jvjv at posthaven

Heather Mac Donald's recent Wall Street Journal essay raises this question for me.  An excerpt:

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the "Empire," UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

This dreck is nothing knew to Ricochet readers, I know. But it makes me think back to the summer after my freshman year in college. When I started at the University of Oklahoma, like many (most?) pre-med students, I declared a zoology major. 

Then it occurred to me sometime during my freshman year that I had no interest in the science of zoology. I still wanted to become a doctor, but four years of zoology did not, for me, seem to be what college was about. Some of the harder sciences (physics, astronomy) seemed more interesting, but, like many students who are trying to get in to medical school, I was spooked by the "hard" part of "hard science." I wanted to make A's.  

In the spring semester of my freshman year, I took a course called, simply, "Fiction." We read some of the great short books and short stories you might see on a high school AP list: Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, Crane, Fitzgerald, Twain, et al. It was fun. And I thought "Why not spend four years reading stuff like this, and better?" I didn't know it, but I was stumbling onto the idea of a liberal arts education, Matthew Arnold's "best that has been thought and said," a dialogue with the great thinkers of the liberal tradition.  

I came home for summer vacation and told my dad that I was changing to an English major, but that I was still committed to going to medical school. He took it in stride, even though he had always advised me to:

1) Make sure that, whatever I study, it ought to consist of a real body of knowledge, and not be some made up "discipline" (If memory serves, the context for this advice was that he was telling me not to take an Ecology class in high school. A wise man.)

2) Make sure I finish my education with some skill that other people don't have

I'm pretty sure English did not meet those criteria, but I went ahead with it. And how did it work out? It was...OK. I had a good course on the Bible, a good Shakespeare course, a really good course called "Poe, Hawthorne, Melville" that also encompassed the American Renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson), a not-awful criticism class, and a decent American lit two semester survey. I took my senior capstone on the literature of the American West from a Marxist, but he was a fun guy, and he gave me an 'A' even though I was in my openly militant Ayn Rand phase. 

I did get to read Moby-Dick as part of the deal. That probably made it all worth it.

And I did encounter my greatest teacher, but he was not in the English department.

I could make a pretty awesome list of the writers I was not assigned as an English major. A hint: It includes Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and all English poets except Shakespeare and Milton. Overall, it was a fairly sloppy, undemanding undergraduate major.  (My wife beats me on this: she was a political science major and was never assigned Aristotle's Politics.)  

My oldest child is only eight, so I have a while before I have to worry about this. But, reading things like Mac Donald's essay, I already feel a strong urge to gently shunt him to the sciences, math, engineering—something, anything but English, the social sciences, the liberal arts.  

Let's assume that your kid is not going to go to a Hillsdale or St. John's or Thomas More or one of the other Great Books schools. Assume he is going to a large state university, or even an elite institution. What are you going to say when he comes home telling you he is majoring in English?  Unless he has a plan (not graduate studies in English!) I would say the answer is no. Not with my money. Not now.  

You simply cannot trust that he would take the right courses from the right professors—or that these courses and professor even exist at his school. Far better to spend four years in the rigor of a hard science, as far away as possible from gender and postcolonial studies as possible.

I completely agree with Heather Mac Donald's view of what a great liberal arts education offers.  The problem is that that education simply no longer exists outside of the few remaining programs and institutions that are overtly dedicated to the Great Books. I see it as an iteration of O'Sullivan's Law: All institutions that are not overtly dedicated to teaching the Great Books and preserving the liberal tradition ultimately will have Queer Theory departments.  

And they are sloppy. The only place left in higher education where rigor is guaranteed is in the sciences. In higher education (as it actually exists today, not as we wish it existed) maybe the best that we can hope for is that our kids experience intellectual rigor. If the science departments are the only places where that can still happen, then so be it. They will have to read Plato on their own. Which is too bad, because it is really hard to read Plato on your own. Most of us could use a good guide.  

It's too bad because, even though I am a physician, I remember (and need to remember) almost no organic chemistry from my sophomore year in college, nearly 20 years ago. But I bet that an intense encounter with the Nicomachean Ethics at age 20 would have left something of an impression.