8. Back to Chicago

The fifteenth anniversary dinner for the "Fat Man's Great Books Course" was the high-water mark for the Great Books in American culture. Within a decade feminist critics were entering into what would become a prolonged attack on the western canon, a battle taken up in subsequent years by a wide variety of scholars supporting multicultural diversity in the academy.

In the tradition of Adler, and with an educational philosophy similar to the one outlined by Hutchins in his Higher Learning in America, University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought professor Allan Bloom re-enlivened the Great Books debate in 1983. Bloom was an established scholar who had written on Shakespeare and translated Plato and Rousseau. His best-selling work, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), which he called "a report from the front," was a lightning rod in the tempest that surrounded the "Culture Wars" of the 1980s. To stem the tide of cultural relativism he saw destroying higher education, Bloom advocated renewed attention to the texts championed by Adler. The goal of a liberal education should be to equip students with the tools to investigate "the question, 'What is man?'" That enduring question, according to Bloom, is best addressed by the classics of western culture. Like Adler before him, Bloom stirred public debate both on and off campus.

University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum, then at Brown University, entered the debate in the pages of The New York Review of Books. She was disturbed primarily by Bloom's elitism, but she also thought his method of teaching the Great Books negated the possible benefits of such a curriculum. The kind of required lists Bloom advocated, she charged, "encourage passivity and reverence, rather than active critical reflection." Further, she rejected the way Great Books champions such as Bloom and Adler thought ahistorically about the texts and the ideas presented in them. For Nussbaum, a Great Books curriculum could foster a cohesive community with shared intellectual experience, but the books must be taught within an historical context to make them meaningful.

Adler was furious over Bloom's book--not so much for what it said as what it did not. Publicly calling Bloom a "fool," he wrote privately to inform him of his "apparent ignorance or neglect of [his] predecessors at the University of Chicago." The letter included a suggested reading list. First on the list was Adler's own Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1977).

In 1990, the Encyclopaedia Britannica issued a second edition of the Great Books of the Western World. The set expanded to sixty volumes by adding sixty-eight works by fifty-six authors not included in the original fifty-four-volume set. To many, the new revision purposefully ignored changes that had occurred on the intellectual and cultural landscape since the original set was issued nearly forty years earlier. What seemed to be a bit of cultural pretension in 1952 appeared as a cultural slap in 1990. The new edition gave a cursory nod to women writers (one volume is devoted to Jane Austen and George Eliot, and one title each by Willa Cather and Virgina Woolf was added), but writers of color were entirely ignored. While some critics responded to the new edition with a general rejection of canonical compilations, most attacked the set's lack of diversity. Adler reacted to the criticism as he always had, with vitriolic or dismissive arguments. He told The Nation that no African Americans were included on the editorial board "because no black American was necessary. No black American has written a great book." At the Library of Congress-sponsored book launch, he called the arguments for inclusivity "irrelevant."

While the furor surrounded the contents of the set, Encyclopaedia Britannica prepared to sell the set with the pragmatic realization that half of the market would be buying it not for reading, but "for furniture." Critics may have fretted that it contained so few women and no people of color, but Encyclopaedia Britannica was concerned that the original set contained too many olive bindings.

The Great Books never became fully integrated in the College's curriculum as Adler and Hutchins hoped, but since the 1940s, when the Great Books were first taught in University of Chicago extension courses, they have maintained a vital centrality in the University's adult education program. In seminars not unlike those developed by John Erskine eighty-five years ago, students in the University of Chicago's Graham School Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults discuss the Great Books "from Homer to Joyce." Echoing Adler, the Graham School web site explains: "the authors studied in the Basic Program were chosen not only because their ideas are valued but because their works are models of intellectual inquiry." The School's catalog reiterates Matthew Arnold's cultural ideal when it describes the books as those "containing the best that has been thought and written in the Western tradition." Invoking the liberal arts ideal, the program offers a direct interaction with the Great Books that produces a "good citizenship in a modern democracy" leading to "a good life."

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