Diary of a Dean by London Herbert I.;

Author:London, Herbert I.; [London]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

What Really Matters

From the very inception of the Gallatin School, I believed that the delivery system might by experimental even if the curriculum remained traditional. I believed as well that cross school registration could enhance the educational experience and that independent study—if carefully monitored—might be a desirable enhancement for students. However, I did not accept the proposition that standards should be modified or that grades were unimportant.

Since the promise I made to the president was that students in my program will have read great books before they graduate, I was obliged to prepare a list of great books as the central requirement to the program. While there will always be a debate about book selection, why X as opposed to Y, the books selected have passed the test of time. As I see it, there were few surprises. the Bible, Melville, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus. Hobbes, Euripides, Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Aristotle, Milton, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Machiavelli, Marx, Dante, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Locke, Austen, Rousseau, Bronte, Cervantes, Trollope, Dickens, et al (this is not a complete list). There was a mix of philosophy, literature and social theory. Although I have strong political convictions, my bias didn’t enter into this list of eighty-seven books. Mine was an Arnoldian decision simply to identify the best that is known and thought. The “list,” as it became known, was the foundation of the program.

Not only were students expected to read these texts and take seminars on the books, but when they were eligible for graduation demonstrate they were expected to conversant with the themes. At these oral exams, three faculty members would interrogate candidates about their general knowledge of the texts. Students weren’t asked to comment on Canto 54 of Dante’s Inferno, but they were expected to explain Dante’s position in this epic poem. Yes, I could say that students graduating from the Gallatin School had read great books.

Not all my students passed this exam. Those who didn’t take the assignment seriously had to repeat the experience after taking a semester off. Some regarded the assignment as arbitrary. And others complained to the administration about this “artificial” hurdle for graduation, but I was intractable. If you weren’t ready for this assignment, you weren’t ready for the Gallatin School. In the more than two decades I administered this program, this list remained intact. Politics were not part of the equation and those who took the exam and passed often remarked that it was a highlight of their undergraduate education.

Yet it is also true that nothing remains the same in higher education. One of my decanal successors left the list unchanged. But another, who readily admitted she had another agenda, started to tinker with it. “What is a great book?” she asked. She answered her own question by arguing my list represented a tradition bound, politically conservative agenda. As a consequence, she believed Franz Fanon, Shulamith Firestone and Toni Morrison, among others, should be on the list for “balance” (her word). While I would not object to

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