More on the curriculum

I was reading another section of Ms. Rosa Ehrenreich's essay referenced below, when I came across this revealing tidbit.

"Conservatives like D'Souza and Kimball charge that traditional Western culture courses barely exist anymore at schools like Harvard, because of some mysterious combination of student pressure and the multiculturalist, post-structuralist tendencies of radical professors. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly last year, Caleb Nelson, a former editor of the conservative Harvard Salient, complained that in the 1989-90 Harvard course catalogue:

No core Literature and Arts course lists any of the great nineteenth-century British novelists among the authors studied, nor does any list such writers as Virgil, Milton, and Dostoevsky. In the core's history areas even students who . . . took every single course would not focus on any Western history before the Middle Ages, nor would they study the history of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the American Civil War, or a host of other topics that one might expect a core to cover.

Nelson's major complaint is that Harvard is not properly educating all of its students. I agree with him here; in Caleb Nelson, Harvard has let us all down by producing a student so poorly educated that he's unable even to read the course catalogue.

I have the 1989-90 catalogue in front of me as I write, and a quick sampling of some of the entries gives us, from the Literature and Arts and the Historical Study sections of the core curriculum, the following courses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, The Bible and Its Interpreters, Classical Greek Literature and 5th-Century Athens, The Rome of Augustus, The British Empire, The Crusades, The Protestant Reformation. Perhaps Chaucer and Shakespeare are somehow, to Caleb Nelson, not "such writers" as Milton and Dostoevsky and the Protestant Reformation is a historically trivial topic.

Nelson also worries that students will have "no broad look on ... philosophy"- by which he really means Western philosophy. Yet in the Moral Reasoning section of the core, seven of the ten courses listed have at least four of the following authors on their primary reading lists: Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hume, Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, and Weber. There is one course devoted to a non-Western philosopher. Confucius. The remaining two Moral Reasoning courses focus, respectively, on the writings of "Aristotle . . . [and] Maimonides," and of "Jesus as presented in the Gospels."

Interesting stuff. So Caleb Nelson (who is presumably no relation to the Caleb who posts here on a occasion) claimed that Harvard no longer taught students the Basics of Western Civilization; it turns out they do.

I wish I had Mr. Nelson's article in front of me, because I'll bet you, dollars to donuts, that he complains about the lousy courses that have taken its place. That's how this argument always goes; first some wild eyed speculation that decent classes aren't available and then an aggressive attack on those courses that are being offered. The point being that today's college professors are interested solely in political indoctrination or gross banalities.

So while a class on Milton is acceptable, a class on Gender Issues in Milton's Writing is suspect. A class on Kant is fine, a class on how Kant's theories are still reflected in the television sitcom Sienfield is a waste of time.

You know, it sounds to me like it's not just Politically Correct Thugs who want to slow down freedom of thought.