In Texas, Public Officials Offer More Ideas for Cutting College Costs

Can we let Mexico have Texas back?

A $10,00 Bachelor’s degree (text books included) is a dream come true… but it will be hard to actually make it come true.

How about slashing or just plain eliminating the athletic budgets at all the state institutions and redistributing some of the money back into academics? I’m sure reducing the Longhorns football budget by 1/2 to 3/4 wouldn’t go over well in Austin, for example, but it would reduce the cost of a 4 year degree. However, this wouldn’t make him very popular.

Hey – arminius and chedie – I dont know where you’re from, but I actually LIVE in Texas. The provincial snobbery your posts appear to show doesn’t reflect well on you. Just because Rick Perry is an arrogant, self-serving no-nothing (this distinguishes him from most politicians…how?) doesn’t mean Texas is filled with ignorant hicks. Every state (including yours) has stupid politicians. Texas is no exception. I won’t take the time to point our some of the more egregious examples from other states, but they are there, on every level of government. The persistent snobbery of academics from some areas of our country with respect to other regions reflects an unbecoming self-regard based largely on media-derived stereotypes of others and a boundless willingness to believe in one’s own cultural and intellectual superiority. Don’t we spend a considerable amount of time these days preaching about diversity, cultural sensitivity, etc. to the students? I guess there are just some categories of human beings (those that live in “fly over country”?) that it is still ok to stereotype.In short folks, quit watching so much TV and treat your fellow Americans with a bit more respect.
Oh, and by the way, I too think Perry’s idea is bizarre.

10k is a stiff price for a sheepskin and a few textbooks. Is anything else included?

As I recall from the original press releases, the chancellor of Texas A&M did in fact respond. I believe he is the one that is quoted above as having “no idea” how a $10,000 bachelor’s degree was possible.

Archman, you ask if Governor Perry is “crazy, incompetent, or merely shifting the burden for Texas budget woes onto education?” I would answer, “yes, yes, and yes again.” Now, as a Texan, I would give you fair warning when Perry runs for President not to get fooled again by another Texan snake oil salesman who says he knows what he’s talking about. Remember what that got the country last time. Perry is basically a demagogue. He says things the least educated among us react viscerally to, like “Texas should secede.” He even says the treaty by which Texas came into the union allowed for that, which of course anyone knowledgeable about history knows is not true. Most of what comes out of his mouth, like the drivel about a college education costing $10,000 is just garbage. We’ve learned to ignore him in Texas, to the extent we can. Everyone else should do likewise.

I know nothing about what is taught in the listed course:
“Or History 3530 at Auburn, ‘Science Fiction as Intellectual History.’”

but if I were teaching it, it would consist of the intellectual, political, historical and propaganda analysis of:

Zamyatin’s “We”  – novel
Huxley’s “Brave New World” – novel
Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – novel and animated film (some say the film was partly financed by the CIA)
Orwell’s “1984″ – novel and film
Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ – novel and film
Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)

These works defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility with far greater vigor, passion and power than a pile of Western Civ courses.  To slight the idea of Science Fiction being of value, is to miss some of the most important works of intellectual history. 

Though I always liked “With your shield or on it” and “Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”  There is the major problem that the Spartans were the enemies of freedom, liberty, individualism and dignity, as well as the ancestor (along with Plato) of the 20th century totalitarian, mass-murdering state.  Which of course is why the 20th century totalitarian dictator typically loved civilization, loved Greek or Roman art and in turn was loved by teachers and professors who eagerly aided the state (except for the ones who were rounded up or escaped).

Glad to see you mention the The History of the Peloponnesian War.  Since its publication, there has not been a conflict, or war, in human history that cannot be explained by Thucydides lucid explanations!  

And yet, try convincing an employer that reading Thucydides (and Herodotus & Xenophon & all the rest) is just is valuable as that accounting/business course you DIDN’T take instead.  Look, I love the classics, and I’ve had time to read nearly all of them – Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Persian, Celtic, Saxon, or otherwise, because I was a history major from a top 20 college and I’ve only ever had underemployment, law school, and more unemployment to show for it.  When college costs as much as it does, EVERY course should be considered with an eye towards the future.  Does GE care if I know Latin or Anglo-Saxon?  Will BCG be impressed by my knowledge of Sun Tzu?  No.

Unemployed_Northeastern, another possibility is that they were worried you were another Alcibiades, the serial traitor/betrayer.  Xenophon was another traitor working for the Persians. Socrates had such great students ;-) Or was it their classmate Plato? ;-)

My list was geared towards being “relevant”, useful and necessary for the citizen as citizen. My list is concerned with the education of better citizens and not better corporate employees.

Unemployed_Northeastern, so was jaysocrates (note the Socrates in the name) misleading us when he claimed to have gotten a B+?

“. . . I graduated from Harvard Law School a year or so before the economy tanked. I was in the middle of my class. I thought getting B+’s at Harvard would be as good as getting A’s at some lower-ranked schools. Wrong! . . .”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565

I am curious when and how you learned what the right schools were to be recruited by the top (especially beyond HYPS which many suspected).

BTW, I have found your previous posts quite informative about law school, thanks for providing the information and the context.

Dear UN: Your short account exemplifies so many of the difficulties that we face.  The liberal arts in general and knowledge of classics in particular never guaranteed satisfying employment to a graduate.  Colleges and universities were more honest about this a century or so ago, when only those not in need of employment would pursue a liberal arts education.  But that kind of elitism didn’t sit well with either the professoriate or the general public and America embarked on the plan to make liberal arts education a general purpose preparation for a wide range of “professional” pursuits:  medicine, law, business, etc.  This worked during some historical moments when the economy needed skilled workers and a liberal arts college degree reliably served as a proxy for high-level cognitive ability.  It worked less well during periods of high unemployment, and it really began to unravel when, via America’s pursuit of mass higher education, the liberal arts bachelor’s degree lost most of its utility as a marker of higher ability. At that point, the job market began to shift strongly in favor of those whose educational credentials offered evidence of particular vocational skills.  

You are, like many others, a century too late to be able to translate knowledge of Thucydides into an appeal to employers looking for someone with cultural breadth and depth.  Yes, if a student’s goal is to prepare for employment, that student should probably pay close attention to the programs of study that have a definite destination.  But that is to weigh only one side of the problem.  We need people like you too, UN, and we have to think carefully about why you and people like you end up stranded with sophisticated knowledge but low appeal to employers.  

We also have to think about the problem of how to educate all those other students who are attracted at the outset to vocational goals.  They need to encounter Thucydides (or at least a few writers of his standing) along the way as well.  Mass higher education hasn’t worked very well on either end:  for those who seek to understand civilization or those who seek to fit themselves to ever-changing market needs.  What do we try next?

Peter Wood

For undergrad, I knew the score beforehand. I had applied to the tippity-top of schools, and likely had a better shot than most at getting into one of them save for one semester’s blip in academic performance stemming from having an immediate family member have a major health emergency five days before finals. I knew senior year of high school that my backup choices and eventual alma mater (all liberal arts colleges ranked btw #10-25) did not offer anything like the career possibilities of a Williams or Yale, say. What I did not know, and dearly wished I did, is that your average business/finance major from much less selective universities than my liberal arts college are in far more demand for Corporate America. I have had recruiters from most of Boston’s big financial players (think Fidelity/Putnam/State Street/Liberty Mutual) tell me that they would rather have a business major from an essentially open-enrollment university than a English/History/Poly Sci/etc major from the likes of a Colby or Tufts or Wesleyan. I really wish I knew that back in high school so I could have just skated through a BU-type institution and gotten a job.

For law school, Northeastern has always advertised that 40% of its graduates get an offer from a co-op employer. This has never remotely been true, but since no one audits the numbers, they keep saying it. 93% employment at nearly a six-figure salary – it’s the same nonsense that every law school puts out, but since we are brought up in America to think that college is THE ANSWER for everything, we tend to buy into it. I’ve heard from recent grads that maybe 20% have jobs, but the school keeps saying 90% (as they raise next year’s tuition + living expenses north of $70,000).

The main difference, to me anyways, is that my UG liberal arts college at least tries, somewhat, to help its grads. Networking events, internal job postings, etc. Northeastern Law drops its grads like a bad habit, save for those fortunate few with the BigLaw jobs, who get harassed incessantly for donations.

Professor Wood, how can one defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility with vigor, passion and power through a tradition of typically mandatory, dry, insipid courses that glorified the enemies of freedom, their courtiers and their apologists?  Or through jargon, “theory” filled courses that seem geared to confuse, mystify and distort?

A mandatory course is by definition an abridgment of freedom and liberty.  Making even my earlier list mandatory would contradict the spirit of the works.  To learn to be free one must practice what one preaches.  I prefer the Founding Fathers to Thucydides, but one should be free to read “When Words Lose Their Meaning”, “On Tyranny” and other books.  Libraries should be well stocked so that students are free to read what is out of fashion (or at least what is out of fashion in the Academy).

Most of what I have written in this thread also applies to K-12.   The reading of my list should start in K-12, with the great caution that they need to be taught by the willing and those with talent.  Too much is badly taught in K-12 so that what is read is then hated.

Professor Wood, thanks for your response.  You wrote, “Is this material that the student would otherwise miss?”  Increasingly, I get the impression that most children do not read novels and especially not novels that don’t have some current TV or media tie in.   Even if some are taught in K-12 I doubt they were taught well.

In addition, reading several of these novels as a child. I didn’t know many things and I didn’t recognize many things.  I didn’t know about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Eichmann at the time.   I read the novels and watched the films as naive entertainment.  Doing intellectual, political, historical and propaganda analysis on a second or third reading adds to the depth of understanding.  The march of time adds to understanding.  Reading the analysis of others adds to understanding.  Wrestling with competing interpretations adds to understanding.  There is much to miss.

You wrote, “What other courses will this course displace?” well I say it would best displace what displaced Western Civ or that all 3 be provided as alternatives for freshmen.  It could be the default and recommended with the others available as alternatives.

You wrote, “if its intellectual history you want, there are much more direct avenues” but many have found that reading and thinking about novels provides the best education for most people.  Orwell and the others have done more than a host of colleges combined to enlighten citizens and to help defend human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility.  Direct avenues are not often the best for most people.  The totalitarians of the 20th century claimed to have “much more direct avenues” to a wonderful future, but only created mass pain, misery, suffering and death.

“War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength”

Are all very direct, and very wrong.

To bscmath78,You ask,”how can one defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty…though a a tradition of typically mandatory, dry, insipid courses…?”  The question as you phrase it is stacked.  How can one start a fire with wet matches?  By getting some dry ones. 

I don’t see any need to defend poorly conceived or poorly taught core curricula, but that doesn’t mean that core curricula as such are a bad idea.  A core curriculum simply means that a body of faculty members has put on offer its best judgment of what students should study in a more or less coherent program.  Those who aren’t attracted to such a curriculum have myriad other options.  

Mandatory course abridge freedom in at most a trivial sense.  Students who don’t like the requirements at one college have some 3,900 other colleges to consider–and that’s only in the United States.  To be free means to have meaningful choices.  A choice among thousands of colleges and universities all teaching a cafeteria-style curriculum is freedom only in the most superficial sense.  

“One should be free to read” whatever one wants.  But it is silly to extend that principle to the curriculum.  I don’t lose the freedom to read whatever I want when I pursue a core curriculum at some college.  I just agree that for a limited time I will subscribe to someone else’s judgments about what i should study.  I can read whatever else I want on the side or when I have time. 

Peter Wood

Professor Wood, good. You wrote, “. . .it is clear that most students arriving at college today have read few such,” that is my impression (based on anecdotal information).

Professor Wood, there are today colleges that offer “Great Books” based programs, so parents/students who want that kind of education can send them there.   Even if the issue is restricted to “elite private and top public colleges and universities”  there is at least Columbia’s Core (which at least a few years ago was still teaching the “Iliad”) in the US.  So there would appear to be no problem. 

The value of my list being used widely is that even the person who can only go to their local state college can have the choice to learn about freedom and liberty.

Regarding “dry matches”, history suggests that one should have little confidence in the activities of a committee of academics. One could just look at what they did in previous eras to lose confidence.

In your article you referred to an ISI test:

“. . . multiple choice exam about civic literacy to 14,000 freshmen and
graduating seniors. . . .  had resulted in a net loss of historical knowledge”

A while back I took what was portrayed as a similar test at the ISI website (I got over 90%) and the key point was that it was an American civics literacy test, NOT a history test and especially not a “deep history” test.  It did ask about American historical events of importance to American civic life.  It did not ask about Marathon, Xerxes or Pericles. 

It did ask questions about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and at least one important court case.  My list of documents would have been much better prep. If students don’t know about the 3 branches of the federal government as set out in the Constitution and know less after 4 years it is because they don’t care!  What the ISI test seemed to show was that students remembered something from K-12, but if it wasn’t repeated in college they tended to forget, probably because they not only don’t care but they don’t read about politics so there is no reinforcement.

This relates to “A few years ago, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute administered a 60-question multiple choice exam about civic literacy to 14,000 freshmen and graduating seniors.”

Back in 2010, in my 13th post in a Professor Vedder thread, I wrote about the ISI civics quiz:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Modest-Proposal-Searchin/26949/

“It might be worth considering the impact of the findings of the ISI’s report “Failing our Students, Failing America”:

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/summary_summary.html

Finding 3, names 4 universities that were in the top 12, in one set of ratings. These 4 universities had seniors who did worse than the freshmen on a simple civics quiz. It suggests that the university experience resulted in worse outcomes. It calls it “negative learning”.

Finding 1, includes the interesting tidbit that the best average was among Harvard seniors who got a D+!

It is interesting that there does not seem to have been a rush away from the 4 top-rated universities that were named as having freshmen who did better than seniors. There also doesn’t seem to have been a rush away from the additional 4 colleges and universities listed with a negative “value added” (total of 8 with a negative value) at:

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/major_findings_finding1.html

which has a chart of 50 colleges and universities with the scores and the “value added”.

Unfortunately, there was no testing of 8th or 5th graders. It would have been fun to see which elementary schools did better than Harvard seniors.”

You can take the 2007 ISI civics test (or at least a version of it) at:

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/summary_summary.html

click on the little box on the left side column under the list of headings.
 
FYI, a while back, I got over 90% which shows it is an easy test on the web. The quiz on the website is multiple choice only. FYI, the debates were about slavery (if you need to go to college to know that then you have real problems). About the battle, if the real question is what battle forced the British to start to negotiate peace (which is subtly different than actually ending it), then it is Yorktown.

Sadly, the list of 50 colleges did not include Columbia so we don’t get to see the impact of the Columbia Core.

I wonder what fraction of CHE readers know “Major Barbara”?  I only know the 1941 film, which is great. Since it was made in 1941, in Britain, during the Blitz, needless to say Undershaft the tycoon weapons-maker is a hero (note the shots of industrial production towards the end as part of the industrial might propaganda tour) at the end of the film.

Undershaft is specifically looking for a foundling as heir and Cusins fits the bill in addition to being the future son-in-law.  The daughter is a major in the Salvation Army.

“Wot prawce selvytion nah?” or in standard English: “What price salvation now?”

David Denby’s 1996 “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World” seemed to show that the Columbia Core is wasted on the young.  When Denby returns after 30 years to take the Columbia Core yet again, his new learning seems a result of 30 years of life experienced outside of Columbia. As described, his instructors and classmates seem underwhelming (in some cases they are painful to listen to). 

It appears he gets out mainly what he puts into the books with the advantages of Stanford graduate school, 30 years of experience and being a “New Yorker” film critic.   The Columbia Core seems in this book to be a waste of time and money. You would be better off going to the library to read the books and the books about the books yourself.  If you have enough motivation to go back to Columbia after 30 years, you should have enough to read the books for yourself or with a reading group (reading groups was one of the Great Books ideas).

And if you have the motivation, why not read the Founding Fathers instead?

If you don’t have the motivation then why should anyone hire you?

Way back in 1968, when there was a shortage of new academics (apparently all male, but then Columbia and most of the elite colleges were men only), Columbia’s Jacques Barzun wrote “The American university: how it runs, where it is going”:
 
“. . . the whole rigmarole is as wasteful and ineffectual as when James first deplored it” referring to William James’ 1903 critique in the “The Ph.D. Octopus”

“. . . there is really very little the young serfs can do.”

“. . . to a level of quasi neglect close to the undergraduate’s”

He doesn’t make exceptions for Columbia and the last quote seems suggestive of what the Columbia Core and others of its ilk might have been like “back in the good old days”.

He also writes regarding Ph.D. supervisors:

“. . . for whom the supervising and examining of dissertations is all the more distasteful that [sic] most are exercises in fact-gathering rather than contributions to knowledge.”

He also says he has nothing to change in his book as a result of events at Columbia in 1968.
He is probably alluding to the occupations and protests.

The interesting 1995 book “An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College” by Timothy Cross does not discuss the effectiveness of the curriculum in terms of even medium or long term results from the viewpoint of students who didn’t become Columbia staff.   Mention is made of various changes to reduce costs, but no impact on the students is really considered.  The focus is mainly on what Columbia faculty, administrators and staff thought.

http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/oasis/history6.php

“Finding full-time faculty willing to teach in the core was proving increasingly difficult in the 1960s, and the burden of teaching both courses fell more and more upon preceptors . . .”

Those interested in encouraging freedom and liberty might be interested in the discussion of an earlier version of my list and the resulting discussion in the Mark Bauerlein “Against Relevance” thread, starting here:
 
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/against-relevance/38096#comment-284724578

For those who feel a need for poetry, the thread includes my suggestion of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other patriotic songs as interesting poetry for historical/political analysis.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/against-relevance/38096#comment-284732249

For those unfamiliar with the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” here are a few verses:
 
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

I’m surprised no-one has picked up on Chuckkle’s comment about skills and field work. We live in huge, very old (in human terms), and now highly connected world. There’s a lot of merit in debating the ideal content of an UG curriculum–history specifically, or liberal arts generally–but we know going in we’ll never arrive at consensus; Peter Woods points out that 4 years of coursework isn’t enough time to get it all in.

For a global education, why are the Lincoln-Douglas debates more important to know than the tensions around change and continuity in the Boxer Rebellion? Or the ideologies of Apartheid?
In an era where a few keystrokes on a hand-held device can replace factual recall, our students need skills to make sense of a bewildering onslaught of new information. How do you formulate useful/meaningful questions? How do you gauge the reliability of data? How do you build context to make sense of unfamiliar information? How do you keep track of large amounts of information and extract what’s necessary to answer your questions, without discarding relevant data that might change your answer?

I see great utility and intellectual merit in the river-based assignment that Prof Woods dismissed. (If badly executed, it could be frivolous–but so could a great books course.) And I can’t imagine how a course on the construction and circulation of identity in our global age would not be relevant. Is it just the reference to Africa that makes it easy to dismiss?

No matter how much a good student learns at a “top” college or university, s/he will leave college knowing only a small subset of the world’s available knowledge. I’m not at all advocating that we abandon a focus on “content” for our students. But I do assert that a wide range of “contents” can effectively teach the skills our students will need to navigate the fast-paced changes of the 21st century. Of course, none of this guarantees them jobs (but limited knowledge and skills probably precludes employment–or at least long-term employment in a changing economy).

As our global political economy changes, maybe more knowledge about the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Long March, and Tiananmen Square will serve students better than command of the details of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

I will confess, as a working academic I haven’t the time to read through all of bscmath78 and Unemployed_Northeastern’s back-and-forth, and can’t imagine a working academic would have the time to post them (how UN finds the time is self-evident).  Therefore, I hope the two points I would like to make have not already been addressed, but from skimming their entries I think not.

First, regarding Peter Wood’s critique of what he views as overly specialized history offerings: I presume they have no prerequisites of the sort of broad introductory courses that would familiarize a student with the general outlines of history before proceeding to a more detailed examination of a particular topic within it.  If they do have such prerequisites, what’s the problem?  I know that in my department students don’t get into advanced specialized courses until after they have passed introductory surveys, and that the latter that are designated requirements but many of the former are electives.  I also presume that he takes amusing course titles to reflect flippant course content, rather than catchy names meant to generate interest among the students for classes that in fact have  intellectual rigor.  If the courses do have intellectual rigor, what does it matter if the students come to a better understanding of the human condition through a close examination of popular culture instead of through a better understanding of the human condition through a close examination of high culture or public policy making?

Second, regarding bscmath78′s repeated slight of Greco-Roman civilization as the inspiration for totalitarianism based on readings of Plato and his colleagues, it should be considered that a love of the classics has long inspired liberals as well as reactionaries, and maybe bscmath78 should become familiar with more of classical culture than just its literature.  Classical civilization is like the Bible – big enough, diverse enough, and prestigious enough that almost anyone can pick and choose from it to promote almost any goal they wish.  Dictators aren’t the only ones to admire Greek and Roman art.  For instance, while Napoleon Bonaparte was building a Neoclassical Paris Thomas Jefferson was building a Neoclassical Washington, D.C.  Bonaparte admired the Roman Empire and Jefferson admired Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic.  (We can split hairs about how Bonaparte was an authoritarian liberal and Jefferson was more liberal in his theory than his practice, but the contrast remains.)

You have only to read the works I listed previously to know the dangers of relying on the hand-held device:

Zamyatin’s “We”  – novel
Huxley’s “Brave New World” – novel
Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – novel and animated film (some say the film was partly financed by the CIA)
Orwell’s “1984″ – novel and film
Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ – novel and film
Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired
by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)

They also provide the motivation to act on the questions that have been raised.

Smart phones and I-pads and laptops aren’t dangerous; my point is that uninformed or uncritical use of the information they provide access to doesn’t serve us or our students very well–which I think is the point you make with a proposed reading list. It think we agree, here.

My second point is that a wide range of reading/art/music/material culture/film can be used to help students develop the critical skills to embrace or avoid an Orwellian future–or other version to substitute for Orwell. We needn’t all share a political agenda or set of cultural inclinations to teach critical reasoning. In fact, a diversity of reading/sources lists is a very good thing.

The question here is whether we need our students to reason with the same political purpose we do, to absorb a set of political and cultural values that matter to us as instructors, or whether we’re willing to risk having our students see the world as a Chinese communist might.

I am impressed with the erudition you have demonstrated in your many postings here, my point was that I was astonished at the sheer volume of them and unfortunately cannot possibly read them all and attend to my duties at work during the day.  I am glad to learn that my assumption that your notions of classical civilization are entirely literary is mistaken, and as an art historian I regularly teach all that you have mentioned about the Parthenon, and finish by teaching that the Athenians lost the ensuing Peloponnesian War that they brought upon themselves as a result.

However, I will add that I find many of your statements vaguely pessimistic and disheartening.  I do not agree that regarding the Parthenon the fact that the Athenians committed atrocities whose origin was directly linked to their turning the Delian League into an extortion racket is “what is really important for students to know,” which I take to imply that such is what is MOST important for students to know and all the rest is merely incidental.  Everything the Parthenon can demonstrate about Greek ideals is worth knowing as an insight into the thinking of our fellow human beings and thus an increased understanding of ourselves by comparison, and while I’m no Pollyanna and certainly don’t believe in celebratory, jingoistic, filial-pious history, neither do I think students are well served by prioritizing all that has been worst in history as “what is really important to know.”  In this I hope I am misreading your intent.

As a point of clarification, I too regard Napoleon as a dictator, but wanted to acknowledge that some might find some of his policies “liberal,” such as his being the first leader of a major modern nation-state to remove sodomy laws from the books, regarding such conduct as a private matter of no legitimate concern to the state.

jamesebryan, I commend you as an art historian for providing the context that I referred to.  But I suspect that the Western Civ survey courses of yore neglected this.

Your approach sounds appropriate for those interested in art history.  My comment on importance was in the context of a political/historical education in Liberty for the general US citizen student. It was based on my assumption that coming into class, general US citizen students will most likely only know the “celebratory” aspects of the Parthenon (and probably other things) and therefore need an antidote. I have no objection to them taking your course or other courses on Antiquity that also provide the context and human cost.

My posts in this thread sought to counter some of the elements of Professor Wood’s article. I sought to identify a more useful, more effective and more generally palatable alternative to the Western Civ survey courses of old — for general US citizen students.

Thank you for your perspectives.

jamesebryan, in “Fahrenheit 451″, Montag pulls the plug on the giant TV screens to get his wife’s attention.  He then reads “Dover Beach” to his wife and her friends in an attempt to break through. He fails.
 
Pessimistic? Disheartening? Melancholy? “No certitude”? “No help for pain”?

Maybe.

Yet still I struggle in these threads since “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

I also hope:
 
“Every time we really pay attention we destroy some of the evil within”
 
 - Simone Weil (1909-1943 (tragically))

emwhite, Atwood is quoted on page 87 of “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (edited by Harold Bloom) as saying, “The Wall is the wall around Harvard yard”.  You can read the whole quotation and related material at:
 
http://books.google.ca/books?id=u9dlKNJh_rAC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=%22the+wall+is+the+wall+around+harvard+yard%22&source=bl&ots=yym18uBJms&sig=hSpXokaYuFldiUiafBTauR0GlPM&hl=en&ei=8juHTuLUOOLj0gHgsdXWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20wall%20is%20the%20wall%20around%20harvard%20yard%22&f=false

Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale, Roman Protéen: Conférence de Margaret Atwood”
tells us more about the buildings and quotes a friend asking, “Hasn’t anybody figured out that this book is about the Harvard English department?”

http://books.google.ca/books?id=LOjxddA5gVsC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=%22hasn%27t+anybody+figured%22+harvard&source=bl&ots=i7B4tninmp&sig=lD44QsIrVAmviquBI8Jj5pcNJCo&hl=en&ei=aESHTtC7FInW0QGS9ez3Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hasn%27t%20anybody%20figured%22%20harvard&f=false

The Harvard University Gazette reported on her receiving the Radcliffe medal.

“Atwood said her Cambridge days provided fodder for her prize-winning novels. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” altered the architecture of her Harvard Square haunts, including the Brattle Theatre and Widener Library.”

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/06.12/03-radcliffe.html

Harvard Magazine quotes her whole talk including, “All of these buildings appear in altered form in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/democracy-use-it-or-lose.html

In 1990, the LA Times wrote:

“In a hotel lobby interview in Berlin, Atwood gladly filled in the Cambridge, Mass., references in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ starting with the grim, monastic clothes store, Lilies of the Field, placed in what had been, in pre-revolutionary times, Cambridge’s beloved repertoire movie house, the Brattle Theatre.

Atwood said, ‘The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library is where they have public hangings.’ ”

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-04/entertainment/ca-2834_1_atwood-tale-handmaid

If anyone has any doubts about my earlier Harvard claims in “Atwood’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)”, they can read the following sources:

Atwood is quoted on page 87 of “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (edited by Harold Bloom) as saying, “The Wall is the wall around Harvard yard”.  You can read the whole quotation and related material at:
 
http://books.google.ca/books?id=u9dlKNJh_rAC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=%22the+wall+is+the+wall+around+harvard+yard%22&source=bl&ots=yym18uBJms&sig=hSpXokaYuFldiUiafBTauR0GlPM&hl=en&ei=8juHTuLUOOLj0gHgsdXWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20wall%20is%20the%20wall%20around%20harvard%20yard%22&f=false

Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale, Roman Protéen: Conférence de Margaret Atwood”
tells us more about the buildings and quotes a friend asking, “Hasn’t anybody figured out that this book is about the Harvard English department?”

http://books.google.ca/books?id=LOjxddA5gVsC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=%22hasn%27t+anybody+figured%22+harvard&source=bl&ots=i7B4tninmp&sig=lD44QsIrVAmviquBI8Jj5pcNJCo&hl=en&ei=aESHTtC7FInW0QGS9ez3Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hasn%27t%20anybody%20figured%22%20harvard&f=false

The Harvard University Gazette reported on her receiving the Radcliffe medal.

“Atwood said her Cambridge days provided fodder for her prize-winning novels. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” altered the architecture of her Harvard Square haunts, including the Brattle Theatre and Widener Library.”

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/06.12/03-radcliffe.html

Harvard Magazine quotes her whole talk including, “All of these buildings appear in altered form in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/democracy-use-it-or-lose.html

In 1990, the LA Times wrote:

“In a hotel lobby interview in Berlin, Atwood gladly filled in the Cambridge, Mass., references in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ starting with the grim, monastic clothes store, Lilies of the Field, placed in what had been, in pre-revolutionary times, Cambridge’s beloved repertoire movie house, the Brattle Theatre.

Atwood said, ‘The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library is where they have public hangings.’”

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-04/entertainment/ca-2834_1_atwood-tale-handmaid

Sadly, I am too lazy.

I did enjoy the film adaptions: “Pygmalion”, “Major Barbara”, “Androcles and the Lion”, “Caesar and Cleopatra” and indirectly “My Fair Lady”.

Oh woe, or in Greek, talas ego! So many things wrong!  Frankly, I rarely watch documentaries about the ancient world – they just make me furious – so driven to come up with some gotcha, but there are few gotchas in history in the sense that there is no single answer.  In short, I did not watch “In Search of the Trojan War,” especially since my research interests are heroes in the Iliad and Greek tragedy, so I know I would have hated it.  Most classicists these days figure myths are as real as pottery, just in a different way.  And as you can guess, I recommend none of them.  Not sure who “they” is in your first paragraph – classicists certainly differentiate these various types of “history.”  There are many basic books on Greek and Roman history – I would recommend Ian Morris on “The Greeks.”
Didn’t see Patton – oddly enough, I don’t like war movies.  I only liked “Troy” for Brat Pitt.
On Hercules – again, this is something I have thought about.  If there was such a person, he would have no bearing on the myths.  After all, are any stories about King Arthur true? Even George Washington (I mean stories we were told as children, not well-researched history)?  Yet we know they did live at some point.  Or did you mean did the Greeks believe he was real?  Probably the way English children believe in King Arthur – that is, it doesn’t really matter.  only post-Descartes thinkers worry so much about what is “fact.”
On intellectual history:  that is what I am going to teach in the spring as “Racism (or not) in the ancient world.”  My premis mostly is that modern racism has kept the modern world from acknowledging everything that the Greeks got from abroad, but that the Greeks were not racist in our sense.  (I am using Eric Gruen’s “Rethinking the Other in Antiquity,” although I have some reservations about that too.)  However, I would not say “real intellectual progress” did not occur in Athens.  Parmenides and Democritus would never have had the impact they had if Plato had not filled out their arguments.  In fact, I object to notions that the “real” progress happened in a single place and everyone else was “stealing” from them.  Ideas do not work that way.  There was a PBS series that showed how one idea morphed into something we would never have imagined being related, nor would those scientists have been bothered by the borrowing – ideas were worth spreading for their own sake, they didn’t own them.
There is a good documentary ( the only “good” one I know, but it’s not about history) called “Black Athena” that explains the controversy about modern racism, although it’s a bit dated.  There’s probably something about Black Athena on Wikipedia.
And for sure, the Greek and Roman political systems surely inspire both liberals and conservatives (especially clear after the Black Athena controversy).  However, it is clear that their political systems were conceived so differently and aimed at such different goals (forestalling class warfare, for one), but from very different angles, that they really have pretty much entirely imposed modern ideas on ancient ones without understanding them.
Thanks for the interesting questions.

Isn’t great when the author is still alive to tell her readers what she did?  But despite Atwood’s repeated explanations it is surprising how many working academics are oblivious to the Harvard references, including some who were students there, read the book — and even give lectures on it. 

It makes you wonder how you can trust working academics with anything that cannot be independently and directly verified with the source . ;-)  Though sources and authors can lie. ;-)

Huh.  OK.  And yet I’m going to do a classic English professor move here and say that I don’t CARE what Atwood says her book is about.  The subject is clearly a whole lot larger and more comprehensive than (who the heck cares about) the Harvard English department.  The novel has had its effect as a feminist novel and as a warning about Christian fundamentalism–and who can really separate those two issues, anyway?

That sounds like exactly the sort of curriculum I would want out of a classics department.  I wouldn’t want a rapturous appreciation of the accomplishments of classical high culture to be all we teach about it, nor would I want nothing but a relentless demonstration of instances of brutality in the classical world to be all we teach about it.  As bscmath78 explained, neither does he or she in general, but has here emphasized the pessimistic as a rhetorical technique in challenging Peter Wood.

Oddly enough, as far as I can tell neither he nor anyone else has commented upon my query about giving broad overviews in required introductory courses and saving esoteric foci for electives later, which I think addresses one of the central complaints of his column.