HIST 216 The "Canon Wars": Debating the Aims of U.S. Higher Education
The "Great Books" have been seen by many as the defining element within the tradition of Western Civilization--a claim that has been the subject of fierce contemporary debate. In fact, the controversy has a long history which goes back at least as the "Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns" at the end of the 17th Century and extends to Matthew Arnold's Victorian-era debate with T.H. Huxley over whether science has eclipsed the need for humanities. In the United States there has been an ongoing skirmish over what to read in our universities that stretches from President Eliot's decision to abandon the core curriculum at Harvard for an open, elective system in the 1880s, to the furor that erupted with the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind a century later. More recently Dan-el Padilla Peralta--a professor of Roman History at Princeton--has advocated for abolishing the founding discipline of Classics altogether because of its entanglement with the origin story of white supremacy. At the bottom of the debate over the canon is the assumption that what we teach and read defines the culture as a whole, what we value, and who we are. It is a debate over the tradition's exclusivity and chauvinism. But it is also a debate over the relevance of the humanities in a world dominated by science and the rigorous demands of pre-professional training--which is to say that it is a debate over modernity itself. Finally--and perhaps most controversially--it is debate over a putative ideal of "greatness" and "civilization," along with the role of the University in perpetuating that ideal, even as it plays the largely unexamined role of selecting leadership within a democracy. Clearly, much is at stake. This course will examine the many sides of this longstanding controversy among canon's advocates, critics and reformers. We will also examine the attempt to institutionalize various curricular models such as the Great Books program at Columbia University and the Athens-America program at University of Wisconsin (both in the 1920s), as well as the Experimental College at Berkeley in the 1960s. We will analyze their educational goals, read some of the books they assigned, and explore the viability of the Western Tradition as a usable past.