Who says the Great Books are dead? Not Stephen C. Zelnick. Fifteen years ago, he and J. Scott Lee founded the Association of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC), composed of colleges and universities that have programs dedicated to world classics. I interviewed Zelnick, a professor of English at Temple University, to learn more about ACTC and the state of the classics in universities today, including Temple.
Q. Tell us how ACTC began.
A. ACTC was born out of my attempt to join forces with programs similar to the Intellectual Heritage (IH) program at Temple University, a two-course curriculum that introduced students to great works of Western civilization.
When I inherited the directorship in 1991, I was impressed by the fact that IH had kept true to its original intentions of bringing classic readings to our entire undergraduate student body, regardless of a student’s major. Every student had read Plato and Shakespeare, John Locke and the nation’s founding documents, Galileo, Darwin and much more. I was impressed, too, with how receptive our students were to studying material that was difficult and that had no obvious connection to their career goals.
Much of the success of IH came from the talent of our faculty, many of them full-time adjuncts. The diminishment of humanities in the 1980s had set many talented and brilliantly educated people adrift in the job market but, happily, many had found their way to Temple’s IH Program. Because many of these talented teachers faced a career dead-end at Temple, I invited them to become engaged in activities that might lead to permanent employment elsewhere, such as publishing texts based on Intellectual Heritage readings.
As part of that effort, I wanted to find more programs like my own and share ideas about strengthening the humanities. I had the great good luck to interest Scott Lee, who was at that time a full-time adjunct in the IH Program, in the project of linking with similar programs.
I entirely underestimated the number of such programs—I thought there might be dozens, but Scott soon found there were hundreds. ACTC began to bring them together.
Q. Why does the association’s name include “core texts and courses” and not “Great Books”?
A. We wrestled with this term at the beginning. By “core” we mean that these texts and courses fit within a framework larger than an individual instructor’s inclinations. They are part of a deliberate curricular design that emphasizes careful reading of primary works and addresses the most significant ethical, political, and spiritual issues. Some educators prefer the term “Great Books,” but quite a few programs include readings that have not made their way into the canon of “masterworks,” perhaps because they are too new. We settled for a latitudinarian approach.
Q. Is ACTC interested in a broad variety of classics, not just classics underlying Western civilization?
A. ACTC invites differing views on this subject. Many member institutions focus exclusively on the Western tradition; some do not. The prevailing approach, however, tends to favor Western classics. At Temple, for example, we studied the Sundiata, a thirteenth-century epic from Mali, in our course on earlier works and Mahatma Gandhi’s writings in the later period. But establishing the cultural traditions of these works would have taken our program way off course. We faced a big enough challenge establishing the broader outlines of the Western tradition for students who came to college badly prepared to understand their own intellectual heritage.
Some academics assume that U.S. students are sufficiently grounded in their own cultural and intellectual heritage that they are ready to move on to understanding other cultures in the global fabric. In fact, however, our students are woefully ignorant of their nation’s history and its special claims for respect and of the broader background of Western thinking.
Q. Are the classics accessible to all, or just to the smartest kids?
A. We are committed to the notion that the great tradition of learning and art belongs to everyone. It does require patience to bring these wonderful and difficult books to students whose reading habits are casual at best and whose judgment is underdeveloped, but that is what education is, especially in a democratic setting.
Of course, the pedagogical challenge is to introduce these materials to students who are unprepared for them. It is not just a matter of reading skills, either. Reading Machiavelli, for example, requires an awareness of the political dynamics of contending social strata; few American students have this.
Happily, no single work stands alone, and encountering Plato and Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, some biblical material, the Sundiata, and Shakespeare enables students to see social forces and the challenge of political leadership in new ways. The answer for limited student abilities and perspectives is always curriculum—a purposeful and organized assault upon ignorance and upon underdeveloped habits of thinking.
Q. Does ACTC represent merely a holding action against the erosion of deep reading?
A. This is a vexing question. The future is by no means clear. We have certainly been passing through a difficult time for traditional education.
In the 1950s, at a pretty good but not stellar high school, I studied three and a half years of Latin and one term of Greek. My 11th grade chemistry course was far more rigorous than the college courses I now see. I read fat books avidly, from elementary school on. But that was a different world—a world of limited media intrusion, and a world that seemed coherent and therefore worth the effort to understand.
Furthermore, I always trusted that there would be a comfortable place for me in the social order. Economics had not yet put on its brutal face of competition-to-the-death, in a game tilted against most of the players. Doing work well, rather than finding the most cunning angle, was still the answer when I attended high school and first enrolled in college.
Then, too, we have an entirely different student body attending our universities. In one sense, this is very healthy. When I entered college, women constituted about a third of my urban university freshman class; now women make up close to sixty per cent of first-year students. I recall almost no African-Americans in my undergraduate classes and few professors who were not white males. Access to all has made a wonderful difference. At the same time, enrollment of poorly prepared students and of hordes of students with scant interest in study has taken a terrible toll on the integrity of our universities.
Faculty specialization has also had a destructive impact on the humanities, as have the tired and routine left activist agendas.
Still, this may be the “re-set” moment. Students hunger for coherence and for a higher ideal to propel their lives. The classic books and works of art we propose to them have a powerful allure in themselves. If we find the points of contact between what these works offer and what students desire, we have a fighting chance. That is what ACTC has always aimed at.
Q. In an article in Academic Questions you describe how the Intellectual
Heritage program at Temple University, which you formerly headed, has been replaced by something called Mosaic. It pairs works of Western civilization with works of other cultures. What do you think of this change?
A. The faculty members in the IH program found themselves helpless against notions held by politically powerful, tenured faculty and academic administrators. The faculty of Mosaic now must teach materials from traditions they know little about. Books they loved, admired, and understood have been pushed to the side.
Academic administrators now rarely emerge from the humanities but tend to come from “power” departments that specialize in funded research and involvement with external structures. Our last provost, a professor of criminal justice, thought that Homer wrote in Latin; our last dean of liberal arts specialized in political survey data analysis.
Many faculty members, too, were not educated in the classics and respond avidly to the allure of new things—globalization drove the decision to dismantle the IH Program. We are an anti-traditional culture –suckers for novelty.
Q. Can this trend be reversed?
A. Yes, I believe it can, but not easily. Human beings love shiny, bright new things, but they also need coherence and stability. We have this inborn hunger and the satisfactions of long-tested works of genius on our side.
And the universities have gone out on a long, unstable limb that could break at any moment. A price rebellion is brewing, but also a quality rebellion. Cohort after cohort of graduates find themselves not sufficiently advantaged by their degrees and their educations. A regime where everyone is a “B” student and few can write sensibly or read thoughtfully or present an idea intelligibly or work concertedly cannot prevail.
University professors have become their own worst enemy. Professors too often object to the idea of “core education” and even to any set curriculum. They claim that these violate their right to academic freedom, by which they mean the right to teach whatever they want and in ways that serve their own political commitments or research agendas. These attitudes simply extend the incoherence and discourage our students.
Q. Does it matter that students are losing touch with the ideas that underlie the world of liberty, or relative liberty, that we have today?
A. I am no supporter of the arrogant project of forcing people in other cultural traditions to bend to our truths—no holy wars for liberty. However, we need to recognize the value of our own heritage and to demonstrate its excellence by cultivating its possibilities fully.
Unfortunately, we are doing exactly the opposite. We are becoming a timorous, in-door people, frightened by the rules and by pressures to be and look and consume like everyone else. Our public figures calibrate their looks and comments and views in order to be popular. Our faux-individualism is largely expressed by media characters whose rebelliousness is impulsive and hostile to civility and honor.
Against this conformity and sluggish acquiescence to mediocrity are the core figures of our heritage, all trouble-makers for the truth: Socrates (by way of Plato), Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Galileo, Machiavelli, Locke, Jefferson, Adam Smith, Blake, Whitman, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Frederick Douglass, Darwin, Gandhi, and M. L. King, Jr. These—and others—constitute a remarkable roster of renegades.
I cannot think of a time in our history when we have needed their encouragement more.