Bring Back the Dead White Men

After four years at Harvard, students can graduate into the company of educated men and women without knowledge of Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Charter of the United Nations or even the Constitution of the United States. The present structure of Harvard’s Core Curriculum allows students to escape all of these topics and replace them with multicultural alternatives. In Historical Study A, for example, students can readily substitute for “Democracy in America and Europe” courses like “Gendered Communities: Women, Islam, and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa.”

The distinction between these two topics is clear. The first has profoundly impacted the structure of Western government, the formation of Western values and the fabric of a Western way of life. The latter has not.

It is embarrassing that Harvard students can graduate ignorant of major Western authors and philosophers. Harvard boasts as its motto “veritas,” and it should therefore teach students truth, rather than encourage students to remain neutral when confronted with values “significantly different” from those that have shaped the society they are preparing to enter.

Instead of structuring its general education program around what the Core bureaucrats call “approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education,” Harvard should establish a canon of great works that the Faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education. This canon should include Shakespeare and the Constitution, and there should be no escaping Western truths. While Muslim women and African art are certainly worthwhile to study also, these topics belong in department courses and not in the Core.

The principal objection to establishing a canon at Harvard is that no one would agree on what to assign. But the existence of disagreement does not preclude the existence of a correct outcome. As citizens of a Western society, we should be familiar with its values and how those values evolved. With this specific educational goal in mind, the Faculty could choose works that have dramatically influenced this evolution.

In reality, there would be no argument about whether Locke or Hobbes belongs on a syllabus with limited space. Rather, the argument arises between those who believe a work’s merit should determine its inclusion in the curriculum and multiculturalists who clamor for representation of diverse perspectives—much like we observe in Foreign Cultures.

Addressing the conflict between schools’ role in educating citizens and multiculturalist demands for diversity, sociologist Nathan Glazer posed this question in his book We Are All Multiculturalists Now: “Groups, racial and ethnic, and women want to see themselves in the curriculum…But what will this emphasis on multiculturalism, on ‘recognition,’ do to our efforts to teach our children truth and the best way to reach it, to promote American unity, to encourage civic harmony?”

If Harvard takes seriously its traditional obligation to teach truth and its self-styled progressivism, it should recognize that Western “truth” has shaped the creation of a society where women and ethnic groups are treated equally. Western values include tolerance for many different ethnic and gendered perspectives, which is why women and minority readers will “see themselves” in a Western canon, even if that canon doesn’t include many women and minority authors.

Alternative “truths” illuminated in Foreign Cultures courses make clear that tolerance is for the most part exclusive to modern-day Western society. Aztec religious philosophy, outlined in gory detail in “Mesoamerican Civilizations,” called for the ritual sacrifice of war prisoners. “Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies” must confront uncomfortable realities: suspected adulteresses are stoned to death where Sharia is enforced, women and homosexuals are brutally persecuted throughout the Middle East and Africa, and the president of Nigeria has explained that widespread killings “could happen at any time irresponsible journalism is committed against Islam.”

Herein lies the problem with Harvard’s value-neutral Core: Western society is better than its alternatives. The “dead white men” whom multiculturalists demean—as if syllabi focusing on the likes of Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald marginalize women and minorities—in fact encourage inquiries that invalidate the grotesque marginalization observed in other societies. Shakespeare, for example, challenges students to discover human truths transcending the perspective of any one ethnic group or gender.

Currently, however, Harvard does not require anyone to ponder Shakespeare’s truths, much less to read a word of his plays. Casting the rejection of standards as an enlightened educational revolution, the Core bureaucrats giddily proclaim: “The Core...does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information, or the surveying of current knowledge in certain fields.” But there are some Great Books that citizens of Western society, in order to be educated men and women, really should read. It is perfectly reasonable that Harvard require its students to read them.

Luke Smith ’04, a Crimson editor, is an economics concentrator in Quincy House.