So totalitarian is the contemporary university that some professors wrote to Rollins complaining that his courses were too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.”
The Great Courses is by no means a theory-free zone; it even offers a course in canon formation. The title of another course, “Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature,” uses the mannered gerundial construction so beloved of theory-besotted academics—not surprising in a course built on the briefly trendy idea that law is a form of literature. But the incursions of identity studies and other post-1960s academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website. Overwhelmingly, the professors act as handmaidens to their subjects, laying out their material clearly and objectively, rather than avenging four thousand years of injustice by unmasking the power relations supposedly hidden in a hapless text. Whitman College classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver notes in a course on Homer’s Iliad that ancient Greek culture was patriarchal, unlike the modern era. Seth Lerer, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego, does not chastise Milton for sexism in the famous description of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
For contemplation he and valour form’d,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.
If the Great Courses were a college, its students would graduate with a panoramic view of human accomplishment and the natural world. Their knowledge of the past would be bolstered with courses in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt; the early, high, and late Middle Ages; the Renaissance and the Reformation; Chinese, Russian, and African history; and modern European history, including the Enlightenment, Victorian England, and World Wars I and II. In science and mathematics, they could study cosmology, algebra, calculus, differential equations, quantum mechanics, chemistry, chaos theory, basic biology, probability, the history of mathematics, the great ideas of classical physics, and the science of consciousness. To understand how mankind has thought about human life, they could plunge into Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s Republic, medieval philosophy, Eastern philosophy, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Voltaire, the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism, and modern philosophy since Descartes. In literature, they could read the Greek tragedies, Homer, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, Mark Twain, the English novel, and masterpieces of Russian literature. Their appreciation of beauty could be enhanced by studying the Dutch masters, cathedral architecture, Michelangelo, Mozart’s operas and chamber works, northern and Italian Renaissance art, the lives and times of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and Beethoven’s piano sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets.
True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools. The company planned a series dedicated to single authors but changed its mind after its Chaucer and Milton series didn’t sell as well as expected. “People don’t want to spend six hours on a single author,” Rollins said. (What about Dickens or Trollope? I asked. “You should have seen their polling numbers,” Rollins responded.) The company offers little genre or period specialization, and there is insufficient close reading of literary and philosophical language. But there is also none of the specious specialization of such courses as Wesleyan’s “Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in Eighteenth-Century England,” which “explores the period’s circulating bodies as they were passed from hand to hand, valued and revalued, used, abused, and discarded,”3 or Bowdoin’s “Renaissance Sexualities,” which “reimagines the canon of Renaissance literature from the perspective of desires that have not yet been named, [and] explores homoeroticism, sodomy, and heteronormativity … with special attention to the politics and poetics of same-sex desire and the erotics of theatrical performance by boy actors.”4
In the past, the company used polling to determine not only which courses to offer, but even the individual lecture topics within each course. Seth Lerer was told to omit Old English from what would become his extremely popular lectures on the history of the English language because only 10 percent of likely buyers wanted it. Lerer insisted on including it anyway. “The company was good at understanding its audience but at the time not good at understanding what college professors were like,” he said. “Professors generate content and teach it because they think something should be taught, not because it meets a market.” (This lofty conception of academic freedom and intellectual responsibility sounds admirable in theory; in current practice, the results are less impressive.) Ultimately, however, the company agreed with Lerer and a substantial fraction of its audience that there were commonsense limits to the consumer model of education. “We don’t know what should be in each course,” the polled customers told the company, according to Rollins, “and neither do our fellow customers!”
Beyond the promise of knowledge, the Great Courses markets itself by invoking the Eros of the great teacher. It claims to have identified the very best of the country’s more than half-million college professors. Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording then goes to the company’s most valued customers. If enough of them like it, the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.
In the company’s “heroic” early period, as insiders call it, professors, once chosen, received carte blanche in crafting their courses. Now, however, the company closely involves itself in the creation of each course to make sure that it isn’t being sold “five pounds of manure in a ten-pound bag,” as Rollins put it. Professors must submit a detailed outline of each lecture according to strict deadlines before taping begins. Company employees work with each professor to make sure that courses are logically coherent in parts as well as the whole. Each lecture must be thirty minutes long: no ignoring the clock or deferring material to the next week, as on a college campus. Such a quality-control regime contrasts sharply with the academy and has led some professors who recorded in the freewheeling “heroic” era to part ways amicably with the company. The amount of work required to create a course is fully equivalent to writing a book, said Columbia University professor John McWhorter, whose linguistics lectures are among the company’s most popular.
In its emphasis on teaching, the company differs radically from the academic world, where “teaching is routinely stigmatized as a lower-order pursuit, and the ‘real’ academic work is research,” noted Allen Guelzo, an American history professor at Gettysburg College.5 Though colleges ritually berate themselves for not putting a high enough premium on teaching, they inevitably ignore that skill in awarding tenure or extra pay. As for reaching an audience beyond the hallowed walls of academe, perhaps a regular NPR gig would gain notice in the faculty lounge, but not a Great Courses series. Jeremy McInerney, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998 that he wouldn’t have taped “Ancient Greek Civilization” for the company if his tenure vote had been in doubt: “This doesn’t win you any further respect. If anything, there’s a danger of people looking down on it, since many people are suspicious of anything that reeks of popularism.” So much for the academy’s supposed stance against elitism.
Do the Great Courses’ professors live up to their billing? Not always. A few ramble in their presentations or oversimplify (even sugarcoat) their material—making Nietzsche, f
or example, sound almost like a self-help guru. But most of the professors are solid to very good, with the best exhibiting an infectious enthusiasm for their subject matter, whether expressed through the debonair showmanship of an Allen Guelzo or the ingenuous directness of his colleague on the company’s superb American history survey, Emory professor Patrick Allitt.
The Great Courses’ highest-selling lecturer—music professor Robert Greenberg—unquestionably deserves his devoted following. Greenberg’s patent love for the music of the past is utterly endearing. During one course, he implores: “My friends, if it wasn’t an unseemly thing to do, I would go down on my knees and beg all of you to go out and get a recording of [Robert Schumann’s] magnificent piano quintet. You will never regret it.” Recounting how Johannes Brahms destroyed his first twenty string quartets, Greenberg says mournfully: “We rightly ask: ‘J.B., J.B., did you have to?’”6 Greenberg’s blue-collar New Jersey persona (“I grew up in Levittown,” he explains; “if you spoke hoity-toity, you got the shit kicked out of you”) might put off some super-serious listeners—to their loss, since his composer biographies are superb, vividly drawn portraits of quixotic geniuses and their cultural environment. “When Brahms started his first concert tour in 1853,” Greenberg narrates, “the not-quite-20-year-old was an insignificant bit of blond lint from a bad neighborhood who played some piano and wrote some music. Seven months later, he would be hailed as the heir to Beethoven.”7 The only flaw in Greenberg’s courses is the frequent mediocrity of the anonymous performances that he uses to illustrate them, the result of strict copyright rules on recordings, which have also limited the composers he can cover.
Predictably, the Great Courses has come under pressure for not having enough “diversity” in its teaching ranks. Rollins received angry letters from women complaining about the paucity of female lecturers; his nonstop efforts to recruit them have yielded few results, in part because women lecture less than men. As for the truly big-name female professors, they command speaking fees so high that the Great Courses’ pay scale looks insignificant. The same applies to the black superstars, one of whom told Rollins: “Tom, honestly, I make several thousand dollars a night from Martin Luther King Day through Black History Month; you’re not even on my radar screen.” A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course’s gross revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high enough evaluations. The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course.
The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm’s two-hundred-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claimed Guelzo, that “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses. A professor who teaches the Civil War as the “greatest slave uprising in history” to his undergraduates because that is what is expected of him, said University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors, will know perfectly well how to teach a more intellectually honest course for paying adults.8
Unfortunately, even some Great Courses faculty demonstrate the narrowing of the academic mind. I contacted another Penn history professor to interview him about his experiences with the company. After a positive initial response to my request, he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t speak with me. “I ought to have looked up the Manhattan Institute before I replied to your first e-mail,” he wrote. “I cannot in good conscience contribute in any way to any project associated with an institution which rejects everything I believe. It says something about the undeclared civil war in U.S. life that I have to say that to you.”
While the Great Courses, then, is only an ambiguous marker of the academic scene, the meaning of the audience’s response is far clearer: There is a fervent demand in the real world for knowledge about history and the high points of human creation. Public libraries have formed discussion groups around the most popular courses. Customers accost Great Courses professors in airports as though they were celebrities. Alan Kors has received fan letters from forest rangers and from prison convicts. By contrast, “students never thank you; college is simply what they do next,” says Patrick Allitt.9
The company releases no information about its buyers, but professors say that they have been told to think of their audience as just as educated as they are, but in a different field. The customers must be well-off enough to pay what can be a hefty sum for the courses; a typical twenty-four-lecture course costs around $200 on DVD, and Greenberg’s thirty-two-lecture course on Verdi runs $520, though patient customers wait for sales to snap up courses for around $60. A few professors suggested that the company has pegged the audience as leaning conservative. Seth Lerer claimed that the firm told him in the 1990s that some of its clientele would be uncomfortable with his including Black English in his “History of the English Language” course. “They were very conscious of their political demographic,” he said. Lerer got an angry email from a customer asking how he could include that “leftist son of a bitch” Noam Chomsky in the course. John McWhorter was told to omit from his linguistics lectures his usual argument that the idea of grammatical “correctness” is an “arbitrary imposition.” Such caveats on the company’s part, however, could simply reflect the desire to avoid alienating any customers.
Some popular professors make more money from their Great Courses royalties and the resulting speaking engagements than from their academic salaries. Greenberg’s “Understanding the Fundamentals of Music” sells twenty thousand units a year, according to Forbes; Lerer said that his “History of the English Language,” which the company told him was a high midrange seller, sold tens of thousands of units over a dozen years. All in all, the firm has sold more than 9 million courses since 1990.
Brentwood Associates, a private-equity firm, acquired a majority stake of the Great Courses in 2006, spotting a thriving company with huge growth potential. “The foundation that Rollins created was unlike anything we’d seen,” said Brentwood’s Eric Reiter. “He was a brilliant entrepreneur, building the company brick by brick through rigorous testing.”10 Profits soon doubled, thanks to major investments in advertising—visible to anyone who reads The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, or Science News or who is on the receiving end of some of the 70 million catalogs that the company sent out last year. “Few businesses have such a passionate customer base,” said Reiter. “Nine out of ten people on the street have never heard of it, but nine out of ten, upon learning about the product, want it.”
Annual sales reached $150 million by 2016, according to The New York Times. The firm opened a high-tech headquarters in Virginia for its two hundred employees and has beefed up the visual learning aids on its DVDs—a sorely needed correction. But the Great Courses confronts a major challenge as it tries to expand its course offerings: “finding great lecturers, a talent that seems to be increasingly rare these days,” said Lucinda Robb, the company’s former director of professor development. In fact, the company has been recycling its most popular professors on topics increasingly remote from their official competencies. It is also diversifying into nonacademic realms, such as wine appreciation and personal health. The growing reach of free online university courses might seem to pose a competitive challenge, but for now, the Great Courses adds enough value to its lecturers to justify the product’s sticker price.
The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No
, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserted Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can nonironically celebrate literature’s power.
But even if Allitt and Lerer are right, the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison-shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves—discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children’s. Employers, too, ignore universities’ curricula when they decide where to send recruiters, focusing only on the degree of IQ-sorting that each college exercises sub rosa.
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