Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University, teaches a popular course on the Russian novel at this renowned school in Evanston, Illinois. As such, he might be expected to welcome a defense of the humanities from any quarter. But in his review of Martha Nussbaum’s latest book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, he shows how some self-styled friends of the humanities are to a great extent the cause of the doldrums into which they have fallen.
The standard diagnosis now being invoked for explaining declining enrollment in college-level humanities courses is economic. Whereas in the sixties the lament placed the blame on the philistinism of American culture, now market forces are made the scapegoat.
As David Brooks deftly puts it in a recent column: “When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.” Adding to the chorus of lament, Harvard’s president Drew Faust worries that “the market model [has] become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education.”
Morson isn’t buying. Since he teaches the most popular humanities course at Northwestern, he has ample opportunity to ask his students why they avoid taking more such classes. “Not materialism but a nose for nonsense drives them away,” he finds. That nonsense takes three forms: condescension, literature taught as a crossword puzzle, and historicism.
By condescension Morson means the tired trope of measuring Shakespeare, Milton, or Tolstoy against “our” values, which of course would be the norms of the academic left. Should the author in question not have denounced heterosexism or colonialism, he is denounced as “reactionary.” In other words, read in this way, “literature can teach us nothing because it presumes that the truth is already given.”
He even more deftly describes the crossword-puzzle approach, a paragraph so droll it must be quoted in full:
Even more often, interest in literature suffers because it is taught as a sort of crossword puzzle. The idea is that, for some reason, authors do not express anything directly, but instead devise a complex code of images, alliterations, obscure references, biblical allusions, interlingual puns, concealed quotations and—above all—symbols. Students rapidly learn how easy it is to find symbols. As a last resort, there is always water, because no matter what the story, somebody sooner or later is bound to wash and drink. And off the student goes, discovering allusions to baptism, the flood, or amniotic fluid. He earns his A and never again picks up a work of fiction.
The final approach is equally deadening: treating the work merely as a testimony to its times. Which of course it is. One does, after all, learn a lot about social conditions in Dickens’s times from reading Bleak House, but that store of information is not what makes the novel literature, which by definition transcends its times. “One does not read Tolstoy,” Morson rightly observes, “to learn about tsarist Russia; one becomes interested in tsarist Russia because it produced Tolstoy.”
He is willing to concede that Nussbaum is arguing on the side of the angels, especially when she defends the great novels as the best way to see the world from perspectives other than one’s own. But true to form for a self-congratulatory academic liberal, she fails to practice what she preaches: She discusses the social issues in Not for Profit, he writes, “but time after time, and without exception, she presents the leftist one as the only possible one for a decent person to hold.”
Her prescription to “think critically” never applies to the pieties of the American academic intelligentsia. Nor does the “tyranny of custom” ever include intellectuals’ custom of supporting or apologizing for tyrannical ideologies. … Nussbaum affirms the need for racial and gender equality while also endorsing affirmative action, without ever allowing that reasonable people might find a conflict between the two or asking whether affirmative action has always and everywhere produced desired results. In her world, the right intentions never have unintended consequences that opponents have witnessed before.
Then there is her repeated insistence that professors should teach “critical thinking” instead of mere facts. To a modest extent Morson agrees: “I would much rather my students acquire the skills to appreciate great realist prose than memorize the names and patronymics of minor characters in War and Peace.”
But there are surely limits to this insouciance toward these “mere” facts, as he mordantly notes here: “I wish more of my students, who are very bright but often woefully ignorant, came to class already knowing who Napoleon was. It would also help if I did not have to identify the Sermon on the Mount. Surely at some point factual ignorance impedes critical thinking itself.”
But maybe the problem lies elsewhere. Perhaps undergraduates have not matured enough to appreciate great literature. I recall having to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college and absolutely hating it, but then I reread it one summer in my forties and thought it the best English novel I ever read. Of course, undergraduates have to have some exposure to great literature lest the faculties for appreciating it completely wither. But nothing can gainsay the growth in subjective powers of appreciation that increase only with the accumulation of experience in life.
In that regard, perhaps the real enemy of the humanities is time. I recall once mentioning a book I had just read to a college administrator, who lamented that her bureaucratic duties in a 9-to-5 desk job and her family responsibilities in the evening prevented her from reading more than a few books a year. I recommended she read The Intellectual Life by the French Dominican A. G. Sertillanges.
The book was written to encourage busy parish priests to keep abreast of theology (I recommend it to newly ordained priests all the time), but its advice applies to any busy person who wants to keep his mind active and enriched. I won’t repeat the advice here, since reading the whole book is part of the motivation for keeping active intellectually. But one reason for the book’s popularity can be mentioned here: if you follow the advice of the book, you’ll never have to rely on a professor again for the rest of your life.
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago. Morson’s review appeared in the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion, and David Brooks’ comments may be found in History for Dollars .
Comments:
They've read Harry Potter, one has read Tolkien beginning to end. The older boy is being given the usual gloomy fare that serves as literature in high school honors classes . . . Night, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye. I try to supplement his reading with more positive stuff -- heck, even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is cheerful compared to some of our angst-ridden literature.
I don't see the kids today being that far behind my generation. Some of them are great readers. And a lot of teachers, in public schools and I think in college, do a great job, even if they do take an almost uniformly liberal perspective. I think we just have to assume that supplemental reading will be neccessary, for a rounded perspective, and for a decent appreciation not only of western civilization, but even of life! The Unabomber was quite a reader, too, after all.
I love reading – often rereading -- the classics. To first understand and, second, see connections between Madison, Aquinas, Aristotle, Herodotus, Newton (gotta get some math in there); to respectfully contradict Marx, Rousseau, Plato (well, at least some of Plato), Nietzsche, and Freud; to be flummoxed by Kant’s impenetrable books (is it his thinking or his writing?); to be carried along by Dante’s style; to read the pages of First Things with a degree of discernment; these are great things.
In the end, it must be true -- these professors make humanities dull.
Agree. As an undergraduate I was a political science major (focusing on American government and Constitutional Law). I became enthralled with the topic because my professors made history come alive, showed trajectories from colonial days to the present, brought Constitutional relevance to all matters of culture, and made me feel like I was PART of this country we call the United States. Contrast that with the much-anticipated elective I took: Irish Literature. We spent the first 6 weeks reading aloud James' Joyce's Ulysses. That's it. No conversations or explanations other than "oh, that word means 'x'." I think it was a graduate student teaching some obtuse part of his dissertation.
I don't see an immediate solution to the problem.
That would certainly kill a normal person's interest. Too slow, too dull, ... we did that when I was in 3rd grade.
"I think it was a graduate student teaching some obtuse part of his dissertation."
That, too, would do the trick. I am guessing here, but teaching Ulysses might be your man's way of working out his own thoughts on the book. In that case, you could get a vaguely nonsensical feeling because he did not work out his own ideas before taking the job. This is common academic practice, especially if it is his first time teaching it.
Not sure about a dissertation being 'obtuse' -- maybe you meant 'obscure'?
Most dissertations in the humanities are never completed.
Gee, do you think?
At some point? How about the beginning of the learning process itself?
I think this is a huge factor in the demise of the humanities. Critical thinking cannot happen without a base of knowledge. That base is made up, at least in part, of facts memorzed. When memorization or rote learning of historical facts is lacking, much of literature is hard or impossible to understand as is history for that matter. How can you understand what you don't know? How can you think critically without the knowledge?
Good heavens it doesn't take an academic with a lot of letters after their name to get this. No wonder a college education ain't what it used to be.
Actually why teach accounting in a university? Can't you just start off as a clerk after high school, and pick it up through professional education? Why do you learn accounting at a university and carpentry 'on the job'? Wal*Mart may have caught on to this and are now offering coursework to their workers. Seriously, almost nothing is taught in undergrad accounting that cannot be taught and tested by a computer instructor.
Given the large number of liberal arts classes taught each year, is it possible for them to be any good. My guess is that every year maybe 100 liberal arts lecturers in the US are worth the effort of attending. The rest exist to get graduation points.
A 6-credit course in Bible is now two separate 3-credit courses (Old and New) and so it becomes more of a challenge to emphasise the necessary historical and theological links that join them.
Here, Bible courses are second and third level at the undregraduate stage. There are no prerequisites such as having actually read the Bible somewhere ahead of time. I have personally taught students (at this university) that have never seen a Bible let alone read any of it. You simply enrol. Yet........the formal expectation is that students will be taught (in a few hours a week) a critical approach to (ancient) texts about which they have no clue. Things like redaction criticism, etc.....it hardly makes sense. Christian students don't fare much better really - their knowledge of Scripture comes from the pulpit mostly and that's frankly dismal. I worry that this does harm rather than good.
In amongst this counsel of despair however, my young students are very curious about the subject - after all, they heard the rumours and horror stories about religious folk and their Bible. Still, they often find the Bible more intricate, intellectually satisfying, and enriching than the pietistic sermons their pastors had led them to believe. That natural curiosity can sometimes supply a well-placed opportunity to keep the conversation going, and that may be the best thing I can do.
Some have mentioned that the students have lost interest in those subjects or are not mature enough to appreciate them. I don't think that is true. The world has too many bookworms for the thirst for knowledge to be extinguished. Perhaps, students are not taught how to read properly. Moby Dick is boring if it is not understood properly. Today, we need real leaders, leaders that are willing to sacrifice so that their subjects improve themselves in society, beginning with those society often looks down upon: parents and teachers.
Yes, in fact. This approach was popularized in the early 20th century by authors such as T.S. Eliot, who were strongly interested in with preserving the best of Western culture. They wanted literature to be difficult and they wanted to make readers learn something about our cultural history by forcing them to contend with allusions to Dante and Donne and Buddhism etc.
Don't blame the professors for this approach when it was deliberately created by the literati themselves. (N.B.: As a college-level literature instructor, I don't enjoy reading these texts either. It's not just the students who dislike deliberately difficult texts. I dread teaching Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams because I disagree with their views on poetry.)
Much of humanities courses follow a similar format of reading, discussing and writing that apparently is migrating on-line? A face to face encounter with some over-worked, nearly unpaid graduate student doesn't bring much value added to the party.
Maturity is brought on by time but it can also be stirred by great books and great professors who show the students how to access even the most difficult literature.
I needed a professor to help me through the subtle and beautiful verses of Dante's Divine Comedy, especially the Paradiso. But now, nourished by the core of UD I can swim through an afternoon of Dante with ease and pleasure.
Some universities (the University of Dallas comes to mind) focus on the creation and teaching of a core curriculum, as determined by the faculty as a whole. This curriculum provides a rare basis for understanding Western culture, and thus understanding modernity more thoroughly than is often accomplished by undergraduates. It's a shame that administrative focus on publication has required faculty to focus more on research and publication than education in US universities.
@Paul F Austin (8:20PM): There are several reasons why online education is insufficient for a college education as a whole. First, many subjects cannot be taught effectively online (art, biology, psychology, chemistry, physics, etc.), but require active demonstration and tactile experience of the student in a controlled environment. Second, it is extremely difficult to perceive and correct misconceptions in students' understanding remotely in a timely manner. Communication via the written word is more difficult than in-person communication where tonality and body language can confer information both to the students and from the students back to the lecturer/educator. One needs only take a serious look at the sad state of modern literature to observe how difficult it is to transmit complicated thought via the written word without extensive effort. And finally, the simple act of physical presence of both students and teacher(s) brings a gravitas to the formal mode of learning, making it easier for students to pay attention to what is being taught. Online coursework suffers by the many-faceted informational networks available on the internet. It becomes much too easy for students to be distracted, and thus much more difficult for them to actually learn effectively.
I think that part can be attributed to the failure of professors making the humanities exciting. But it is, and can be!
where else can you find historians like Heroditus, Thucidydies, Xenophon, Polybius. Or great biographers like Plutarch, or philosohers like Democritus, Epicurus, Seneca,etc.
Literature from Dante, Chaucer,Shakesphere, Milton, Dickons, Swift, Henry James. Heck I have barely, and I mean barely, scratched the surface! Make it fun and enjoyable, as it clearly is, and people will come!