Why should we read great books that deal with the problems and concerns of bygone eras? Our social and political problems are so urgent that they demand practically all the time and energy we can devote to serious contemporary reading. Is there any value, besides mere historical interest, in reading books written in the simple obsolete cultures of former times?

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People who question or even scorn the study of the past and its works usually assume that the past is entirely different from the present, and that hence we can learn nothing worthwhile from the past. But it is not true that the past is entirely different from the present. We can learn much of value from its similarity and its difference.

A tremendous change in the conditions of human life and in our knowledge and control of the natural world has taken place since ancient times. The ancients had no prevision of our present-day technical and social environment, and hence have no counsel to offer us about the particular problems we confront. But, although social and economic arrangements vary with time and place, man remains man. We and the ancients share a common human nature and hence certain common human experiences and problems.

The poets bear witness that ancient man, too, saw the sun rise and set, felt the wind on his cheek, was possessed by love and desire, experienced ecstasy and elation as well as frustration and disillusion, and knew good and evil. The ancient poets speak across the centuries to us, sometimes more directly and vividly than our contemporary writers. And the ancient prophets and philosophers, in dealing with the basic problems of men living together in society, still have some thing to say to us.

I have elsewhere pointed out that the ancients did not face our problem of providing fulfillment for a large group of elderly citizens. But the passages from Sophocles and Aristophanes show that the ancients, too, were aware of the woes and disabilities of old age. Also, the ancient view that elderly persons have highly developed capacities for practical judgment and philosophical meditation indicate possibilities that might not occur to us if we just looked at the present-day picture.

No former age has faced the possibility that life on earth might be totally exterminated through atomic warfare. But past ages, too, knew war and the extermination and enslavement of whole peoples. Thinkers of the past meditated on the problems of war and peace and make suggestions that are worth listening to. Cicero and Locke show that the human way to settle disputes is by discussion and law, while Dante and Kant propose world government as the way to world peace.

Former ages did not experience particular forms of dictatorship that we have known in this century. But they had firsthand experience of absolute tyranny and the suppression of political liberty. Aristotle’s treatise on politics includes a penetrating and systematic analysis of dictatorships, as well as a recommendation of measures to be taken to avoid the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.

We also learn from the past by considering the respects in which it differs from the present. We can discover where we are today and what we have become by knowing what the people of the past did and thought. And part of the past — our personal past and that of the race — always lives in us.

Exclusive preference for either the past or the present is a foolish and wasteful form of snobbishness and provinciality. We must seek what is most worthy in the works of both the past and the present. When we do that, we find that ancient poets, prophets, and philosophers are as much our contemporaries in the world of the mind as the most discerning of present-day writers. In fact, many of the ancient writings speak more directly to our experience and condition than the latest best sellers.

Mortimer J. Adler

Americans may be reading online, but that’s not literature. Without the great authors, where are the great thoughts? Five years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) issued an alarming report called Reading at Risk, which declared that literary reading was in dramatic decline. The NEA reported a sharp drop from 1982 to 2002 in the proportion of people who were reading any kind of literature. Fewer than half of adults, the NEA said, had read any single work of literature during 2003, the previous year. Dana Gioia, then the chairman of the NEA, called the decline of literary reading a national crisis that represented a “general collapse in advanced literacy.”

Early this year, however, the NEA reversed course. It said the latest figures showed a turnaround: for the first time since 1982, the proportion of adults who had read at least one novel, short story, poem, or play in the previous year had risen.

The number was still lower than it had been in 1982 or 1992, but Gioia concluded that the downward spiral seemed to have ended. He attributed the happy reversal to an NEA program called The Big Read, which encourages entire communities to read and discuss one particular book, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Henry James’s Washington Square.

Not long ago, visiting a town in Wyoming where many people were reading the same book, I could see that The Big Read was a wonderful idea. Everyone was discussing the book. I thought wistfully of the many times I had argued with state education bureaucrats who staunchly opposed the idea of specifying a good book for students to read in any particular grade. In these dark days for the publishing industry, which has suffered along with the rest of the economy, any good news is welcome. And yet it is hard to be cheerful when so many signs suggest that the increase in reading springs not from a newfound love of literature but from a devotion to trivial stuff online. Indeed, some critics of Reading at Risk contend that reading is not in trouble because young people are reading material on the Internet. Yes, but what are they reading? It is not likely to be Mark Twain or William Faulkner or Walt Whitman or Ralph Ellison, but rather Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. Text messaging is also a form of reading, but it is not going to keep the higher end of literary culture alive.

There are other troubling signs of the decay of literary culture. The Washington Post has shut down Book World, its book review section. The New York Times Sunday Book Review is probably the last such freestanding section left among the nation’s newspapers the (Times eliminated its daily book reviews several years ago).

Few genuine outlets now exist for reviewing books, which is bad news for authors, many of whom work for years writing a book and getting it published but then get no reviews. Books that are not reviewed have a hard time finding an audience. The publication of the book is like a tree falling in the forest: If no one heard it, did it fall? If no one reviews a book, how will readers know that it exists? The New York Times book section may also be at risk. It is no secret that the Times, struggling with a large debt, is cutting back sections of the newspaper. One recent week, the Sunday Book Review was a slender twenty-four pages and contained scant advertising. How long can it survive under such circumstances? Writers whose books can change the way you see the world are not on Americans’ “must read” lists.

Most people never read these works, which tend not to become blockbuster computer-generated movies. Even more ominous was the list emerging from “Ten Books to Read before You Die,” a feature that appeared on America Online not long ago. It grew out of a Harris poll that asked people to identify their favorite books. Aside from the Bible, the rest of the list reflected popular culture: The Lord of the Rings, surely on the list because of the wildly popular movies (I wonder how many of those who named this series had read any of them?), and the Harry Potter series, about which nothing more needs to be said (except that Harry Potter is seven books, not one). Add to those two by Dan Brown, including The Da Vinci Code (I would be willing to die with no regrets at all if I had never read that book); a book by Stephen King, a master of popular fiction; and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, presumably because lots of people have seen the movie on television. All that remains to round out the list of the books one must read before dying are Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and two staples of the high school curriculum, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

One wishes that the Harris poll ad asked people if they had read the book or merely watched the movie. This list is the ultimate confirmation of the dumbing down of America. If these are the ten books one must read before dying, count me out. Why nothing by Mark Twain, whose novels, I believe, are certainly superior to anything on the Harris poll list? Why no mention of Shakespeare or Tolstoy? Why no George Eliot? Why no Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright? Those writers, whose works can change the way you see the world, are not on the list because most Americans have never read them and because their writings have never been converted into a major computer-generated movie.

The publication of the book is like a tree falling in the forest: If no one heard it, did it fall? If no one reviews a book, how will readers know that it exists? Why does it matter if America’s literary culture is dying? It matters because the ability to read challenging books helps make one more independent-minded. It encourages a way of thinking that is not a product of the mass media. It gives one the ability to think for oneself and entertain contrary opinions, and the freedom from dependence on Hollywood for a view of the world. The literary culture is the last bastion of the individualist. Our society, our culture, even our economy depend on preserving freethinking dissidents. And there is nothing that works better to free a mind from cant and superstition than to engage with the ideas of the world’s greatest writers.

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is20diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educ ational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institut ions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different20cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field20Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”

Editor’s note: Our thanks to John Zmirak for this article. And a special thanks to one of our students, T. C., for sending us these beautiful pictures she took while in Florida.

In times of economic slowdown, prices usually fall. Is your home worth as much as it was two years ago? As much as the mortgage you have on it? (For your sake, I hope so.) In major cities rents are falling, and shoppers are skipping organic groceries in favor of mongo-sized discount produce from Price Club. There’s just one sector of the economy that’s bizarrely insulated from reality: Academia.

Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College just hit $53,166 per year. That’s like buying a C-Class Mercedes every year … except you never get the car. Other colleges are comparable, with even state school tuition rising to levels some parents find impossible. Why hasn’t reality had its revenge?

There are good reasons why we try to preserve college life from the logic of the market. There’s no clear bottom-line benefit to teaching Shakespeare plays, but we still want professors doing it. Universities in the West were invented by monks in the Middle Ages, and at their best they still serve as a cloistered refuge from the grim necessities of life — offering students not just a degree that’s valued in the marketplace, but a chance to broaden their interests and deepen their souls, to gain a solid grounding in the fundamentals that made our civilization, and explore all life’s possibilities before settling down to a life of working to earn their bread.

Yeah, that’s the theory. But what if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers — who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?

That is exactly what happened in academia over the past 30 years, according to Emory University professor Mark Bauerlain, who explores the open, ugly secret that most professors are paid based not on the quality (or even quantity) of their teaching, but rather on the volume of scholarly articles and books they can produce.

Bauerlain’s American Enterprise Institute paper, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own,” reveals the following: Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.

At the same time, the degree of interaction between teachers and students has declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial course work, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”

Indeed, prestigious professors frequently have little interaction with students at all, lecturing to hundreds at a time, consigning discussions and grading to graduate students. Meanwhile, the research these professors are turning out is increasingly obscure and often politicized. If they’re dealing with well-studied writers, they must pursue ever more oddball interpretations of the works in order to produce something original. Here’s Bauerlain again, explaining why: In the year 2007, literary scholars and critics published 85 studies of the life and writings of William Faulkner. Nearly all of them appeared in U.S. publications, and the total included 11 books and eight dissertations. The previous year saw 78 entries on Faulkner, and the one before that 80 of them.

In fact, from 1980 to 2006, Faulkner attracted fully 3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews and editions. During the same years, Charles Dickens garnered 3,437 studies, while Emily Dickinson tallied 1,776. Towering at the top was William Shakespeare with 21,674 separate pieces of scholarship and criticism.

Professors daunted by the task of hunting for treasure in such burned-over fields will often simply switch gears and write about popular culture. At least the movie ‘‘Bruno” doesn’t have 47,000 scholarly articles written about it. Yet.

I’m not throwing stones at the hardworking scholars who wade through decades of previous research to try saying something new about canonical authors. I’ve been there and I’ve done it. It’s real work, but it doesn’t add much to teaching, especially at the most basic levels, such as composition courses.

Those classes, which few professors really want to teach, are among the most crucial many students will ever take, determining how fluently they can write in their own first language.

Meanwhile, survey classes — the next most important category of courses — which cover literary history and introduce students for the first time to the greatest works in our language, also have trouble finding teachers because they don’t “tie into one’s research” and are largely useless for gaining tenure.

Ivy League grads can emerge without having ever read Hamlet or the Declaration of Independence, or they’ve learned these texts through some trendy lens, such as Queer Theory.

That’s why it’s essential, when making the ever more costly choices required in education, to carefully scope out each college. Call the admissions office and inquire about the student/teacher ratio and the percentage of classes taught by graduate students.

Is there a core curriculum of solid classes in Western culture, American history and great works of literature? Ask a professor how highly teaching (versus research) is valued in tenure decisions. After all, the teaching is what you’re paying for. Leave the tab for all that research to those 300 people who actually buy the books.

I find that more and more people have an urge to pry into such difficult subjects as science, philosophy, religion, economics and political theory. One clear sign of this is the widespread circulation of the serious books that are now found everywhere in paper-back editions. Decidedly, people want to go further and deeper in their thinking about many things which we used to feel were the monopoly of specialists and scholars.

More often than not, however, this urge soon dries up. People find that the book which they open with high hopes of enlightenment turns out to be beyond their grasp. They think that the subject must require more background than they have, and they quit.

Actually, any book intended for the general reader can be understood if you approach it in the right way. What is the right approach? The answer lies in one important-and paradoxical-rule of reading. You should read a book through superficially before you try to master it.

Most of us were taught in school to go to a dictionary when we met an unfamiliar word. We were told to consult an encyclopedia, scholarly commentaries or other secondary sources to get help with statements we couldn’t understand. The rule to follow on tackling a difficult book calls for exactly the opposite procedure.

Look first for the things you can understand, and refuse to get bogged down in the difficult passages. Read right on past paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. There will be enough material which you can immediately grasp, and soon it will add up to a substantial foothold from which to climb further. The amount you understand by a quick reading-even if it is only 50 percent or less-will help you to carry some light back to the places which left you in the dark.

The tremendous pleasure that comes from reading Shakespeare was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar, Hamlet or Macbeth scene by scene, to look up all the new words and to study all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read the play. By the time they got to the end they had forgotten the beginning and lost sight of the whole. Instead of being forced to take this pedantic approach, they should have been encouraged to read the play in one sitting and discuss what they got out of that first quick reading. Then they would have been ready to study the play carefully, for they would have understood enough of it to be able to learn more.

The best proof of the soundness of this rule-give a book a first superficial reading-is what happens when you don’t follow it. Take a basic work in economics such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. If you insist on understanding everything on one page before you go on to the next you won’t get very far. In your effort to master the fine points, you will miss the big points that Smith so clearly makes-about the role of the market in determining prices, the evils of monopoly, the reasons for free trade.

What is true of The Wealth of Nations in the field of economics is equally true of J. S. Mill’s Representative Government in the field of political theory. These books are open to the layman if he approaches them in the right way; so also are a host of other books. In religion, the writings of Martin Buber, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich; in philosophy and psychology, the writings of William James, Segundo Freud, John Dewey, Bert rand Russell; in science, the works of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. The writings of such specialists are probably not completely understandable by the layman, nor need they be. It is a considerable achievement if we can grasp. The essential part of what these great men are saying, about their principles, their methods and their aims.

In addition, it is well to remember that books can be not only good friends, but also passing acquaintances. Some of them can tell us what we want to know-or all they have to tell-from a brief chat, if we use them properly.

A variation on the method of giving a book a first superficial reading is the technique of skimming. You will never get from skimming what reading and study can give you, but it is a very practical way of dealing with the mass of books available to you. By skimming you can get, often with surprising accuracy, a general sense of the contents of a book. This enables you to file the book away in your mental index so that, should occasion arise in the future, you can go back to it, dig it up and dig deeper.

Giving a book a quick once-over is also a threshing process that allows you to separate the chaff from the real kernels of nourishment. You may discover that what you get from the skimming is all the book is worth to you for the time being. It may never be worth more. But you will then at least know what the author’s leading contention is, so the time you spent with the book will not have been wasted.

For skimming or reading, the following steps are a good way to begin giving a book the once-over:

• Look at the title page and preface, and note especially the subtitle-or other indications of the scope and aim of the book or the author’s special angle.
• Study the table of contents to get a general sense of the book’s structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip.
• Check the index for the range of subjects covered or the kinds of authors quoted. When you see terms listed that seem crucial, look up the passage. You may find the key to the author’s approach.

Now you are ready to read the book or skim through it, as you choose. If you vote to skim it, look at the chapters which contain pivotal passages or summary statements in their opening or closing pages. Then dip into a page here and there, reading a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages in sequence. Thumb through the book in this way, always looking for the basic pulse beat of the matter.

All this will add to your alertness while you read. How many times have you daydreamed through pages only to wake up to find that you have no idea of the ground you’ve been over? That cannot happen if you have a system for following a general thread.

One word of warning: if you use this approach and start to skim through a book, you may end up discovering that you aren’t skimming it at all. You are reading it, understanding it and enjoying it. When you put the book down it will be with the realization that the subject wasn’t such a tough one after all!

Great Books Academy Ad 2010

The Great Books?

Daniel J. Flynn

From every page of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, author Alex Beam whispers: put down the Aristotle and pick up the remote. Stop reading that Dostoevsky text and start responding 2 a txt. There is a Dog the Bounty Hunter to watch, internet porn to surf, Grand Theft Auto IV to play. Conform.

"Great Conversations"

The Great Books movement, spearheaded by autodidact Mortimer Adler, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, and Encyclopedia Britannica publisher William Benton, represented “everything that was wrong, unchic, and middlebrow about middle America,” according to Beam. A confirmed participant in middlebrow culture as a Boston Globe columnist, Beam is the latest bourgeois to attack the bourgeoisie for not knowing their place. The fighter pilot buried with a copy of Adler’s How to Read a Book, the motorcycling high-school dropout transformed into Adler’s St. Paul, and the Utah plumber turned onto the Great Books through Adler’s television appearances all feel the brunt of Beam’s passive-aggressive writing style of oblique put-downs, spotlighted quirks, and condescending prose.

More direct is Beam’s contempt for the trio behind the Great Books. Hutchins becomes academia’s “boy wonder,” Adler his “Hobbit-like sidekick,” and Benton the “hustler extraordinaire” who peddled their 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. If you missed the snake-oil salesman characterization, then Beam reminds you on pages 5, 13, 75, and 197 that “hucksters” pushed the project-and that Beam needs a thesaurus. The trio’s crimes include successfully marketing 1 million editions of the Great Books of the Western World (full of Aristotle and Aquinas, Newton and Einstein) to Middle America.

Robert M. Hutchins	“The best education for the best is the best education for all.”
1st Editor in Chief of the Great Books

Count one on Beam’s indictment stems from the Great Books Movement’s raison d’etre, which, in the words of Hutchins’s guiding mantra, was “the best education for the best is the best education for all.” In Beam’s eyes, there is something uncouth rather than uplifting about evangelizing great books through door-to-door sales, in book clubs run by retirees and suburban moms, at resort seminars, and in downtown continuing education classes aimed at businessmen. He divines dollar signs rather than vocation as the motivation for the campaign. Adler, a self-taught immigrant’s son, touted liberal arts education in an age of specialization. As a twentysomething instructor at Columbia University, Adler opened up the school’s Great Books-style honors curriculum to a general public more interested in an education than a piece of paper. That Adler offered the courses free of charge undermines Beam’s smear. Twenty years later, the Batman to Adler’s Robin, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins furthered the continuing education revolution by launching a UC annex in downtown Chicago aimed at Second City businessmen. Rather than a scheme to make a buck, a notion belied by Adler’s dependence on a book-a-minute publishing schedule and the enormous $60 million profits going to the non-profit University of Chicago, the Great Books were an extension of Adler and Hutchins’s life mission. As the title of Adler’s Great Books newsletter proclaimed, Philosophy Is Everybody’s Business. Beam counters that philosophy, for Hutchins, Adler, and Benton, was merely a business.

Aristotle

Beam’s snobbishness toward a movement spreading great books to mediocre minds strangely morphs into egalitarianism when he attacks the project’s contention that some books truly are great. Who’s to say Jane Austin over Danielle Steele, Aristotle over Deepak Chopra, Thomas Aquinas over Richard Dawkins? “America was becoming a land of consumers, and a land of choice. [Harvard President] Charles Eliot was very much in tune with the times,” writes Beam of academia’s trendsetter at the turn of the last century. In contrast, Hutchins, who launched a counterrevolution against Eliot’s free elective system, was very much not in tune with the times. This is the closest Beam comes to a point in his proudly pointless book. He views the Great Books movement, and the core curriculum associated with it, as a reaction to the Deweyite model of education, of which he sees Elliot as a proto-proponent and himself as a latter-day defender. Just as Beam enlists a century late in the battle pitting the cafeteria curriculum against the core curriculum, he plays Hiroo Onoda to the 1990s campus culture wars over Western civilization, dead white males, and identity politics written to death in a cottage industry of conservative critiques. Scandalized to discover the Great Books of the Western World were not only written before his birth, but by authors who were-gasp-white, Beam repeatedly reminds readers of this find. “No blacks or Hispanics appeared on the list,” “the seventy-four writers, all deceased and primarily Caucasian males,” “the Western canon of predominantly dead white males,” and so on. Might Beam go into shock to discover the Orient’s Great Books were authored by Asians? Who, exactly, did the author think resided in the West over the last several millennia? The models in the United Colors of Benetton catalog? “The Great Books are not in fashion,” Beam taunts. “Harold and Allan Bloom not withstanding, the literary canon has broadened to encompass slave narratives and the utterances of Chief Joseph Seattle, among others.” For this we should be thankful?

Added to the Great Books’ offenses against multiculturalism, “There were no concessions to contemporary taste.” The books, then, are a slur upon our age and its diversity cult. Calling the kettle black, Beam complains that Hutchins “mocked (and of course, simplified) Dewey’s notion that education should conform to young people’s wants.”

“All young Americans of a certain age now want to be cowboys,” he quotes Hutchins. “I doubt whether it would be useful for the schools to concentrate on cowpunching in its moral, social, political, scientific and intellectual contexts.” By ignoring last week’s New York Times bestseller list, the Great Books offends the man stuck in his age. It is anti-democratic elitism, Beam avers, for a small group of scholars to decide what books the masses ought to read without consulting modern tastes. But is it not anti-democratic to ignore, as the critics of the Great Books routinely do, the votes of Elizabethan England, Ancient Athens, and Medieval France? That a book is still read hundreds of years after its publication date, and in languages foreign to its author, is a clue that it just might be a great book. That it is prominently displayed near Barnes & Noble cash registers, or talked about at last year’s Modern Language Association panels, is not. Great books fuel a lasting conversation across millennia and cultures. Great books transcend the muck rather than descend into it.

A Great Idea at the Time sneers but doesn’t speak. “For a while, the Great Books were important enough to be made fun of,” Beam informs. His snarky indirectness always keeps open the plausible deniability that he’s really not saying what he seems to be saying. It is a writing style that’s all style, leaving a reader entertained but empty. There is a mood but not an argument. The cowardice in that should not to be overlooked: the latter can be refuted; the former cannot. It is the sucker punch from behind a football helmet.

A Great Idea at the Time is a silly book on a serious subject. A thoughtful critique of the Great Books movement could have been written. There are obvious drawbacks to education without the benefit of instruction. By applying the word “canon,” with its connotations to holy writings approved by a clerical body, the Great Books movement risks cultivating a cult that believes the subjective the sacred. The math and science books included have aged as well as the various popular books that contemporaneous critics thought merited inclusion. There are certainly great books outside of the Great Books just as there are certainly not-so-great books within. Might they have selected this text and not that one?

But such an investigation would require reading the actual texts, which would be quite a task in between newspaper columns on squash matches, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and headmasters addressing sex scandals at Milton Academy and Groton. And as his breezy broadside against the Great Books demonstrates, the provincial author is too preoccupied with what captivates his Boston neighbors today to enter into a discussion with dead white males from across the ocean.