these students - there is a vested interest in letting them graduate. These dregrees have been devaluated, and the students/graduates are hardly passionate about the subject matter.

maybe this is a case where market forces should be allowed to have greater sway - within limitations. if there were fewer graduates in things like sociology or anthrology, maybe the quality and committment of the graduates would also improve, and these disclplines would gain more respect.

[knzn]

It's interesting that the two sides seem largely to have reversed. In a sense multiculturalism was self-defeating: when you discard the idea of an inherently valuable canon, you undermine the major justification for studying humanities in the first place. If there are no "great books", why should students waste their time reading literature at all when they have future careers to worry about? When it was still the old canon being defended, the conservatives were the ones defending it. Now that the old canon has given way to a new quasi-canon (which by now is somewhat old), it is the former "liberals" who must defend this quasi-canon against the attacks of "free market conservatives" who question the value of such studies altogether.

[PeterRabid]

Beware, be very wary of those who would try to revive this book and their motives.

When the title of this book came up, all sorts of buzzers and flashing lights started going off in my head.

Now I remember why. When it first came out, it was seen by many as a response to an equally popular book of the previous decade, "The Greening of America", by Charles A. Reich.

It just so happens that I have both of them on my dusty shelves. I don't remember much about either since I haven't looked at them for 20 years.

As I thumb thru "The Closing...", I can see that it will be useful - to read in bed as it is sure to put me to sleep.

"The Greening...", however, immediately sets the blood coursing through my veins so that I don't dare read it at night,

Consider -

"America is dealing death, not only to people in other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut. This realization is not limited to the new generation. Talk to a retired school teacher in Mendocino, a judge in Washington, D.C., a housewife in Belmont, Massachusetts, a dude rancher in the Washington Cascades. We think of ourselves as an incredibly rich country, but we are beginning to realize that we are also a desperately poor country -- poor in most of the things that throughout the history of mankind have been cherished as riches.

"There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty -- a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land."

Sigh!!

What ever happened to that revolution? Do some see it building again, and are they touting the Bloom response as intellectual preemption? I suppose I shall have to read both again - one at night, and the other in the morning - and think about it.

But I shall be very wary.

[evagrius]

The article states that 20% of college students major in business.

Interesting. Business.

What's business studies?

According to the U of Michigan the following classes are required for a "BBA";

"Core Curriculum: BBA - Three Year Program
The following course schedule is for BBA students admitted Fall 2006 or later to the 3-year BBA Program:
In preparation for admission, students should also have completed ENGL 125 (or equivalent), MATH 115 (or equivalent) and ECON 101 in their freshman year.

Sophomore Year
The first year of the three year BBA program introduces students to some of the core business fundamentals, while they continue to complete some of the general LS&A requirements. (Please note that the admitted class of 2006 was required to complete OMS 301 in the Fall term, and BIT 200 and BE 300 in the Winter term.)

Fall
ACC 271: Principles of Accounting I (3.0 cr)
BE 300: Applied Economics (3.0 cr)
BIT 200: Personal Productivity with Information Technology (1.5 cr)
ECON 102: Macroeconomics (4.0 cr)
----------------------
Degree Requirements
Winter
ACC 272: Principles of Accounting II (3.0 cr)
LHC 250: Introduction to Business Communication(1.5 cr)
OMS 301: Business Statistics and Management Science (3.0 cr)
----------------------
Degree Requirements

Junior Year
The second year of the three year BBA program continues to build on the base core curriculum, while beginning to immerse students more into business electives as they wrap up their LS&A requirements.

Fall
FIN 300: Financial Management (3.0 cr)
LHC 350: Business Communication (1.5 cr)
MKT 300: Marketing Management (3.0 cr)
----------------------
Business Electives or Degree Requirements
Winter
BIT 300: Business Information Systems (1.5 cr)
MO 300: Behavioral Theory in Management (3.0 cr)
OMS 311: Operations Management (3.0 cr)
----------------------
Business Electives or Degree Requirements

Senior Year
The last year of the three year BBA program contains one final core course and provides students with the freedom to select from a variety of electives. Students should also make sure they complete any remaining degree requirements.

Fall
STRATEGY 390: Corporate Strategy (3.0 cr)
----------------------
Business Electives or Degree Requirements
Winter
Business Electives or Degree Requirements

Additional Degree Requirements
Business Law: Students must complete one of two Business Law courses (either LHC 305 or 306). This requirement be completed at any time during the Junior and Senior years.
45 Business Credits: Students must complete at least 45 credits of Business classes in order to graduate. The core classes listed above as well as ACC 271 and ACC 272, which may have been taken before the BBA program, are included in the required 45. (The core, ACC 271 & 272, and the law requirement are a total of 36 credits, so an additional 9 credits of Business elective coursework is required.)
120 Total Credits: Students must complete a total of 120 credits to receive their degree. In addition to the required 45 Business Credits, at least 54 of the 120 credits must be non Business coursework.
Distribution & Foreign Language Requirements: In addition to the Business requirements, BBA students are required to complete three of the following four requirements:
Humanities Distribution (HU) = 9 credits
Natural Sciences (NS) and/or Mathematical and Symbolic Analysis (MSA) = 9 credits
Social Sciences (SS) = 9 credits (excluding Econ 101 & 102)
Foreign Language Proficiency = Fourth-term proficiency in a foreign language is determined by successful completion of a proficiency examination administered by U-M, or by completion of a fourth-semester college-level foreign language course. AP course work which meets fourth-term proficiency fulfills this requirement. See the LS&A Bulletin for further details.
Current BBA students can schedule an Academic Counseling Appointment if they have questions regarding any of the degree requirements."




It's not an education- it's an indoctrination.

[PeterRabid]

Further research reveals that Allan Bloom has been declared neutral and safe to read by critics with impeccable credentials. Wariness alert reduced from red to yellow.

Chas. Reich, however, has been declared a nutcase by such giants as Francis Fukuyama, and therefore worthy of highest consideration.

[Winston]

I am friends with a recent graduate of a second tier U.C. who managed to get a BA in English without ever having read Virgil, Dante, Homer, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Dickens, the Bible or even anything by Poe. She has been greatly harmed by the hole in her education left by the dissolution of the cannon. Not only does she miss nearly every allusion to great western literature in film and literature, but she also is incapable of deciphering anything written at a level higher than eighth grade or of forming a grammatically correct paragraph. She is, however familiar with Marx, Freud (or with summaries of their writings) and with feminist theory. I don't think that this has been a good trade.

[burritoboy]

"Engineering, Architecture, Medicine, and a few other disciplines with limited enrollment can cherry-pick the best and brightest."

Except that the largest majors now are Business and Health-related (which is mostly not the very small number of MD students, but various medical management programs, nursing, other types of paraprofessionals, etc) and education. None of these are unusually difficult as fields of study go nor difficult to get into a school that offers them. The numbers of humanities students is actually quite small, and the number of hard sciences students isn't that much bigger - even though the hardest of hard sciences are perhaps the most challenging fields of study of all.

Students aren't looking for difficult or even exclusive majors.

[MT57]

Both the article and the comments seem to be kind of all over the place. I want to focus on the first sentence of the post: "What is the purpose of an education?"
I think that each person should determine that for himself or herself. If someone wants to use higher education to gain a credential to enhance employability, fine. It's their tuition and their right. If someone wants to use higher education to pursue some hitherto unvalued topic, fine for the same reason. . What I reject is when some pompous paternalistic elitist academic starts to promote his or her educational values as the only legitimate ones. Administrators should make sure to either a) be responsive to the students and parents and donors, because you have to survive, and b) otherwise, to minimize imbalance both within departments and across the curriculum. As a society, we benefit from people spending their own money to educate themselves in pretty much any way they want. When it comes to spending someone else's money, as the state does, I suppose there one can argue society's interests should come into play in steering the education in one or another direction. But realistically, there are so many of those interests that the outcome is likely to be a a prety broad spectrum of courses, majors, etc. which gets back to the same place. It's a diverse country of 300 million people.

[anne]

Peter, that was interesting.

[evagrius]

"I am friends with a recent graduate of a second tier U.C. who managed to get a BA in English without ever having read Virgil, Dante, Homer, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Dickens, the Bible or even anything by Poe. She has been greatly harmed by the hole in her education left by the dissolution of the cannon ( sic). Not only does she miss nearly every allusion to great western literature in film and literature, but she also is incapable of deciphering anything written at a level higher than eighth grade or of forming a grammatically correct paragraph. She is, however familiar with Marx, Freud (or with summaries of their writings) and with feminist theory. I don't think that this has been a good trade."

Hmmm. Well, it couldn't be U.C. San Diego which requires Shakespeare...

http://www.sandiego.edu/english/majors.php

Nor could it be U.C. Santa Barbara which also requires Shakespeare...

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/undergrad/requirements/major-requirements.asp

Which other "second-tier" U.C. did she graduate from?

[mrrunangun]

Business, engineering, and nursing undergraduate schools provide training. As they are part of a university, some education is available to their students, and a bit of composition at least is usually required. A good deal of quantitation comes with most training undergrad majors. The the training emphasis is only a little less descriptive of the university science departments. Education is not the main object. Along with the doctors, lawyers, and accountants such students as graduate from these programs may get an education later in life via the Teaching Company or some such if they so desire.

It is fair to ask what the purpose of identity based courses and majors are in the contemporary world. If it is not political consciousness raising, what is it? If it is political consciousness raising, to what end? If in your Jewish studies program you have spent your time studying Jewish writers and goyish writers' takes on Judaism, does that make you more fit to engage the many varieties of goyim than a Jewish student who majored in a traditional liberal arts program? If one would answer yes, how so? And how does it benefit the Jewish studies major unless he is to pursue rabbinical study or teach jewish studies to the next generation? For the identity majors not based on a religious group (Is there such a thing as Christian Studies? Muslim Studies? Atheist Studies?) no clerical career is a logical outgrowth.

[Michael Bérubé]

I am friends with a recent graduate of a second tier U.C. who managed to get a BA in English without ever having read Virgil, Dante, Homer, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Dickens, the Bible or even anything by Poe. She has been greatly harmed by the hole in her education left by the dissolution of the cannon.

I hope it wouldn't be too pedantic of me to point out that Virgil, Dante, and Homer didn't write in English. The Bible, however, truly is one of the great novels of English literature. Though some people prefer the movie.

[Steve]

"Humanities courses are given short shrift because they are easy-"A" classes, undemanding and full of soft concepts lacking critical thinking."

I found the humanities courses in college to be the most rigorously graded, along with the social scienes. You had to commit to memory every minutiae of information if you wanted more than a B. They were not "easy B classes." Science, business, and economics had much easier curves. Those were the easy B courses at my school. I found this surprising because I wouldn't even consider myself a "math person" (I scored in the 98th percentile on the verbal SAT, but only in the 70th percentile on math). I assumed that courses in economics and mathematics would become more rigorous at higher levels, but from what I have heard from people at my school, that was not the case.

[PeterRabid]

Free market theory forbids us to disagree completely with MT57 -

""What is the purpose of an education?"
I think that each person should determine that for himself or herself. If someone wants to use higher education to gain a credential to enhance employability, fine. It's their tuition and their right. If someone wants to use higher education to pursue some hitherto unvalued topic, fine for the same reason."

The problem is (as is often the case with free markets) that the learners don't usually have the information necessary to choose. This is because the secondary schools haven't done their job. Somehow, just a bit of basic orientation through philosophy (history, literature, etc.) would seem desirable before a young person choosees a probable life-long career commitment.

And Orient - ation restricted to Western thought would be an oxymoron.

If the high schools don't do it, the universities must

[real person from the real world]

a few thoughts:
In the 60's, so many of us cheered on the civil rights movement. It was just and moral, that people should not be denied rights because of skin color. However, the politicization of the minority, has eaten away at the idea of unity and working together for larger common good, above and beyond most minority goals. There are scads of minority groups promoting their members interests, but no large groups that really get any really needed reforms. People talk about reseurecting unions, but the scandals of corruption and cronyism helped do them in. Cheap goods also helped do them in. I lived in a "minority " neighborhood for decades. Foreign cars were highly regarded, at the expense of UNION made US cars, despite the fact that minorities and Americans of all races worked together in US car manufacturing, and the foreign made cars were made by a homogeneous foreign workforce.

At one time, HR was a simple function, if it existed at all. People came in, filled out a form, and had a brief interview. Now, they play pseudo psych games. There are no real answers, and regardless of what you answer, they have plausable deniability if you are refused a job. Employers now carefully advertise their comittment to hiring minorities, while they easily discriminate based on age, health, or other reasons. Presence of minorities, mission statements of high sounding ideas are supposed to be proof of a organization that is fair, and principled, meanwhile, you can listen to the tapes of the Enron guys laughing their heads off at all the suckers they were cheating.

Someone here claims that the humanities are the dumping ground of the "C" students. Amazing. When I was in school, all the "C" students went into business class, and struggled thru as few finance courses as possible. These were the guys that went into marketing or sales. Now business has been elevated to the major profit center of a school, as once, were tech courses, altho with the importation of techies, tech is now in disfavor. Our local community college, where I took my programming courses has shut down most of the tech courses it once favored and which were populated by immigrants trying to maintain their skills or learn new ones.

[John]

Around one and a half decades ago, a Boston Globe science columnist wrote how offended he was that, as a physics major, he had to study Aristotelian physics his junior year -- a college-wide humanities requirement based on the "great works" -- while he was learning quantum mechanics. It's horrible that everyone is required to learn wrong physics because it is "great" and "ancient," while only a select group (physics majors) gets to learn the correct physics.

Some advocate of the classics (Bloom himself?) once said that everything after Plato was mere footnote to Plato. A (real) footnote added that Aristotle wrote half the footnotes. If he wasn't totally oblivious to the discoveries in math, physics, geology, biology, etc. of the past few centuries, he was very much denigrating them. Knowledge, reason, and understanding weren't virtues -- only his particular knowledge was valid.

At times, I've advocated that if we go back to a strict canon, include "The Feynman Lectures on Physics." It might help counteract the awful stuff from Plato et al., and bring some awareness of the 20th Century.

It seems as if the advocates of the traditional canon are more interested in indoctrination than in education.