Recently, an opinion appeared in this paper calling on the College to institute curricular changes in pursuit of the “cultivation of virtue.” Unfortunately, it is emblematic of a tired yet pervasive attitude to higher education curricula that seems to appear semi-frequently. While it’s easy to give these criticisms credence because they seem to home in on the telos of our time at Williams, the current liberal arts model deserves a defense in its own right.
The argument in the piece — and in general — is in favor of the revival of a curriculum centered on the “Western canon,” providing an intensive, directed path through the texts that have dominated higher education through much of the post-Enlightenment period. While the value of these texts is unquestionable, there is a tendency to argue for their inclusion in a manner detached from that value.
The common misunderstanding of the canon’s modern fate is that of condemnation to obscurity, leaving the “great intellectual tradition” without disciples. This then naturally leads to frantic hand-waving and finger-pointing at whatever can be blamed for its “disappearance.” The recent op-ed puts that blame on three things: the “postmodernist” educational model, “empiricism,” and the “careerism” of higher education.
The first two are abstract assertions founded on mostly anecdotal evidence. The claim that higher education has been reduced to a mono-dimensional level of analysis through a singular framework — in this case, postmodernism — is a verbose version of the rallying cry of institutional “wokeness” sounded by conservatives. The approach to higher education is constantly changing and finds its basis in the genealogy of professors’ knowledge. This is exactly why it’s impossible to claim that higher education is in a stranglehold of one particular form of, primarily literary, thought.
Similarly, the argument against empiricism is dubious. Canonical texts wrestled with the bleeding edge of their own times: times of computational and data poverty. The soft sciences have evolved, as have the hard ones, with the advancements made in their fields. There simply isn’t a feasible way to have an economics major read every foundational text and be up to speed on the present state of the discipline. Some things must be omitted for the purpose of productivity: We cannot advance our academic production and contribution to modern research absent those omissions.
Now to the position I take most umbrage with: careerism. Yes, it’s true that fewer graduates are pursuing Div. I degrees; it’s also true that more people seek an education that will net handsome financial prospects. Those aren’t the signs of the Great Intellectual Rapture they’re made out to be.
Over the last 25 years, higher education has become increasingly accessible through massive investments in financial aid and efforts to diversify student bodies. These landmark achievements are essential in making elite schools vehicles of social advancement for those meritocratically excellent students who earn a place there. Gone are the days when Williams was a quaint rural four years for the aspiring dilettante to read his canon and enter the workforce administered by his and his classmates’ fathers. The College simply isn’t the kind of finishing school it used to be because it doesn’t consist only of the cadre of wealthy sons who inhabited it for a century and a half. Being a humanities major is, in many cases, simply not cost-effective. And while that may be disheartening — it certainly is to me — an optional canon tract won’t change that decision calculus. Similarly, a curricular overhaul that could accomplish that task would alienate students looking to pursue studies outside of the humanities.
The books of the canon have their value in the liberal arts, and some are essential to them, but to suggest that they ought to be cordoned off into a discrete tract of learning is antithetical to the foundation of the Williams education. The erroneous suggestion that the Western canon hasn’t been integrated into the modernized humanities curriculum is simply founded in a fabricated nostalgia for a time when the world was smaller. After all, the canon developed because those were the seminal works available. The West held a monopoly on publishing and funded research until the mid-20th century. That material still continues to maintain a substantial representation in the humanities curriculum at the College. Crucially, though, the liberal arts have adapted, as any academic tradition ought to. They simply have integrated those most essential works of the canon into productive, comparative education.
In my 10-ish weeks here, I’ve read a considerable portion of The Odyssey in two separate translations, and I had no intention to when I selected classes. That’s the beauty of the curricular model Williams espouses. I had no idea I would run into Homer in Schapiro 129, nor did I think he’d be sitting next to Kafka and Baldwin — but he was! And while I haven’t seen them around campus yet, I’m only a stone’s throw away from those imposing names that loom off the walls of Stetson Hall.
Though maybe easier said than done, the simple solution to the fact that I haven’t yet read Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Inferno is to choose to read them. Those, and hundreds of other canonical works, are available almost every semester. Even when they’re not, between independent study options and constant access to our library system, I have another choice: pursuing them on my own. If you want to study the canon, choose to do so.
The aforementioned op-ed suggests that the canon curriculum should be optional. If the issue at play were really the cultivation of virtue and the moral responsibility of an important educational institution, a real conviction in the canon’s moral value would require it as curricular material — for all students. There is no such conviction, only a conciliatory argument, founded in nostalgia for the products of a long-gone system.
As students here, we’ve been granted an opportunity that exists sparingly across the country and around the world. We have the agency to pursue a course of study as we choose, girded by requirements that we, at minimum, diversify our interests across three broad categories of study. Not only is that a marvelous way to discover oneself, it’s also a framework for finding one’s own way to virtue. In the Aristotelian sense, every Eph must habituate themselves to excellence: stepping out from behind mono-dimensional career tracts to choose, regularly, those courses that will most improve themselves while still being exposed to works they wouldn’t have otherwise sought out. It is this tremendous tradition that must never become a “vestigial remnant” of Williams, and at present, I haven’t noticed it going anywhere.
Hugh Kane ’27 is from New York, N.Y.
