THE GREAT IDEAS:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
1. General Honors at Columbia
Despite being edited by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot, the 1909 Collier and Sons edition of the "Five-Foot Shelf" of Harvard Classics had little to do with Harvard or higher education. It was not until 1921 that an education centered on the classics first entered the modern college curriculum at Columbia University. Four years earlier, Professor of English and noted poet and novelist John Erskine had proposed a two-year course where students would read one classic in translation each week and discuss it in a seminar. Erskine hoped to clear the barrier students perceived between themselves and the classics while providing them with a common tradition (other than "girls or athletics or compulsory chapel") lost in the modern elective system. He reasoned that all classics were originally written for popular audiences, but their haughty reputations combined with faculty members' obtuse scholarly interventions made the texts daunting to students.. To Erskine, "A great book is one that has meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time," and a true classic ought to speak to the modern mind as effectively as it spoke to its original audience. The faculty at Columbia rejected his proposal on the grounds that students could not be expected to master so many works in such a short time and that the essence of most classics was lost in translation. As one of the first volleys in the battle that would rage through twentieth-century academic history, the faculty rejected Erskine's liberal arts ideal. They maintained that it was far superior for students to specialize and read a few books deeply than it was for them to acquire a general knowledge of a wide range of texts. The University should cultivate the expert devoted to a narrow subject--after all, some members of the faculty at Columbia had spent their careers commenting on only one or two of the texts Erskine wanted his students to breeze through.
World War I gave Erskine a chance to test his theories as Director of the Education Department for the Y.M.C.A. and the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Flush from his success on the front, he persuaded the faculty at Columbia University to allow him to teach General Honors, a two-year seminar devoted to the Great Books.
Among Erskine's early students at Columbia were future University of Chicago faculty members Richard McKeon, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Mortimer Adler. Adler, who described himself as "an objectionable student" found the refined culture and reverence for greatness he longed for in Erskine's General Honors course. He enthused that it "was a college in itself--the whole of a liberal education or certainly the core of it," and it was taught "in the manner of highly civil conversation." When Adler moved to the graduate school (without earning his B.A. for failure to complete the College's Physical Education requirement), Erskine hired him to lead a section of General Honors with fellow student Mark Van Doren. Following Van Doren's lead, Adler learned to curb his usual argumentative style and teach using the Socratic method. Together they refocused the class discussions on the students' perceptions of the ideas presented in the Great Books. With Van Doren's calm temperament and Adler's enthusiasm, the course fulfilled Erskine's ideal of living culture. The Great Books came alive through the students direct interactions with them: culture was reinvented as the "interplay of life and ideas."
THE GREAT IDEAS: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION