A Debate Over Classics!
Terry H. Schwadron
April 23, 2021
Sometimes it is the less-publicized event that should draw our attention to reflect something of note about the state of our thinking.
I have found myself giving a lot of thought to a contretemps churned up by a decision by Howard University, the Historically Black college in Washington since 1867, to drop its Classics department, dispersing its eight faculty members to other departments. That, in turn, spawned a Washington Post op-ed by Harvard Prof. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate, head of the Classic Learning Test, in defense of classics-laden reading and training, particularly as important to an understanding of Black history, as a spiritual necessity.
No Democrats, no Republicans, but a healthy debate about learning, priorities, the state of the university, race and cultural resets — it’s my kind of issue.
A musician and journalist, I studied philosophy, and made a career of asking and researching questions as well as seeing to the very tangible aspects of getting news published every day through constantly changing technology and circumstances and trying to mentor in the practical realm as well as the more cerebral. I’ve tried to teach my children about doubt and the importance of questions and rigor in learning and decision-making.
What we have here is the result of a graduated move by academia over two decades to move towards more towards job preparation than classical education. It has been heightened by cresting in a time not only of economic competition factors but by a perceived irrelevance of history, literature and the liberal arts altogether, particularly of white, European culture as exclusionary.
As West and Tate argue, “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.”
Them’s Fighting Words
OK, it’s on. The two trace, for example, that such important Black figures as Frederick Douglass “began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man” to risk by studying the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Novelist Toni Morrison was a Howard University classics grad; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
In this same time, the biggest rise in academic departments has been in various ethnic studies departments, in deserved explorations of too-long ignored histories. As West and Tate argue, “Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.”
In defense, Howard — and lots of other universities — point to empty classroom, or Zoom sessions, of rising financial pressures, of changing student and faculty interests, and of an economy that makes perfectly clear that there is no end to jobs in coding and bio-sciences with relatively far less room for PhDs in literature, Greek and Latin understanding or even arts orientation. Those student loans contribute to a sense that all that learning had best lead to employment and higher salaries lest one spend the rest of life paying off the debt.
On a more practical level, two daughters in separate university art faculties have complained long and loud that they cannot get students to read, the societal results of which we can see daily in Americans’ growing inability to distinguish fact from politicized fiction, to unravel complex social problems or to approach the country’s problems with rigor rather than mottos.
I still subscribe to the classic or perhaps now ancient belief that the point of learning ought to be in the learning, including learning how to learn, not in the job or debt that results.
The Wider View
Howard, the only HBCU to offer classics, had said Classics should invite students to explore the wonders and diversity of the ancient world and cultivate the critical skills for lifelong learning and professional growth. In making the move to dissolve the department, Howard joined with the University of Vermont, which last month cited financial reasons and enrollment erosion, a 2018 decision at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wa., and insttitutions like Stanford and Harvard that have cut back in humanities students since 2013 as interest has faded for more computer science enrollment. The economy has “helped turn college, in the popular view, into largely a tool for job preparation, administrators are concerned,” reported The New York Times.
Meanwhile, scientists and technologists face questions about values and ethics, doctors need to balance organic chemistry with demands of humanity, successful lawyers, politicians, industrialists need to learn to listen to the music of their communities. A psychiatrist cousin published two books on classic myths to teach about human response.
West, the well-known Black intellectual who is threatening to leave Harvard over tenure issues, and Tate remind us that the rising voices descending from Africa, Asia and Latin American should be expanding humanities discussions. “The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.”
They argue that changes in higher education over time have been devalued into schooling of specific skills and labels rather than “the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings. . . Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.”
Prof. Ed Glaude Jr. of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies argued on MSNBC that students need to face the realities of what has been taught to better frame the most important questions facing us.
“This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages,” argues West.
Identity aside, that is hard to do in code or test-tubes alone.
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