Core Classes Lack Depth

Stodgy traditionalists make happy habit of lamenting the place of the Western canon in college curricula. How odd, they say, that Western civilization's leading educational institutions produce men and women largely unfamiliar with, and hence unsuited to maintain, the intellectual patrimony they will inevitably inherit.

At Harvard, these crusty Eurocentrists finger Foreign Cultures and its thriving colonies in Historical Studies and Literature and Arts. Harvard students need not read Plato, Shakespeare or Locke to graduate--in fact, chances are they won't. As the Goths conquered Rome, they say, so multiculturalism has sacked Harvard's liberal arts requirements.

The real problem with Harvard's curriculum, though, is not that the Core is too foreign; rather, it is entirely too familiar. So many Core courses deal with the present or recent past--"The Warren Court" in Historical Studies B and "Industrial East Asia" in Foreign Cultures, for instance--that students are tempted to explore the cozy space within their current horizons rather than take a broadening course. Also, it seems that every ethnicity is recognized with at least one course, allowing students, in effect, to study the subject with which they are already (and quite inevitably) most familiar: themselves. Is it any surprise that Afro-Americans are overrepresented in Afro-American Studies, or that Literature and Arts A-48, "The Modern Jewish Experience in Literature," is affectionately known as Jews for Jews?

Which is fine, and maybe beneficial, so long as other courses are sufficiently foreign. Trouble is, several of the most promising courses seem determined to make attractively difficult material into familiar, almost banal, fare. Professor Michael Sandel's well-known and well-respected Core course concluded recently to a much deserved, if customary, standing ovation. "Justice," undoubtedly one of the best taught Cores, examines great philosophers and practical present-day applications of their theories, bringing daunting philosophies to bear on familiar contemporary debates.

Last week, I spent an evening chewing on one of these practical present-day applications with a friend enrolled in the course. What did Kant think about racial profiling, we wondered aimlessly, until it occurred to us that he didn't--there were and are, thank God, more important things to worry about. Things more fitting for a great philosopher's philosophy, more fitting even for a Harvard student's studies.

By forcing great thinkers into modern political debates with Procrustean zeal, Justice makes mere politics of political philosophy. Kant should be an end in himself. One should not, and does not, have to locate his thinking on our political spectrum to make him interesting. But students in Justice are required to pluck Kant from the clouds, fumble with him in their untutored hands and mold him to a present-day problem--like smashing a butterfly between one's fingers in order to admire its wings. Such familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a false and dangerous sense of intimacy.

Especially when, as in Justice, one spends such little time on each great philosopher, the best of whom ought to command an eternity of study. It is simply impossible to understand, or even appreciate, a great thinker in one week--if you can, chances are he's not a great thinker. But in order to give a general introduction to moral philosophy, Justice sacrifices depth for breadth. In this case, necessity is the mother of imperfection.

Treating great thinkers in this way often generates a flighty arrogance. In section, would-be consultants, having skimmed a few books of the Politics, claim shamelessly that Aristotle contradicts himself; bubbly pre-meds babble unchecked about Locke's shortsightedness.

Worst of all, when exposed only to simplified and modernized tidbits of philosophy, students can begin to take philosophy itself for granted. If one can easily approach and understand Kant and Aristotle, and one need only look to them to inform contemporary disputes, they become decidedly less lovely. And if one doesn't love Kant and Aristotle, can one really find solace in Marx or Foucault?

Of course, youth itself does not prevent students from taking ideas seriously. On one hand, there are the seniors reclining in Sanders' balcony, pondering Kant's thoughts on a free market for women's eggs, and then there is the 20 year-old Friedrich Schelling writing to Hegel. "We must take philosophy further! Kant has destroyed everything; but how is everyone to notice? You would have to crush it to bits before their eyes to make it tangible to them!" Or the 19 year-old Marx who, upon reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time indicating a new direction." Or John Stuart Mill whose intellectual crisis at age 20 led to mental breakdown--would that Core courses made Harvard students prone to similar breakdowns!

Precious few students take ideas so seriously; those who do tend to be either devout Christians struggling within a Fallen world or social justice zealots roused to a frothing fervor by mistreated proletarians in faraway lands. Students are politically apathetic, we're told by countless pundits who 30 years ago proved conclusively the virtues of the same apathy they now decry. But political apathy isn't as much the problem as is intellectual lethargy--a much more troubling ailment in which so many Core courses are complicit.

And it's not so much the fault of professors, who make a living by taking ideas seriously. It seems that in a noble attempt to inspire students to share their scholarly excitement, they have crushed great learning into mediocre bits, lest students choke on it. They have reduced great revelation to mere relevance. In the process, the great thinkers who might otherwise inspire men and women to greatness, become cold marble busts sitting mute while scores graduate without their sage teachings.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column will resume in January.