The Marketplace of Ideas (3 page)

The courses arose independently. Contemporary Civilization began at the time of the First World War as a course called War Aims. It was taught by Frederick Woodbridge, a philosophy professor who was later dean of the graduate faculty, and it was part of a program designed at the request of the U.S. Army for students in the Student Army Training Corps (SATC). The SATC, the precursor of the ROTC, was a creation of the National Defense Act of 1916. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was a supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s war policies—he had two professors dismissed for anti-draft activity—and War Aims was, as the university’s historian, Robert McCaughey, puts it, “a course in Allied apologetics, with no pretense at objectivity or balance.”
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After the armistice, Peace Aims was considered as a new title for the course, but Contemporary Civilization was chosen instead. Contemporary Civilization was a one-year course required of all freshmen. Its distinctive character—what made it a general education rather than departmental course—was the emphasis on the contemporary world. The syllabus for 1919 explained that “We are living in a world in which there are great and perplexing issues on which keen differences of opinion have arisen; and it is important now, not less than during the war, that men should understand the forces which are at work in the society of their own day.”
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In its first ten years, no material before 1871 was covered, and the students did not read primary historical texts; they used textbooks. In 1928, the economist Rexford Tugwell, who was the author of one of those textbooks,
American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement
(1925), persuaded the college to add a second full-year required course, called Today’s Problems. (Tugwell left Columbia in 1933 to join the Roosevelt administration.) The extra year allowed the course to expand its historical coverage, but students did not read primary texts in Contemporary Civilization until after the Second World War. Today, the syllabus is all primary texts.

Columbia’s curricular response to the First World War was not unique. Dartmouth and Stanford both instituted courses called Problems of Citizenship around the same time. Williams College created a course on American National Problems. These were all general education courses: they provided students with instruction in matters that fell outside the purview of departments, because they were either too broad or too current. The University of Missouri created a wartime course whose title is an unusually naked instance of pedagogical bundling: it was called Problems of American Citizenship, Including English Composition. The name of Stanford’s Problems of Citizenship course was changed, after a little more than ten years, to Western Civilization.
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The reason that colleges created required courses designed to introduce students to the political traditions of the West was, to use a word from another time, relevance. Colleges looked at the world, and at what they perceived to be at stake in current events, and they decided that there were certain things students needed to know that most of them were not getting from specialized study.

The figure behind Columbia’s Literature Humanities requirement was John Erskine, an English professor who was concerned about the fact that Columbia was attracting large numbers of students who were immigrants or the children of immigrants. He was particularly worried about Jewish students, and he proposed a course on “great Anglo-Saxon writers.” The purpose of the course was socialization, not conversion. Erskine wanted to provide young people from different backgrounds with a common culture, something he thought was already thin in the United States.

The history of the course is tangled. Erskine proposed it before the war, but he was not given a chance to teach it until 1920, when it was offered as a two-year course known as General Honors. It was the first general education course in the humanities ever given in an American university, and it was a hit with the students. By 1925, there were eleven sections, most of them team-taught. In 1928, Erskine resigned. As advocates of general education curricula sometimes are, he was regarded as a dilettante by many of his colleagues. He had also published a bestselling potboiler,
The Private Life of Helen of Troy
(1925), and he left academia, to which his attachment had never been strong. The course was discontinued in 1929; but in 1932, it was revived by Jacques Barzun, a lecturer in the History department (and an alumnus of General Honors).

Barzun renamed it, charmingly, The Colloquium in Important Books, and in 1934 he invited Lionel Trilling, a graduate student and instructor in the English department, to teach it with him. Trilling, too, had been a student of Erskine’s. He was the son of Jewish immigrants, and although he had been introduced to English literature at home (his mother was born in England), the course made a lasting impression on him.
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The collaboration was a success, and Barzun and Trilling taught the course together, on and off, for thirty years. It remained an honors course (that is, enrollment was restricted), and it became one of the most famous courses in the history of the college. A faculty debate over whether to establish a similar course for all students was carried on for several years, until, in 1937, two courses, Humanities A, on Western literature, and Humanities B, on music and the arts, were introduced. Both were made requirements in 1947, the year that marks the start of the Humanities piece in Columbia’s core curriculum.

The longevity of Columbia’s general education program speaks for itself. Even so, the courses were opposed from the start by many members of the faculty; after 1945, and particularly after the sixties, staffing them was a problem. The faculty who taught them in the early years—Erskine, Barzun, Trilling, Tugwell, Clifton Fadiman, Joseph Wood Krutch, Mark Van Doren, Mortimer Adler—were public intellectuals. Colleagues who considered themselves to be more rigorous scholars condescended to them, and they returned the compliment. Medievalists in Romance language departments could not see what qualified a professor of Victorian literature, which is what Trilling was, to teach Dante. When Adler and Richard McKeon left Columbia for the University of Chicago, the general education curriculum they instituted there, under Chicago’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was far more canonical—more “great books”-oriented—than Columbia’s. But even at Chicago, there was faculty resistance from specialists. This led two professors, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, to leave Chicago for St. John’s College, in Annapolis, where they established what is the purest of the great books curricula.
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Harvard’s general education program also arose out of the experience of wartime. Though Harvard may seem, by virtue of its age and reputation, to represent a conservative and traditional model of higher education, and although it is certainly not a progressive school pedagogically, the university has often been in the forefront of educational change. Harvard has had some crusading presidents, and James Bryant Conant was one of them.

Conant was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. He was a “townie,” from Dorchester, who had attended Harvard and joined the faculty in the Chemistry department. He was not an obvious choice to succeed Harvard’s previous president, A. Lawrence Lowell, a descendant of a famous Boston family. Conant had been passed over by his own high school, Roxbury Latin, in its search for a headmaster. But he became a force in American education and American government. The educational reform he is most closely associated with is the establishment of a meritocratic system in college admissions and faculty advancement. Under Conant, Harvard recruited and provided scholarships to students with high aptitude who otherwise could not have afforded to attend and would probably never have imagined applying; and it made publication a requirement for promotion, often obliging junior professors (by denying them tenure, which is the president’s prerogative at Harvard) to leave for other universities so that they could produce sufficient scholarship to be hired back. He was a force behind both the widespread adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or SAT), which is basically an IQ test that is supposed to measure aptitude in a culturally neutral way, and the founding of the Educational Testing Service, which opened in 1948.
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In 1943, Conant appointed a committee of professors—including the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.; the pioneer of modern English studies I. A. Richards; the classicist John H. Finley; and the biologist and future Nobel laureate George Wald; and chaired by the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Paul Buck, a historian—and charged it with devising a curriculum that would give students, in Conant’s words, “a common…understanding of the society which they will possess in common.”
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The committee met for two years, conducted extensive inquiries inside and outside Harvard, and, in 1945, published its report. This was
General Education in a Free Society
, a work sometimes referred to as the Harvard Report or, because of the crimson binding, the Redbook. The intended audience was national as well as intramural: the report discusses general education in high schools (something that is still the exception in writings on education, where K–12 is usually treated independently of tertiary education) and it analyzes the changes in American life that make general education important. It also recommends that Harvard adopt a general education system with courses in three areas: the humanities (a great books course); social science (also a “great texts”–based course); and natural science. The faculty voted to adopt this system. It had a three-year trial run, and became a requirement in 1950.

This was Harvard’s first try at a general education program, and its fate was not as happy as Columbia’s. But, regardless of its effect on undergraduate instruction at Harvard, the Redbook mattered, for two reasons. The first was its success as a book. It was widely read and widely discussed. By 1950, it had sold more than 40,000 copies. It put general education on the national map, much to the annoyance of Columbia—an annoyance that persists to this day.
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(But Columbia never produced a manifesto.) The Redbook made colleges pay attention to the question of “what every student should know,” whether those colleges ended up instituting full-fledged general education programs or not.

The other reason the Harvard Report mattered was its rationale.
General Education in a Free Society
is a Cold War document. Many of its conclusions are parallel to the ones reached by President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, headed by the educator George Zook, whose report, released in 1947, focuses explicitly on higher education as a national resource.
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Zook’s report argued that investment in higher education was crucial to the development of American economic power. The Harvard authors were also concerned about the nation’s health. They identified two dangers in postwar America. One was increasing socioeconomic diversity, the segregation of citizens according to income, which is itself a function of educational attainment. Conant’s committee was worried that this socioeconomic diversity (it did not mention religious, racial, or other types of diversity) carried the risk of class resentment, as better-educated groups acquired disproportionately greater wealth. This seemed fertile ground for Marxists and other subversives. The other danger the report contemplated was intellectual relativism—a lack of commitment to a common set of beliefs, exacerbated by increased social mobility and the declining moral authority of traditional institutions, such as the church, the family, and the local community. Intellectual relativism made Americans susceptible to ideological indoctrination and fanaticism. Conant in particular believed that general education could help the United States withstand the threat of what he referred to as the “Russian hordes.”
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This is why the report devoted so many pages to general education in high schools. “General” really did mean everyone.

The authors felt that the most important effect of general education is that it gives students a “binding experience.”
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In a meritocratic society, citizens need a common fund of knowledge, a kind of cultural lingua franca, to prevent politically dangerous divisions from developing. In the Harvard model, the great books are not read because they articulate truths that transcend circumstances (though the members of the committee may have believed this as well). The great books are read because they have been read.
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Whether Plato or Rousseau or Mill was right about fundamental human nature is not important; what is important is that we live in a society that is shaped to some degree by the ideas of Plato, Rousseau, and Mill, just as we live in a society in which we can expect to encounter works of literature influenced to some degree by Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Those writers are touchstones for contemporary culture and debate; more than that, they represent a common heritage that bonds each citizen, whether a lawyer or a cabdriver, to each. In the socioeconomically diverse world the Redbook imagines, in which cohorts divide off onto different educational paths as their talents and merits dictate, general education is the social glue.
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At the start of the Cold War, Harvard did what Columbia had done at the time of the First World War: it supplemented its departmental curriculum with courses specially designed to meet contemporary exigencies. It put a public face on college education.