A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  But . . . she is willing to follow Adler, and her father, into the next world: “I have sworn that I’ll read it from cover to cover in case I meet my father in the great beyond.”

  There is a Noble Savage myth underlying the pedagogy of the Great Books. It was best embodied in the spirit of the 1921 People’s Institute, the myth that the longshoreman toting pallets, or the housewife at her ironing board, could commune with Epictetus and Galileo just as easily as the college undergraduate.

  So it was no accident that Adler seized on this astonishing 1985 letter from David Call, a fan in Springville, Utah, who had seen him on public television:

  Dear Mr. Adler,

  I am writing in behalf [sic] of a group of construction workers (mostly, believe it or not, plumbers!) who have finally found a teacher worth listening too [sic]. . . . We have been studying your books for over a year now and have put together a sizeable library of your writings.

  I am sure that it is just due to our well-known ignorance as trades-men that not a single one of us had ever heard of you until one Sunday afternoon we were watching public television and Bill Moyers came on with his show Six Great Ideas. We listened intensely and soon became addicted and have been ever since. We never knew a world of ideas existed.

  Naturally, Adler entered into correspondence with Call, who soon revealed that he and his brother had signed up for a philosophy class at the University of Utah and had taken to wearing “Great Ideas” baseball caps on their construction site. He also offered Adler an example of what it is like to philosophize on a construction site:

  Several days ago my brother and I were discussing free-will and determinism within the hearing distance of a group of brick layers. They were busily laying their brick but could not help but overhear our philosophical arguments. Finally, one of the brick layers could take it no longer and shouted over to us: “I’ve got a philosophical question!” Surprised, we inquired as to what it was, to which he responded, “What is your philosophy on getting a good orgasm?”

  Adler kept a folder of his correspondence with Call, whom he dubbed “the philosophical plumber,” and he boasted about the relationship in Time magazine and in A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, his second autobiography. “He kind of adopted me as an icon,” Call now remembers. Adler sent him and his colleagues several hundred dollars’ worth of books.

  Call was a committed Mormon, and a very serious adept of Adler’s teaching. Just a few months into their relationship, he wrote:

  P.S. If you and I die, Dr. Adler, and if we go to hell, I’ll look you up and together we will boot out the devil and every other moral relativist and we’ll turn hell into an absolute heaven!

  This postscript to another letter could not have found favor with Adler, a self-confessed egomaniac:

  P.S. Just the other day I asked an individual who I was doing some work for if he knew who Mortimer Adler was; he said, “Isn’t that a cartoon character?” to which I quickly responded “No, I didn’t say ‘little Abner’ I said Mortimer Adler!” . . . I can’t believe your [sic] not better known or praised, you certainly deserve it.

  Call sent Adler a paper he had written for his philosophy class, a paper that earned him a verbal reprimand and a C-plus, whereas all his previous grades had been A’s or A-minuses. The essay, “Heterosexuals—the Silent Majority,” argued, based on Call’s readings of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers, that homosexuals are falsely trying to assert “natural rights” in contemporary America. Ultimately it devolved into an anti-homosexual manifesto:

  In the name of human freedom; in the name of liberty not licence; and in the name of public morality and the democratic process, let us meet this challenge and not allow sexual degradation to stand alongside of all the noble causes that we Americans have fought so long and hard for. Let us let the rest of the world know that we Americans stand for Liberty and not licence!

  There is no trace of a reply from Adler.

  David Call still lives in Springville, where I reached him by telephone. He eventually finished Brigham Young University and retired from plumbing. Now in his late 50s, he has embarked on a new career that combines multilevel marketing with inspirational speaking. He is a mile-a-minute talker with an Adlerian gift of gab. It took all of my will power not to buy a $399 blender from Team Everest, his flashy website. He remembers Adler fondly and marvels at his mentor’s astonishing longevity: “He never exercised or did anything, and he outlived everyone around him. I really appreciated what he did for me.”

  NINE

  EPICTETUS AT THE CASH REGISTER

  CHICAGO AND COLUMBIA

  WHILE WORKING ON THIS BOOK, I spent many mornings at the Medici Café on the University of Chicago campus, postponing my inevitable return to Chicago’s imposing, neo-Brutalist Regenstein Library, and to the wild disarray of Mortimer Adler’s fascinating, uncatalogued personal files. Occasionally, a Chicago undergraduate wandered into the Medici wearing a maroon T-shirt emblazoned with the university’s unofficial motto: “Where Fun Goes to Die.” Other versions of the T-shirt proclaim “The Circle of Hell That Dante Never Imagined” or depict a dinosaur trampling on a stick man. The dinosaur is labeled “UC” and the stick man, “your soul.”

  The undergraduate self-pity is, of course, misplaced. Chicago, imbued with Robert Hutchins’s ancient disdain for the slacking “college men” who littered the Ivy League campuses of his day, is in business to educate students, not to coddle them. While it is true that the school dismantled Hutchins’s brief-lived, four-year-long Great Books undergraduate experiment decades ago, it remains one of the very few major colleges committed to a “core” curriculum for its undergraduates. What that means at Chicago is that roughly one-third of an undergraduate’s time is spent taking courses prescribed by the university. When Chicago was embroiled in its widely publicized “core wars” at the end of the 1990s—inevitably, the U. of C. was cutting back on its Western Civilization requirements—Kurt White, a senior from Birmingham, Michigan, told the New York Times: “It may be harder to get into Harvard, but it’s harder to get out of here, and I’m proud of that. This is one of the very last places that has a rigorous curriculum.” It was true under Hutchins, and it’s somewhat true today.

  Chicago’s storied “core” has been watered down considerably since the young Susan Sontag and Katharine Graham grappled with the Western classics. After Hutchins’s departure, Chicago’s formidable anthropologists and cultural historians pushed back against the Aristotelian-Medieval core, mixing Asian and African cultural studies into the stew of required classes. The 1998 “core wars” contributed to the departure of President Hugo Sonnenschein, who dared to cut back the number of required courses, in part to free up undergraduates’ limited time on campus, and in part to make the campus a place where fun could go to flourish, not to die.

  As part of a larger “rebranding” of the university, Sonnenschein, an economist, sought to reduce the core from about one-half to about one-third of the undergraduate curriculum, and tinkered with the college’s Western Civilization courses. The resulting outcry might have been predicted. The faculty, adequately forewarned, reacted much less strongly than some conservative alumni, who formed a pressure group called Concerned Friends of the University of Chicago, and threatened to withhold their donations. The Princeton-based, conservative National Association of Scholars, not to be denied a Halley’s comet-like opportunity for publicity, issued a press release quoting NAS president Stephen Balch: “It is truly depressing to observe a steady abandonment of the University of Chicago’s once imposing undergraduate core curriculum, which for so long stood as the benchmark of content and rigor among American academic institutions.”

  At the height of the nonshooting war, Sonnenschein defended his policies at a stormy meeting attended by students and faculty in Hutchinson Commons, the ersatz-medieval, wood-paneled student center. Someone even shouted “Long Live Hutchins!” from the back of the room, and two students seized the opportunity to sell CDs of their hum
orous song, “The End of the Core as We Know It,” a parody of a famous REM hit. But within months the campus settled down, the core changed, and Sonnenschein later abandoned the Chicago presidency and returned to the Economics Department. “It’s a non-issue now,” says Dean John Boyer, who was partly responsible for implementing some of the curriculum changes.

  Today, Chicago is the very model of a modern university, and when I suggested to Boyer that one could get through the modern U. of C. without ever reading a Great Book of the Western World, he harrumphed. But it’s true. Navigating the Chinese menu-like core course requirements in the Humanities, Civilization Studies, and Social Sciences isn’t easy, but I found a path that skirted the heavy lifting of Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. The Humanities rubric, for instance, offers a course called “Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange.” “It is total flake garbage,” says a professor who helped design the course as one of Chicago’s “young and the restless” academicians in the 1990s. “It was a serious joke, like diving into a bowl of viscous nothing. They were watching Philippine films and reading second-rate literature.” To be fair, “Reading Cultures” now watches Citizen Kane, and includes readings from what sounds like a bona fide, Britannica-approved Great Book, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” (Although John Erskine taught Ovid in General Studies, the Latin poet was never even suggested for the Great Books, which included only “epic” poems by Chaucer, Dante & Co.) Humanities also offers a notorious core cycle called “Media Aesthetics,” which one undergraduate calls “a great course if you don’t like to read books.” “We teach Browning and Wyatt alongside Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close,” Humanities professor James Chandler wrote in the University of Chicago Magazine. They also teach Vertigo, The Conversation , and, yes, Citizen Kane.

  It is harder to slip past the Social Science requirement and avoid the likes of Marx, Weber, and Adam Smith, but if that’s your aim, take “Mind”: “This course focuses on the issue of what is innate versus what is learned, the development of thought in children, and the logic of causal, functional, and evolutionary explanations,” the catalog explains. Chicago has serious mathematics and foreign-language requirements, and it also forces undergrads to take science courses designed to force liberal arts majors’ noses into the muck of empirical inquiry. No one seems to know if Chicago’s required core is a selling point or a stumbling block for recruiting the A-list high school seniors all colleges covet. It is certainly no longer a lightning rod for campus dissent. “I like the core,” says student Tim Murphy. “You’re guaranteed a balanced education if you come here.”

  Ironically, the University of Chicago does still teach the Great Books, Hutchins-Adler style, but not to its students. For over sixty years, the university’s extension college, the Graham School, has been offering its Basic Program, a four-year-long adult seminar with a reading list that flew directly from Mortimer Adler’s famous Royal typewriter to the Graham catalog:

  YEAR ONE

  Autumn: Sophocles, Plato, Dostoyevsky

  Winter: Herodotus, Aeschylus, Aristotle

  Spring: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Conrad, Bible,

  Kierkegaard

  Clare Pearson, a product of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought—the U. of C.’s high-minded parking lot for such talents as Saul Bellow, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom—administers the Basic Program, which she calls “an anomaly in continuing education. It is the heart of a UC education, of the old school.” The Program is popular, attracting between 400 and 450 students each year, about a quarter of whom will earn a two-year or four-year Certificate in the Liberal Arts. The clientele are not the great unwashed of Adler and Fadiman’s People’s Institute. Their average age is 55, and 65 percent of them hold graduate degrees. “It’s not really a populist program,” Pearson explains.

  Just as in the university’s core curriculum, U. of C. senior and junior faculty teach in the Basic Program. At the Graham School, they use John Erskine’s old “shared inquiry” methodology, albeit with only one teacher in the classroom. No one can afford two these days. The Basic Program is decidedly Old School. There is a quote from Robert Hutchins—“The great books do not yield up their secrets to the immature”—plastered front and center on the Program catalog, and there are no “core wars” here. “We review the program every year, but the changes aren’t terribly significant,” Pearson says. “Virginia Woolf has been in and out, we’ve reinstated Conrad, we’ve considered putting Joyce and Faulkner in. Certain things don’t get touched, like the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics. We’re very Greek heavy,” Pearson says. “We don’t do very many novels.”

  Pearson has also taught the undergraduate core at Chicago, her alma mater. And yes, she has noticed the slippage over the years. “Their core has eroded significantly,” she says. “There is some loss in not engaging the classic texts.”

  It’s a sight I have never forgotten. OK, the slim volume of Epictetus’s Encheiridion, or “Handbook,” was behind the cash register at the Columbia University bookstore, alongside other required readings for “Contemporary Civilization,” one of two required core courses featuring great books. But nonetheless, there it was. Not the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” or “What to Do If Your Roommate Is Gay,” but the famous pithy Handbook by the slave with the mangled leg, who wisely counseled: “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

  Columbia, more so than the University of Chicago, has doggedly clung to its legendary core curriculum, consisting mainly of readings from the great Western tradition. One of the courses, Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, aka Literature Humanities, aka LitHum, descends directly from John Erskine’s General Honors class. The other required, yearlong course, Classical Civilization, or CC, likewise hails from the immediate post-World War I era, a storied Golden Age in the history of the college. Most of the college’s great professors, such as Mortimer Adler, Rexford Tugwell, Mark Van Doren, Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun, taught core courses at one time in their careers. The Western core is a favorite among alumni, often the bright shining memory of their four years on Morningside Heights, the subject of endless, dreamy ruminations in alumni publications, and progenitor of much university-sanctioned purple prose:

  At the end, the image of the core as an oasis—fertile, nourishing, and welcoming—returns. . . . But this garden needs constant tending. If Columbia College is to remain true to its most noble impulses, it must cultivate these core courses—which remain a refuge from the fleeting and the trivial—not just continue them. Isn’t that what a liberal education is all about?

  It is, as the marketers would say, Columbia’s competitive advantage, along with the wild blandishments of New York City. Columbia distinguishes itself from competitors like Penn and Princeton by saying, If you come here, we guarantee you will receive a grounding in America’s shared cultural tradition. The current core also includes art and music courses, a rocks-for-jocksy “Frontiers of Science” overview, as well as a Major Cultures (read: non-Western) and foreign-language requirement. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton can’t make that claim.

  What is astonishing about Columbia’s core offerings is how little they have changed over the years. Timothy Cross’s official history of the core highlights “changes” that seem short of earth-shattering, to say the least. Herodotus and Thucydides landed in the core in 1938; the Bible, in 1940. In 1946, Marcus Aurelius out, Tacitus in. When women arrived at Columbia in 1983, so did Jane Austen, Sappho, and Virginia Woolf. The foul-mouthed François Rabelais took a hike. The choice of Shakespeare plays often varies, but we are talking about relatively small orbital corrections in one, acknowledged solar system: the Western canon of predominantly dead white males. The current syllabus would certainly pass muster with Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Kant—the gang’s all here! Allan Bloom, the late, great, best-selling scol
d of the American academy, should be so lucky as to be a twenty-first-century Columbia undergraduate.

  At Columbia, everyone teaches the core: wildly unprepared grad students, postdoctoral adjunct professors, and the hoary tenured lions and lionesses of the humanities, who are notorious for fiddling with the prescribed curriculum. In the 1970s, a professor decided to devote most of CC’s spring semester to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, a Romantic-era German hermeneuticist whose works had hardly appeared in translation. (Oddly, the professor himself didn’t know German.) Likewise, CC once fired an instructor for focusing almost exclusively on the works of Hegel and Marx, to the detriment of nondialectical thinkers. Roosevelt Montas, the current head of the core curricula, told me about a recent “aberration”: A senior faculty member chose to teach only Genesis and Herodotus during the fall semester of LitHum. “That required some very delicate intervention,” Montas recalls.

  CC has bowed to the times, some would say, although to me it looks more like a casually indifferent shrug. W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk has made it into the core, and most Columbia undergrads now read Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 prefeminist tract, Vindication of the Rights of Women. At the end of CC’s second semester, the teachers can insert readings from Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Catharine MacKinnon, John Rawls, or a text of their choosing. “That was fun,” according to Jonathon Kahn, now a religion professor at Vassar, who taught CC four times. “It’s hard to find contemporary stuff,” Kahn says, although he had good luck with MacKinnon and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. One year he added Jonathan Lear’s challenging (to me) Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life to his syllabus, and it bombed: “I had high hopes for this, it just didn’t work very well. Maybe it was too personal. I found that students had a lot less tolerance for obscure contemporary texts than for obscure 17th century texts, because there was nothing but obscurity back then.”