A GUEST POST BY HASSAN MELEHY
Hassan Melehy is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 2004. His principal research on the Anglo-French Renaissance is complemented by continuing interests in and scholarship on cinema, critical theory, and the Beat Generation. He also publishes poetry.
Art Pope, Western Civilization, and the Beat Generation
When Jane Mayer’s superb New Yorker profile of Art Pope placed him in the national news, he became a front-page sensation in North Carolina. Of course, here in the Tar Heel State, his name has been in the press for many years, a result of his status as major donor and ideological guiding light for the Republican Party. For a faculty member at UNC–Chapel Hill such as myself, Pope holds a particular interest: this is mainly because of his steady attention to his alma mater, expressed as a combined strategy of philanthropy and public attacks through his family organizations, the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and the John W. Pope Foundation.
This past September, I found myself implicated in a Pope Center press release embodying both aspects of this strategy. The document rehearsed one of the Center’s and Art Pope’s litanies, that the West is under siege in the universities by the tenured radicals who relativize culture by placing non-Christian values on equal footing with Christian ones and teaching students about clothing and pets rather than the Great Books. At issue was a popular honors course, “Elements of Politics,” taught by Larry Goldberg, a lecturer in UNC’s English Department; following the Honors Program’s decision to cut it, the Pope Center offered to pay $2,000 of its $7,500 cost. Center President Jane Shaw expressed “profound disappointment,” according to the press release, that a class in which students read the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke was being marginalized in favor of “frivolous” courses. Among the three such offerings named was a course I taught in 2007, “The World of the Beat Generation: Transcultural Connections.”
Why were Pope Center writers dismissing a course they knew nothing about? The answer lies in the set of principles informing all the Center’s dealings with the teaching of the humanities at UNC, which excludes anything deemed, prejudicially, as not conforming to a particular vision of the West. I had previously encountered this simple dogma, since the Center is quite public about it. In a 2009 article called “The Culture Chasm at UNC,” Shaw criticized the programming choices of a series of guest speakers at UNC, “Renewing the Western Tradition,” sponsored by the Pope Foundation, saying that those invited didn’t emphasize the true strengths of the West. These include, she explained, “the long process…that developed freedom of thought and freedom of scientific inquiry, separated religious conscience from political obeisance, and laid the foundations of economic freedom and democratic governance. These forces led to unprecedented levels of liberty and economic growth in the world.” Certainly, economic freedom and growth belong to one set of Western values, but to characterize the entire Western tradition as effectively leading to them is erroneous. Even in a cursory reading, it’s easy to discern tendencies sharply critical of the brand of economic freedom the Pope Center advocates, which entails minimal government regulation and no redistribution of wealth. One would be hard pressed to find in, say, the European political thought of the 16th century any detailed proposal for a state that doesn’t act with generosity toward the less fortunate; the 18th century is filled with indictments of the era’s vast accumulations of wealth as lying at the heart of injustice.
Nonetheless, what matters most about the Western tradition is not which values may be justified through its authority but rather how, in its extensive variety and continuous change, it offers the tools to reconsider those values—to think critically, if you will, without settling on a single dogma at the beginning or end of the process. The massive economic, political, and cultural expansions that have marked the West since antiquity have been accompanied by thought and writing on their meaning as well as on how to conceive of the completely unfamiliar persons and phenomena that necessarily appear on the way. Through studying such writings, students develop abilities to adapt and expand their own understanding of the world. Education for this purpose must encompass, then, not a restricted list of titles, but well-chosen samples of the countless cultures, literary works, and art forms that have occurred throughout world history and that the West makes it its business to encounter. To claim, as the Pope Center does, that the West is not this immense and varied series, but rather one set of values best expressed by one set of authors, amounts to isolating the West from its own most notable achievements. It’s a pathetic caricature that has no place in a serious college curriculum.
The opposite is true of my Beat Generation class, which is based on the recognition that these writers were among the finest practitioners of the critical attitude of the West in the twentieth century. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg studied in Columbia University’s remarkable Great Books Program; Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima were immersed in Latin literature early in their lives. These authors conceived their work as belonging to the tradition of Western literature—they were hence open to admitting thought and experience that previously remained out of view of the very broad audiences their writings have reached. That’s the main reason why some of my students in 2007 told me that the Beat Generation course was the best thing they’d done in college. As frivolous as Art Pope’s minions may deem it, I’m proud that it remains part of UNC’s undergraduate curriculum.
