Plum Crazy

I went back into mainstream education from 6th grade through 12th. My college days were spent at two other alternative educational institutions - New College and the Gallatin School at NYU. New College was a very small liberal arts college. The entire student body in my day numbered around 300. There were no requirements except within your major. There were no grades, only written evaluations. Trust me, that's not as great as it sounds. A grade masks many flaws. Teachers are brutal in written evaluations. By and large I got very good evaluations, but in my freshman year, one of my professors wrote that had it been a graduate school course, I would have flunked. Well yes, okay, but I wasn't at graduate school maturity level in my freshman year.

Gallatin was a university without walls program. You could design your own program. You did have to take certain core courses, although I was exempted since I transferred in with sufficient similar credits. But the key thing about Gallatin to me was that it was also a Great Books program. I am a huge fan of Great Books programs. If it were up to me (and fortunately for most students, it isn't), every school would require one. There is nothing like them for getting you to read on a wide variety of subjects and to think about how all the books you have read interconnect. To me that is one of the things a college is supposed to teach you. Too many Americans these days view college as a form of vocational instruction. You go to college because it will help you get a better job. That's fine, but college should be more. It should teach you to think critically.

What, some of you may be asking, is a Great Books program? I can't answer that for every school that has one (and they're not incredibly uncommon). At Gallatin it meant you had to read 24 "great books" and then pass a 2-hour oral exam with a panel of 3 professors. The first 12 were more or less selected for you (I say more or less because you had some leeway). They were: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, King Lear, one of the books from Dante's Divine Comedy, one play from Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, one play from Aeschylus' Oresteiad, Euripides' Medea, Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Symposium, 3 books of the Old Testament (this counted as one selection), and 2 of the New Testament (also counted as one selection). The remaining 12 you were free to choose on your own. You were provided with an extensive list of recommendations, but if you could convince the panel to add another one, you could use that. I can't remember all of the other 12 I read, but I did in fact convince the panel to let me include Robertson Davies' The Manticore, specifically because of its tie-in with Jungian psychology. (Yes, Jung was in my second list of 12.) Incidentally, I don't know if the list is still the same. It may have changed.

I know that one of the popular critiques of Great Books programs, at least as they existed when I was going to Gallatin, was that they were primarily a cavalcade of DWM - Dead White Men. There is clear truth to that critique, but all I can say is that like it or not, due to the discrimination that existed throughout history, those works had a greater and more long-lasting impact on our culture (and here I speak of American and English culture) as it exists today than the works of other authors. This is not to deny that women and men of other ethnicities had a great impact on history and our culture. They did. Just not as much, generally speaking, through their works of published authorship. You can draw very direct lines from Plato and Aristotle to the Magna Carta and the founding of the American republic. A quite large percentage of English cliches derive from either the Bible or Shakespeare. The Greek tragedians pretty much set the form of Western tragedy for centuries to follow. Unfair to their female and other ethnic contemporaries? You betcha. But you can't go back and change ancient history.

I will also say that you could, in your second list of 12, include as many works by women and men of other ethnicities as you liked. Sappho? No problem. Langston Hughes? Step right up. Frederick Douglass? Absolutely. Alice Walker? Put her on the list. Salman Rushdie? I'm sure you could make the case. Omar Khayyam? Jane Austen? Charlotte Bronte? Willa Cather? Ralph Ellison? Toni Morrison? Maya Angelou? Right there, a list of 12 authors whose works you could have had as your second list of 12. Not one of them a DWM.

Neither would I insist that all Great Books programs make you read the selected 12 that Gallatin made us read. I see nothing wrong with that list for the reasons described above, but I also see nothing wrong with changing the list and broadening it. The most important thing about a Great Books program is that it gets you to read excellent and seminal literary works. Which of the magnitude of excellent and seminal literary works that exist can and should be discretionary. Throw out all the DWM if you desire. I wouldn't make that choice, because you'd be missing out on works that really did have a huge impact on shaping the world you live in, but the main thing is to read.