Southern Slant | Reviving “Great Works” curriculum, classes

Graydon Gordian Columnist

Earlier this week I was in Rockefeller hall, waiting to speak to a professor of mine. We had a paper coming up, so the hall was littered with my classmates, all looking to grab just a moment with the teacher to show him a draft or run some idea by him. Among us there stood a student who was a few years older, having come back to college after a couple years of work to get his degree. Because of his special student status, he was unaware of Vassar’s graduation requirements, and when I told him the rather minimal requirements that we have here, he was shocked.

“Are you telling me you can graduate from Vassar without having read Shakespeare?” he asked. Sadly, the answer is yes. Although being a work of a dead white male is about the most discrediting thing to be in academia nowadays, the emotional and moral education that can be found in some of the “great works” is invaluable, and should be experienced by every student at Vassar.

Although many of these great works were produced by the dead white male constituency, it does not decrease the transcendent nature of their merit and insight. Because of the extreme racial and gender inequalities which existed until quite recently in society, and for that matter are still existent today, it was very difficult for many women and people of color to achieve the type of education that empowered an individual to such literary heights as those which populate the Western canon. That is not an excuse for the injustice visited upon those people, merely an explanation for the cultural hegemony of the male European. Sadly, this fact does provide much of the great literature of Europe and its cultural offshoots (i.e. the United States) with a singularity of perspective that is regrettable.

But by reading The Aeneid or Faust, for example, it is not a uniqueness of perspective that one seeks, but the permanent and continual questions which all great literature and thought deals with. The fact that Shakespeare and Thomas Mann are both men does not take away from the timeless nature of their explorations of the decay of a family over several generations in their works King Lear and Buddenbrooks. Similarly, it is not because Gabriel Garica Marquez and Aeschylus are both men that they write of a decayed family’s redemption.

If one wishes to explore the tension between patriotic duty and personal dissent which some Americans have felt since their nation’s most recent military adventure, one need look no further than Achilles and his personal struggle in fighting a war in which he did not believe. Nothing better illuminates the ethical and political struggles of today than the complex and meritorious artwork and thought of the cultures of the past.

But if one is concerned about the dangerous eurocentrism of this perspective on education (although one of the authors I just named is from Latin America, and two of the works were written far before Europe was even a conception), it does not take much imagination to find authors and thinkers from other cultures who fit very comfortably into this category. Works like Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tales of Genji should be read by any genuinely intellectualy curious student, not because a feudal era Japanese woman presents a unique perspective, but because of how similar her perspective and questions are to those of a modern day American. An emphasis on the great works of human civilization is not about male hegemony or eurocentrism, but about a commonality in experience that all humans have, no matter what their race, gender, or creed.

In many ways the necessity of a core that emphasizes the universal similarities between human moral and emotional experiences is not needed just for its own sake, but to offset the indoctrination and ideological stagnation that impoverishes so many departments.

The College’s relaxed policy on course distribution, alongside the nonexistent core curriculum means that many of the assumptions, which would be healthy and progressive alongside a diversity of perspectives, in fact become indoctrinating principles which, instead of being understood as opinion, begin to be seen as fact. This is not merely a possibility. It has happened, and is happening all the time.

It is only because of the existence of such departments that I feel comfortable aggressively advocating a great works oriented core. If one were to experience nothing but the great works, there would be a tendency towards singularity of social perspective which could begin to outway the benefits of engaging with the most articulate expressions of the deepest questions with which humanity is concerned. But just as only reading dead white males would be morally and intellectually impoverishing, so is only being well read in the post-modernist or neo-marxist canon.

The liberty we are granted in our coursework here is not necessarily the liberty we need now. A little bit more direction and aid on the part of the College may be necessary to ensure that every student’s education is as robust and multi-faceted as it should be, and that while at college they are constantly challenged by a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than being indoctrinated by one.