What President Beilock Might Now Say to Revive Her Presidency.

This is a speech that I have taken the Liberty of drafting for Sian Beilock at this perilous time. If she were willing to channel the voice of a humanist, she could easily salvage her presidency right now.

To all Dartmouth students,

In the midst of our present crisis I find myself remembering these three lines from the opening of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY:

Midway through this journey of our life,

I found myself in a dark wood

For the straight way out was lost.

In the year 1300, Dante was a 35-year-old magistrate of Florence, a position of considerable power--though less power than is usually held by a president of Dartmouth College. But while away from Florence on a trip to Ravenne, he learned that he had been sentenced to banishment on perpetual pain of death, and he could never return to his native city.

For obvious reasons Dante speaks to me now. More than half of you have banished me from your hearts, and I obviously have volumes to learn about your hopes and wishes as well as about the history of Dartmouth College--the college I have come here to serve.

Let me say then first of all that I take my cue from one of the most remarkable men of our times.

In 1971, at the age of 43, he became the Governor of Arkansas, with a highly ambitious program of reform. Unfortunately, he overestimated what he could do in his first term, and at the end of it he was voted out of office--banished from the Governorship. So what did he do? He set out with a simple pledge to the people of Arkansas: give me a second chance and I'll show you that I have learned how to lead because I've learned HOW TO LISTEN.

Twenty years later, this man came to Dartmouth as a candidate for the presidency of the United States and electrified a capacity crowd in Alumni Hall. Though he had just been accused of dodging the draft as a young man as well as of having an extra-marital affair he electfrified a capacity crowd in Alumni Hall,, and though he finished second in the primaries, behind the local favorite, but it was enough to make him the comeback kid, and later that year he went on to the White House. When he left the presidency in 2000, he did so with an approval rating of 67%--higher than that of any other president since Franklin D Roosevelt in 1942 By now you know that I'm talking about Bill Clinton, a man who knew how to grow because he learned how to listen. And here now are the words I plan to live by: never stop growing, never stop learning, never stop giving to those around you--above all to this great college.

One thing I have come to realize is that in this time of crisis, we college presidents have failed you. In the face of the rabid partisanship and radically divisive partisanship that have struck this nation, we have failed to proclaim the humanistic values that colleges of truly liberal arts should be proclaiming. And the cardinal sin that we have committed--that I have committed--is to crush legitimate dissent, to meet it only with riot police rather than understanding. Let me assure you that I will never again make that mistake. Starting right now, in fact, I will reserve one full morning (or afternoon) for any any student or students who wish to see me, and I am perfectly willing to discuss divestment or any other topic with you. I am also more than willing to let you make your case for divestments directly to the Board of Trustees--though of course I can hardly promise to determine its votes.

The biggest mistake that we college presidents have made in this time of crisis is in failing to take the lead in proclaiming the humanistic values that it is our job to disseminate. Instead of doing our job, we have allowed ourselves to be bullied into crushing dissent. We have felt forced to take sides in the battle between pro-Palestinian protestors and those who condemn such protesters as "anti-semitic mobs." We have not called out this false dichotomy for the gross oversimplification that it is.

When protestors shout "intifada," they are accused of antisemitism and of backing the terrorists of Hamas. But intifada does not mean genocide. It means uprising against occupation, uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, uprising against seventy years of displacement from territory that had been occupied by Palestinians for hundreds of years. For Palestinians, the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 will always be a NAKBA, a disaster, and there will never be peace in that region until Israel can begin to recognize that its future is inseparable from that of Palestine, and there is absolutely no path to peace in the Middle East that does not require the independence of Palestine. That is why Thomas Friedman--a Jewish columnist for the NYT who had been studying the Middle East for 30 years--says that he destests the murderous policies of Bibi Netanyahu just as much as he detest the terrorism of Hamas.

Let me then say just why this problem cannot be solved by a simple calculation of which side is to blame.

According to Wikipedia, Hamas killed 1339 Israelis--mostly civilians-- on October 7.

In return, Israelis have now killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Since an estimated 70% of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, Israelis have taken more than TEN Palestinian lives for every ONE Israeli killed, and since Netanyahu has vowed to go on attacking Gaza until he has eradicated Hamas (an impossible goal), the ratio wll keep on rising. And according to Bibi, it's all the fault of Hamas.

But if you find this ratio appalling, Bibi Netanyahu will insist that Israel has the right to defend itself, above all the right to take limitless revenge for the murder of six million Jews, which President Biden has just solemnly commemorated yesterday, Holocaust Day.

My dear Jewish brothers and sisters, I know how much you have suffered, but I must ask this question: how long will you insist on the right to retaliate--on the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye ands a tooth for a tooth? Is there nothing more you can say than that you have a right to defend yourselves, which means a right to endless retaliation--with no responsibility for its impact on those you have displaced, and even now on West Bank Palestinians brutally abused by your settlers? Is there no other way?

In fact there is a way, and it is the way offered by the kind of truly liberal and liberalizing education that Dartmouth once offered under the great presidencies of Ernest Martin Hopkins and John Dickey in the middle of the twentieth century.

Suppose we seek some wisdom in our present crisis from the first epic poem ever written--Homer's ILIAD, a landmark in the history of war as well as in literature--a poem that is even now capable of iginiting fresh fire in our hearts because great literature is news that stay news. Take for instance the final book of the poem, where old King Priam of Troy goes to the tent of his mortal enemy, the Greek warrior named Achilles. Achilles has done worse to Priam than any member of Hamas has ever done to an Israeli. After killing Hector, the last of Priam's sons to die in battle against the Trojans, Achilles dragged his body three times around the walls of Troy. Can you imagine what it takes for the old king to visit this horrible man, to speak to him?

Yet that is what he does. He not only goes to Achilles but kneels at his feet, kisses "his terrible, man-killing hands," and begs him for the body of his son. "Revere the gods, Achilles!" he says. "Pity me in my own right, remember your own father!" (Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles 24. 561, 588-89). Priam thus prompts Achilles to remember not only his own dead father but also his beloved friend Patroclus, whom Hector had previously killed:

And overpowered by memory

both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely

for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching

before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself,

now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

Sobbing for a beloved father, a beloved son, and a beloved friend, sobbing for all the pain that each has suffered from the merciless cycle of killing and retaliation, these two men weep also for us. At this very moment in our own history, when grief for the many thousands of Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli bombing of Gaza clamors to drown out grief for the hundreds of Israelis killed by Hamas, could any Israeli ever weep with a Palestinian as Achilles did with Priam? Or are the two sides doomed forever to attack and revenge, to kill and retaliate, to relieve their desperation--as Milton's Satan does in Paradise Lost--"only in destroying"?

The only way out of this dilemma, I believe, is for colleges and universities across this land to restore the humanities to their rightful place in the curriculum. So I am here and now inviting the faculty to consider taking a bold step forward: offer a full year of humanities courses --three terms--to every single member of the fist year class. We would thus lay a truly liberal and liberalizing foundation on which to build the rest of your lives as truly educated men and women.

And let me quickly say that this will require no sacrifice of your marketability as college graduates. On the contrary, it will make you much more adaptable for a changing world in which Generative AI is already staring to detour the jobs normally offered to college graduates who majored in fields such as date prccessing. Again and again, business leaders themselves tell us the best way to prepare for success in business is to study the humanities.

But if the prospect of a year long course on the canonical works of white males still seems deadly to the sacred cause of diversity and deaf to the voices of ethnic minorities, to men and women of color, or of African ancestry, we must learn to hear anew the voices of the old. For the sheer folly of making diversity a zero-sum game --where every white male must be simply replaced by a non-white author of any other gender or ethnicity--becomes obvious once we really dive into great works of literature.

Almost fifty years ago, in an article published by the Massachusetts Review in 1977, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe threw a rhetorical bomb. He lobbed it at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), the story of a would-be emissary of European light whose insatiable lust for ivory among natives of the Belgian Congo drives him into madness and human sacrifice. But in Things Fall Apart (1958), his first novel, Achebe implicitly challenged Conrad's version of Africa by re-creating the pre-colonial life of southeastern Nigeria and its European invasion in the late nineteenth century. In 1977, his article made the challenge explicit. Meticulously analyzing Conrad's novel, he clearly showed how much it is driven by ignorance of native customs and the natives themselves, who barely qualify as human beings: they are simply "not inhuman." And from this analysis Achebe concluded that "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist."

But was he really a thoroughgoing racist? Could that epithet fairly describe a writer whose novella--whatever its blind spots-- had ruthlessly undermined the assumption that white men are inherently superior to blacks? Years after publishing his charge, Achebe himself in my hearing came close to retracting it. In the winter of 1990, when he visited Dartmouth as a Montgomery Fellow, I had the pleasure of meeting him at a seminar for Dartmouth faculty, and we could hardly resist asking him about The Heart of Darkness. His response was telling. Besides admitting that he had overstated his case against Conrad, he also stated that Heart of Darkness still deserves to be taught and read, just as he read it himself at the age of 14. And he clearly implied that it had played an important part--positive as well as negative-- in his own literary education. In short, even though Achebe may be best known for biting the hand that fed him, Conrad's novella undoubtedly fed the 14-year-old mind of the boy who grew up to write Things Fall Apart.

Furthermore, the notion that we have to jettison ancient poets such as Homer and Virgil or great English poets such as Milton in quest of high theory or the Great God of Diversity is just plain nuts. If you really want to be up to date with ground-breakingly original contemporary fiction about Black American life, why not teach the very latest novel by a Black writer named Percival Everett? Best known now as the author of a novel called Erasure (2001), which has just become one of the most astoundingly original movies ever made (American Fiction), Everett has also written a brand new novel called James (2024), which brilliantly re-writes Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of Huck's companion, the enslaved boy named Jim.

Is it not obvious that any student who wants to understand this new novel would need to know at least something about Huckleberry Finn first? And is it not equally obvious that killing off early white male authors to make way for "diverse" replacements is an act of reckless folly--on a par with killing off your own parents because you don't think they'll ever have anything useful to tell you?

And if you're willing to grant my point about Black male authors but still insist that Black woman authors can safely cut all their ties to dead white men, consider Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

As you may well know, Beloved is the story of a formerly enslaved Black woman named Sethe, who lives in Cincinnati in 1873 along with haunting memories of a double infanticide. She can never forget that twenty years earlier in ante-bellum Kentucky, she killed her own two children to save them from a life of slavery and sexual exploitation. Clearly this is the kind of story that no white male--dead or alive--could ever tell. Right? No: dead wrong.

Let's see what Toni Morrison brought to the writing of Beloved, which appeared in 1987, when she was 56 and had already published four other novels starting with The Bluest Eye (1970). As the second of four children from a working class Black family in Lorain, Ohio, she grew up knowing racism in its most virulent forms--partly from stories told by her father, who at age 15 had witnessed the lynching of two Black businessmen living on his street, and partly from her own experience: when she was about two years old, their landlord set fire to the family house while they were in it because they couldn't afford to pay the rent. But instead of feeling crushed by this episode, they laughed at the landlord--showing the kind of resilience that would sustain Morrison for the rest of her life.

And by the age of 18 she had decided that her life would also be driven by literature.

Enrolling at Howard University in 1949, she studied drama, earned a BA in English in 1953, and then a Master of Arts from Cornell in 1955 with a thesis on "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated." Remarkably enough, she actually thought she could learn something from the novels of two white authors.

Then, after teaching literature at Howard for seven years, she went to work for Random House, where in 1967 (at age 36) she became the first Black female senior editor in the fiction department. So by the time she sat down to write Beloved in the mid-1980s, she brought to the task a mind steeped in the history of literature as well as of personal memories: growing up Black in a segregated and often racist America. Since she had studied drama at Howard, the plays she read there surely included Medea, written in 431 BC. Its author was a white male playwright known as Euripides. But he was also the most radical feminist in the history of western literature, and anyone who knows something of that history can see how his play prefigures Morrison's novel.

To avenge herself on her faithless husband Jason, who marries another woman after she has sacrificed everything for him, Medea kills her own two children. Still more shocking, she literally gets away with the murder by means of a dragon-drawn chariot sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun. To spare her from being punished on earth for her deed, the chariot bears her up into the sky--as if in triumph over all beneath her.

And you're telling me that a white male wrote that in 431 BC? Yes indeed, I am, and I'm also telling you that if you really want to understand Morrison's novel, you'd better know that it grapples with just the kind of horrific question that great literature never shrinks from: what on earth could ever drive a woman to murder her own children? To kill these holy innocents--her own flesh and blood? And leave us not so much horrified by her deed as gasping in amazement at the sheer jaw-dropping audacity of her move?

You could of course say that these are two different women: while Medea seeks revenge against her faithless husband, Sethe aims to spare her children. But in each case the deed is the same. So most of all, the originality of Beloved springs from its fascinating oscillation between Sethe's "present" life in postwar Cincinnati and the flashbacks to her agonizing past as a woman enslaved in ante-bellum Kentucky. But the crucial point here is what Toni Morrison learned from Euripides: it's possible for a female character to win some measure of our sympathy even while performing the most horrific deed imaginable.

Literature is not a dissectible corpse. It's a living body that can be mutilated just as surely by amputating its past as by aborting its future. To begin to grasp its whole body, we must begin to grasp the continuity that makes it a truly living tradition--not an inert line of dead white males with nothing to say to the carefree children of diversity. Ponder the richly ironic words of Mark Twain:

This new sequence of humanities courses has unlimited potential. It can only liberalize the minds of our students; it can not only break the mind-forged manacles that have driven us so miserably apart; it can integrate all of our courses by showing how they feed into the humanities. By meams of fully zoomable guest lectures, anyone on the faculty who wishes to showcase his or her teaching talents can offer a lecture that is linked to the first year works being studied. I have lately learned, for instance, that the history of my own specialty--cognitive neuroscience--is fascinatingly intertwined with the origins of English Romantic poetry.

So I hereby invite the Dartmouth faculty to take this bold step forward, which is really a way of reviving one of the greatest traditions of our past. Let Dartmouth College say once again, in the words of Terence, "I am human; nothing that is human is alien to me: Let us begin to learn, begin to grow, and begin to restore to this nation what it so desperately needs: the lifelong fruits of a truly liberal education.