Opiate of the Illuminati

 In a splashy front-page profile in Tuesday’s Indiana Daily Student, a picture of IU’s new presidential intern, Christian Hines, sits below the weighty headline of “Renovating the Undergraduate Experience.”

Hines, the article informs us, is going to bring a Great Books program to us, the deprived undergraduates of IU.

A Great Books program — in which students read much of the Western philosophical canon — will teach the weak-minded how to think and cause the apathetic to embrace their civic duty.

According to the article, the program will “advance the undergraduate experience” and “benefit the kind of undergraduate that IU has tried harder and harder, in recent years, to recruit.”

I hear it even slices bread for students in the morning.

As it happens, this sort of thought is not confined to Hines, but is part of a larger Back-to-the-Future movement in education biding its time until the “choice” reformers burn out.

At the New York Times, professional academic grump Stanley Fish has been championing his own education at Classical High School in Rhode Island as a model for improving education.

At Classical, they learned “four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history and civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities and clubs — French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club among many others” and amazingly, it was a perfect system for everyone.

With that in mind, should we perhaps just skip the Latin lessons all together and go back to the days when only the elite few sat in a room led by a knuckle-rapping nun?

Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to the proposals, for undoubtedly there is some merit to these ideas, and they may even benefit some students.

But renovating the undergraduate experience? Give me a break.

Now, you could say a number of things about a Great Books program at IU.

For one, in my small unscientific survey of Wells Scholars — whom I suspect are the “kind of undergraduate” Hines is referring to and for whom the program is designed — there was some serious confusion about what a Great Books program would be and a seeming lack of demand.

But beyond that, in a world that is increasingly globally interconnected, why would we want to revert to teaching the same Greco-Roman mindset of dead white guys from the previous millennium?

If our goal is to teach students how to think, why are the (Western) Great Books so valuable, besides the reason that they have been regarded as such for centuries?

I suspect, of course, that these things don’t matter because, a bit like the organic food movement, the impetus for change is based on some sort of misplaced nostalgia — that we have lost some essential element along the way and need it back, rather than a basis in reason.

I picture some sort of wizened professor shaking his pinched hand at the world: “Ah, if only we had a Great Books program here — everything would be better.”

“Ah, if only we had better teachers — all our education problems would be solved.”

It’s as if in their quest to stop modernity, these reformers have deluded themselves into believing the rhetoric that there is one simple solution, one honest get-rich-cheap scheme.

It’s fine if this is their drug to deaden the pain of the world, but my reality suggests that only the tough stuff will lead to true improvement, things such as bitter work, talent, money and creating a cycle of excellence between students and faculty.

Mr. Hines’s idea is commendably innovative and deserves our praise.

But if it’s set up with the expectation that it will radically change the academic weaknesses at IU, then it’s doomed to fail.

­— sidfletch@indiana.edu