The last edition of the Record included an opinion by Niko Malhotra ’24 titled “Revisiting the purpose of a liberal arts education: Cultivating virtue at Williams.” In the piece, Malhotra claims that Williams does not sufficiently cultivate virtue in its students. Since Williams educates our nation’s elite, this failure to graduate benevolent and altruistic students may seriously harm the rest of society. To solve the problem, Malhotra proposes that Williams should “institute an optional Western humanities sequence that covers the Western tradition of literature, philosophy, and political thought.” He believes that upon learning this great-books curriculum, students will be imbued with a commitment to “honor, duty, dignity, and humility” and will rightly reject postmodern relativism, empiricism, and careerism.
The problem with Malhotra’s argument is that the classic Western canon is already taught quite extensively at Williams. I myself will graduate having read Virgil, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hume, Machiavelli, Locke, Mill, Marx, Rousseau, and many others. I imagine that most students who have taken classes in the political science, English, philosophy, classics, sociology, or history departments could say the same. This does not mean that all students encounter these works equally, but if the College is failing to instill virtues, it is not for lack of students reading The Republic. While Malhotra is right to call on the College to cultivate greater virtue in its students, it seems that the implementation of a great-books curriculum will not remedy the serious problem he notices.
Instead, Malhotra has the issue backwards. Rather than using their coursework to inform their values, students tend to use their values to evaluate what they encounter in the classroom. Unfortunately, at Williams, these values tend to be postmodern and careerist. As a result, when students read the Western canon, they tend to reach very different conclusions about virtue than Malhotra would hope.
Take, for example, how students with these two typical value systems are likely to read Kant’s writings on ethics. The postmodern will immediately protest that since categorical ideologies only serve to maintain economic and political power, Kant’s categorical imperative must be nothing other than a tool of oppression. The careerist — and this one is a Williams favorite — will read Kant only so they can write a paper that scores an A, increasing their GPA and making them a more attractive candidate to prestigious and well-paying firms. Maybe the worst of all students, the careerist never even considers whether Kant’s ideas are worth incorporating into their life.
In both of these cases, students’ values greatly impact what they take away from their coursework. In neither instance do these values combine with the reading of great books to produce a particularly enlightened or virtuous student body.
The core of the Williams problem, then, is the school’s acquiescence to value systems which oppose the mission of a liberal arts education itself — to pursue truth. Postmodernism and careerism are especially inimical to this mission, as the former rejects objective truth and the latter is indifferent to truth. Therefore, to solve Malhotra’s problem, Williams must first change the minds of students who hold these values. It must convince students that the liberal arts are worth studying, something the school takes for granted but rarely argues effectively. It must convince students that virtue, truth, responsibility, and morality are all real and important. Williams, as long as it produces our nation’s elite and calls itself a liberal arts college, has a duty to instill these basic commitments in its students. Only then will a Williams education produce anything like the virtues Malhotra and I both hope for.
Patrick Gaul ’24 is a political science major from Potomac, Md.
