Selling short the transformative power of the classics (letter)

Professor Harvey Graff’s May 6 essay is the fourth response to my essay on standard education and the humanities. I thank Inside of Increased Ed for offering a area for lively exchange in this age of educational conformity. 

Graff’s entry is, without a doubt, a passionate one—and unsparing. The rhetoric will work merely by opposite assertion, but the warmth is higher. My essay fails to “define possibly the humanities or gen ed,” he states, which is “indeed debilitating.” I experience, also, from “ahistorical, conservative convictions.” Even worse, I have the conceitedness to “write[ ] with unbounded timelessness,” and I “fabricate[ ] a circumstance of great drop.” I suggest “with no evidence or explanation” that humanities majors have slipped simply because of the professors’ retreat from excellent books and grand narratives. I am “effusive” and “romantic” about those tired old Western Civ needs, he continues. My assertion that Stanford’s present specifications present no “majestic formation” is, he states, “a total fiction unacceptable for everyone professing the mantle of a humanities scholar.”  I “misrepresent,” “confuse,” “disrespect,” and “falsely dichotomize.”  In sum, I am but a “salesperson” for great publications classes. 

I obtain all of this hugely offensive. I am not a salesperson—I am a salesman. 

I’m offended, as well, at the terrible slur versus people Stanford people today who, as I quoted, explicitly pressed the really thesis that Graff conditions a “fabrication.” To forged them as “no proof” is a slur on the noble Cardinal.

I item, also, to Graff offending Within Greater Ed viewers when he asserts that they are so incompetent that they require commentators to outline gen ed and the humanities for them. 

Most of all, Graff’s description of The Iliad, Oedipus, St. Paul, Confessions, Beowulf, Chartres, “Friend, Romans . . .,” Cogito ergo sum, F = ma, Federalist 10, Trafalgar, La Traviata, The Communist Manifesto . . . as “a rigid, antiquarian, conservative curriculum” is an insult not to be endured. The students at Stanford and Columbia and other terrific textbooks courses didn’t see them that way, and it has always been my plan to pay attention to the little ones and to honor their sensibilities (see my two Dumbest Technology guides). 

But let us be severe. Professor Graff conditions it a “fantasy” that “literacy by alone is transformative, that proximity to the classics remakes the particular person.” Listed here, in crystal apparent form, is the downfall of the humanities: a professor who has so tiny self confidence in the price and the energy of the masterpieces, so minor curiosity in distinguishing the fantastic and momentous and deep from everything else, that he are unable to profess with force and charisma the will work that uplifted young Frederick Douglass, pulled J. S. Mill out of his breakdown, shored up the ruins of T. S. Eliot, and gave 100,000 youthful People in america in the midcentury a flavor of profundity and natural beauty and wit. This is decadence hiding guiding indignation. 

–Mark Bauerlein