Louis Menand, a writer and professor of English at Harvard University, has the soul of an anatomist. His best writing calmly takes things apart to discover how they were built and how they work. But Menand lost his cool last month in a December essay in The New Yorker, “What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?”
The occasion was a review of two recent books on general education — by Roosevelt Montás and Arnold Weinstein — that describe and defend “great books” courses. Menand turned a skeptical eye on their arguments. What particularly exercised him was, he wrote, that “research is irrelevant” to the teaching of great-books courses. The emphasis by Montás and Weinstein “on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training,” Menand wrote, displayed indifference to the decline of the humanities on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
His essay has inspired a number of ripostes, including one by the Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter in The New York Times, and another by the former Macalester College president Brian Rosenberg in these pages. This looks to be a burgeoning debate — and it’s one that college educators badly need to have. We should spend more time discussing the hows and whys of what we do, and we should do it in the open.
Menand’s argument sits on a foundation laid by Laurence Veysey, author of The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965) — perhaps the single best book ever published on American higher education. Veysey argued that the American research university was driven by three imperatives: research, utility, and “liberal culture” (an idealized, individual freedom of thought, informed by education in the liberal arts). Research, utility, and liberal culture don’t work in harmony in Veysey’s model; they compete for resources. One and then another has gained the edge at different historical moments at different institutions, but the tension among them endures. That tension, Veysey argued, has shaped the culture of American higher education.
Right now it’s safe to say that utility is enjoying an ascendancy. Majors in business and other professions threaten the traditional liberal-arts curriculum. Everyone, including state lawmakers and tuition-paying parents, seems to be questioning the “usefulness” of majors that don’t provide explicit training for specific jobs.
The great-books idea arose from — and some would say is now a relic of — the “liberal culture” vertex of Veysey’s triangle. Advocates thought great-books courses would encourage personal cultivation and make students into better versions of themselves. Roughly speaking, that’s what Montás argues in his book, Rescuing Socrates (Princeton, 2021), and he uses himself as his first example. (Menand reserves special scorn for the notion that reading great books makes one into “a better person.”) There are other arguments for these courses, too — such as that students should read a shared list of great books because they help create a community of common knowledge — but the underlying aim has always been self-improvement through interaction with great works of literature, history, and philosophy.
Menand argues from the “research” vertex of the Veysey triangle. He questions the value of being taught Dante in a great-books course — that is, quickly, by a nonspecialist who’s going to take up Cervantes next week and Shakespeare the week after that. Instead, Menand asks: For the relatively few students who want to read these writers, why not have a Dante specialist hold forth, and then bring in Cervantes and Shakespeare specialists to take their turns? After all, he reasons, research universities are where you find such specialists. (Rosenberg rightly points out that most institutions don’t have such a deep bench, but let’s pass over that objection for now.) Menand helped to design such a course at Harvard, with rotating lecturers.
But something is missing in this debate between specialists and generalists. That something is pleasure, or joy, in learning. The role of pleasure, beginning with the experience of discovery, affects not just undergraduate but also graduate education — including the decision to go to graduate school in the first place.
I lived the generalist-versus-specialist debate myself. I had a “great books” education at Columbia. The university’s Columbia College has a large core curriculum centered on two courses, “Contemporary Civilization” (known as “CC”) and “Literature Humanities” (or “Lit Hum”). Montás also graduated from Columbia, and went on to direct the core there for a decade. That experience led to his book.
The Columbia core gave me a way of thinking about books and ideas that was, simply, fun. I remember being thrilled when I was introduced to Plato’s cave metaphor in my CC course, and my reading of Crime and Punishment in Lit Hum fed my interest in crime stories, a subject I later wrote a book about. Without those courses, I doubt I would have gone to graduate school, where I naturally became a specialist.
I had thoughts of becoming a professor, of course, but the academic-job market was bad in my day, too, and I had no illusions about it. The real reason I went to graduate school was because I wanted to keep having fun for a while longer.
One could argue that we don’t need more people to enjoy college, and certainly not more who choose to go to graduate school. That would be a utility-based argument: Graduate school prepares students to be professors, and we already have enough of those. But anyone but the staunchest utility partisan would find such a position deeply cynical. (And besides, I’ve been arguing for years that graduate school offers a generalist’s preparation for diverse careers.)
Most students don’t go to graduate school for money. They have the opposite motivation: They go because they love a subject that they want to study. Whether or not students end up in graduate school, they deserve an opportunity to learn to love learning. General education gave me that, and I know I’m not alone.
Research creates expertise, and experts, but none of us begin that way. As an undergraduate, my core courses were stimulating precisely because they were broad. Their juxtapositions challenged me in unexpected ways, and — despite their relatively narrow Eurocentrism at that time — introduced me to ideas from different eras and different disciplines. In architectural terms, this gave me a big footprint to build on. I specialized eventually — but my specialization lies on top of my generalist beginnings.
Undergraduates and graduate students both start broadly and then specialize in their own way. The former choose a major, and the latter, a subfield within a discipline. Over the years, the push to specialize has come earlier and earlier for both bachelor’s and graduate degrees. But student training should look not like a needle skyscraper, but like a pyramid. It’s easier to climb that way.
Core courses can also educate the graduate students who teach them. Columbia aims to staff its core courses with full-time faculty members, but some graduate students work alongside them each year. Phillip Polefrone, a postdoctoral lecturer who received his Ph.D. in English from Columbia in 2020, began teaching “Contemporary Civilization” as a graduate student.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that teaching the course has transformed my pedagogy,” he said in an interview via email. The pace of the course “forces me to explicitly create coherence from class session to class session,” he said, “which in turn forces me to clarify those connections for myself.” For instance, connecting “John Stuart Mill at the end of one week to Karl Marx at the start of the next” led Polefrone to search for a “through line,” which he found in “liberalism and a powerful critique of liberalism.”
The course has likewise affected the direction of his research. “Teaching CC has influenced the methods I use in my research and even some of the questions I’m exploring,” he said. Polefrone studies the American literature of the Anthropocene. Before teaching the course, he said, “I was mostly framing my work in reference to contemporary climate change and Anthropocene discourse. Teaching CC has helped me unearth a history of human-nature thinking that predicts and precedes the Anthropocene.” Teaching “far out of my discipline,” he says, has given his scholarship “a richer and deeper context.”
As a research partisan, Menand contended that the best way to learn something was from a specialist. I’m not sure that’s always true. And it can’t be true all the time — and here I return to Rosenberg’s point that most professors are perforce generalists. How many French-literature experts can a college afford? The faculty member who got her Ph.D. with a specialty in 18th-century French novels is still going to be the one who teaches Rabelais, Baudelaire, and Sartre — and sometimes intermediate French language, too. That’s what Rosenberg means when he says that Menand’s approach is bad news for the humanities: If we limit humanities teaching to certified specialists, we’re going to go out of business because most institutions can’t afford to hire a specialist for every area and subarea.
Graduate school in the arts and sciences is part of the liberal arts. In addition to scholarly training and specialization, graduate school should therefore value its own form of “general education.” We teach graduate students that to become a specialist is to realize your highest potential, but that’s debatable. Watching — and participating in! — nonspecialized inquiry helped me choose a path that led to specialization. That inquiry also helped instill in me the habit of reading widely and into seemingly unrelated territory. And that habit has made me a better — and happier — scholar, critic, and writer.
So let’s not lose sight of the joy of general education. One of Montás’s key points is that the pleasures and rewards of this kind of learning should not be reserved for the privileged few. “Denying that opportunity to less privileged students,” said Andrew Delbanco, the president of the Teagle Foundation and a professor of American studies at Columbia, in an email interview, “is a form of educational malpractice.”
Utility is now fully baked into the DNA of American higher education, as Veysey anticipated years ago. We ignore it at our peril. Nor should we belittle the concerns of parents who want their children to get a good job after college. (The data show that liberal-arts students do get good jobs and thrive in their careers, but this is a case where perception, or misperception, is enormously important because it affects behavior.)
Menand champions research, and Montás liberal culture, but what’s been overlooked is that they both agree on one point: They both challenge the utility position, the third vertex of Veysey’s triangle.
Narrowly construed arguments about utility are running the game right now, obscuring other thoughts about what higher education can do. The siege of the liberal arts is depressing the market value of knowledge itself. The debate between Menand and Montás should play out further. While it does, we should all work to show that knowledge is valuable and useful — not least because acquiring it can bring joy, which is surely an important human value, too.
