In defense of higher learning

Sidney Fletcher, in his Feb. 15 column, takes issue with an exploratory initiative sponsored by the Office of the IU President to develop a structured, interdisciplinary humanities sequence for undergraduates. The project had been profiled a day before in the IDS.

Fletcher gives an impressive mischaracterization of the project en route to dismissing it as provincial, retrograde and gimmicky — an endeavor rooted in “nostalgia” rather than “reason.” But misinformed as his analysis is, the issues he raises and their relation to this project are worth examining in greater depth. 

Reprising a complaint from the culture/canon wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fletcher asks why, in a “world that is increasingly globally interconnected,” we would ever want to teach “the same Greco-Roman mindset of dead white guys from the previous millennium.”

In fact, the kind of program being considered will and must be robustly international in scope. “The West” did not exist in a geopolitical vacuum. The transmission of culture between Western and non-Western peoples moved both ways via trade, warfare and colonial holdings. Any program that would contextualize the most important works of Western European cultures must demand, to some extent, an understanding of their non-Western counterparts.

For example, NYU’s Global Liberal Studies Program and Reed College’s course in “Foundations of Chinese Civilization,” part of its mandatory humanities sequence, offer two compelling models for how non-Western cultures can be integrated alongside the traditional Western humanities program. With its renowned emphasis on international perspectives, IU is ideally situated to develop such a program.

But a more internationalist dimension might not appease Fletcher. For our program, after all, would still accept the importance of the Western canon. So allow his initial query to stand: Why study the “Great Books” at all?

One short answer — and by no means the only one — is that the Western intellectual tradition still lies at the heart of most social and political institutions across the world. It still forms the basis of global economic structures and our system of international law. It still informs the way we think about questions of morality and justice, politics and society, oppression and self-determination, war and diplomacy, and it still provides the roots for American higher education.

The enduring relevance of this tradition — for our lives, our society, our politics and for vast numbers of people across the world — represents the impetus of the project.

But despite the relevance of its subject matter, this project, according to Fletcher’s rather creative historicizing, is all part of a quixotic longing for a lost educational paradigm. In our “quest to stop modernity,” he writes, we’ve bought into a retrograde “Back-to-the-Future movement in education biding its time until the ‘choice’ reformers burn out.” The notion that foundation-level humanities programs belong to a prior epoch is patently untrue.

Some of the finest research institutions nationwide, such as Yale, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, the University of Chicago, Stanford and Northwestern, among others, continue to enjoy enormous success with their own innovative takes on “Great Books”-based humanities programs. The same is true of many elite liberal arts colleges.

Now, in fact, there are a number of rigorous Western liberal arts programs popping up in the best Asian universities, such as Sun Yat-sen University in China and Tunghai University in Taiwan. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Karin Fischer writes that Educational reformers in Asia have “latched onto American-style liberal, or general, education as a way to foster more nimble and adaptable thinkers.”

There is both a compelling intellectual premise and a set of empirical precedents behind the project’s initiation.

Finally, no one involved in the project has been “deluded” into thinking — or claiming — we can “radically change the academic weaknesses at IU.” The project’s scope is modest and focused. It will likely culminate in a yearlong course sequence for some freshmen.

If Fletcher perceived a grandiose or paternalistic streak in the project, as his essay insinuates, a better response would have been to resist speculation and pursue more information about the project’s scope and methodology.

I’m pleased this project has sparked a conversation about the place of the Western humanities at IU specifically and in the 21st century more generally.

But in discussing these questions, it’s critical to abide by the intellectual traits the humanities cultivate: attention to detail; an inquiring, open mind; and, most of all, a stubborn reliance on empiricism and reason.  

— Christian Hines