CAN DARTMOUTH REVIVE OLD WISDOM WITHOUT SILENCING NEW VOICES? LET'S HAVE ALL FIRST YEAR STUDENTS TAKE ONE FULL YEAR OF HUMANITIES COURSES
PRÉCIS. First, I hold these truths to be self-evident: that most first year college students have only a vague idea of what they want to become and of how to get there. Second, given the jaw-dropping price of a college education, they are now being dangerously and even catastrohically misled into believing that they should use college as a vocational school to acquire skills such as a data mining and quantitative analysis, which--they have come to expect--are immediately marketable. But since jobs of that kind may soon be done in seconds by Generative Ai, and since business leaders repeatedly tell us that the best path to success in business leads right through the liberal arts and especially the humanities, Dartmouth must start now to require one full year of humanities courses for all first year students. There is simply no other way of ensuring that they are all liberally educated and thus adequately equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world.
Over the past few decades, Dartmouth in general and the English Department in particular have become far more diverse than they were n in the fall of 1965,, when I joined the department. While it was once all male and all white, its white males have shrunk to 14 even as its total number has grown to more than 30, including 10 white women, 3 Black women, one Black man, 3 Asian women, and one Native American woman.
Unfortunately, however, this new and welcome diversity of gender, color, and ethnicity in the English department faculty has precipitated a major shrinkage in its attention to major authors and its commitment to the great tradition of the humanities, which--whether we like it or not--will always be powerfully inspired by the canonical works of white males. But I am here to argue that now more than ever, we need their enduring wisdom.
Just now across the political landscape of this country spreads a vast toxic tide of contempt for all things old, white, and male--above all for Joe Biden, whose long-accumulated wisdom and whose fifty years of experience in national and international politics count for absolutely nothing--at least to the MAGA millions entranced by the would-be flaming youth of his fulminating rival. In his passionate State of the Union speech of March 7, President Bidewent far to demolish this gross underestimation of his vitality and sense of purpose. But he has not yet vanquished the contempt for age and ancient wisdom that has usurped our national discourse. On the contrary, it goes hand in hand with a consensus that has been overtaking institutions of higher learning in this country for the past several decades.
Since the list price of a college education is now fast approaching one hundred thousand dollars per year at colleges such as Dartmouth, students have been led to believe that they can no longer afford to study ancient white canonical authors such as Plato or Aristotle or epic poets such as Homer or Milton or even the reigning god of playwrights, William Shakespeare. Supposedly, these old authors are no use to young men and women facing the practical challenges of today's world. What they need, they are told, are marketable skills in fields such data mining, engineering, high tech, and hard science. Above all they must learn the fine arts of quantification: how to count, even if they end up knowing--in the words of Oscar Wilde-- the price of everything and the value of nothing.
But has anyone stopped to wonder about the price we have paid at Dartmouth for marginalizing the study of the humanities, for gradually but nonetheless relentlessly ripping out the very heart of what John Dickey once called "the |liberal and liberating arts"? After all, Dartmouth still has a Humanities Division, does it not?
Yes, but did you know that until 1958, all first-year students at Dartmouth took one full year (then two semesters) of humanities, moving from ancient authors such as Plato and Homer to modern authors such as William Faulkner and Albert Camus? But when semesters gave way to quarters (because our scientific colleagues thought quarters were more efficient), those two semesters shrank to just two quarters--only one of which kept something of the intellectual heft and challenging thrust of its year-long precursor.
During my first few years at Dartmouth in the late sixties, nearly all first-year students read Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradose Lost, and Melville's Moby Dick. Yes indeed, we force-fed them like Strasbourg geese on the canonized works of white men. We studied a play about the agonizingly fraught relations between parents and their children (how totally irrelevant is that?). We read a gigantic epic poem about a Satanic character who leads his followers into a doomed rebellion against legitimate authority (wholly irrelevant to our Trumpian times, right?) and about a couple who come to grief because of an argument involving the woman's quest for independence (still more irrelevant, right?). And Moby Dick! Good God. A crazy story about a madman's quest for revenge on the white whale that chomped his leg off? (Whoops! Come to think of it, Trump has just vowed to avenge himself on all those who chopped his second term off, but of course that's irrelevant too--riht?).) Anyway, two hours of Jaws is surely worth more than the thirty hours it would take to slog through Melville's turgid prose even if the magnificent soliloquies of Ahab sometimes do rival in eloquence and poignancy the poetry of Milton and the mesmerizingly dramatic force of Shakespeare. SPOLIER ALERT: I am of course making fun of all those who find great works of literature irrelevant and unnecessary to our lives.
But 1970, however, the English Department had decided that great works of literature were no longer necessary to all our students' lives, so the department stopped requiring that all sections of first-year English read Paradise Lost, and from there it was just a short step to section instructor's choice. Students could read anything at all chosen by the instructor, which meant of course that first-year English was no longer a common rite of initiation into the company of the humanistically educated--no longer the kind of transformative experience that stretched young minds as they must be stretched if they are ever to grow beyond the mental playpens of adolescence. Or grow together, by reading and probing with each other a common body of literary works. Today there is not one single work of literature or philosophy--not one--that all Dartmouth students may be presumed to know.
Yet strangely enough, even the oldest of epics sometimes speak directly to the greatest crises of our own time. Take for instance Homer's Iliad, which ends up with one of the most powerful scenes of wartime grief ever written. After Achilles kills Hector, the very last of Priam's sons to die at the hands of the Greeks, the old king goes to Achilles, 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.
(Iliad, trans. Fagles 24. 594-99)
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"?
Questions like these can make the oldest of epics burn with fresh fire in the hearts of today's students. 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.
I have taught and studied and written about literature throughout my adult life for the simple reason that I love it. One big bad reason why the humanities are shedding so many students right now is that too many of its professors--especially professors of literature--don't love it. They strive instead to enlist it in wars against racism, misogyny, homophobia, capitalism, power in all forms, and every kind of foundational assumption which they believe literature is ordained to deconstruct. Though generally familiar with such landmark studies as Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text (1975), they stigmatize reading for pleasure: if you savor so much as a single well-wrought sentence, they believe, you sacrifice the political value of a text--especially its deconstructive energy--to a purely aesthetic frisson that can feed only the jaded appetites of the elite, not the hungry mouths of the politically oppressed.
If that sounds both reductive and reactionary, let me give you one good example of exactly what I mean.
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 nHeart 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.
Heart of Darkness has much to teach any aspiring writer. Consider just this single sentence about the River Congo:
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted upon
the earth and the big trees were kings.
This one sentence could easily generate a whole class if not a whole course in the art of writing. First of all, the parallel structure of its opening clause neatly brackets voyaging through space with travelling through time. Though I have co-authored several textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, I have belatedly realized something never mentioned by any of them: one very good way of learning to write well is quite simply listening to the body and reviving its earliest moves. Long before we learn to talk, let alone to write, we learn coordination, including parallel structure. Instinctively we start to crawl by reaching forward first with one hand and the opposite leg, then with the other hand and the other leg, and so on. Essentially, Conrad's sentence re-enacts our very first moves. It starts by crawling along with parallel phrases about space and time.
But that's just for a start. Consider the metaphor that comes next, when "vegetation rioted upon the earth." Could anything be more startling than this way of picturing vegetation, which we commonly visualize as just sitting there and vegging out? In a poem called "To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell once compared his love to a huge, sluggish vegetable that would grow "vaster than empires, and more slow." In the state of Virginia some years ago, highway builders made the great mistake of planting Kudzu on the surrounding land--and now Kudzu engulfs the highway unless it is cut back every single day. Whether or not you've ever seen such runaway growth, Conrad's metaphor ignites in your imagination a whole new picture of vegetation as something not just alive but running wild.
No charge of racism, however justified, can erase that verbal picture--or the picture of big trees as kings. To study a sentence such as this is to learn what I have long believed. As teachers of literature, nothing we do is more important--more important-- than cultivating within our students a profound and lasting admiration for the beauty as well as power of the English language as deployed in works of literature that have stood the test of time. At their best, they radiate a kind of beauty that transcends the humanities, that permeates the sciences as much as the arts. In mathematics and physics as well as in literature, Marilynne Robinson has recently dared to read configurations of beauty as the nothing less than "the signature of God."
So I don't for a moment underestimate or overlook the power of literature: its power to unmask hypocrisy, self-delusion, cruelty, and all of the ways in which we may blind ourselves to our own complicity in oppressing the powerless. But I firmly maintain that literature works quite as much by means of beauty as well as power, and that great literature embodies both.
Hence the question now commonly, anxiously, and repeatedly asked--"Why do we need the humanities?"--is exactly the question I aim to answer with my proposal. When the most fundamental stages of education
seem almost eclipsed by the wizardry of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGBT, which promise to do all our reading and writing for us, I believe it is high time we reclaimed them for our students and ourselves.
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--or anyone, for that matter--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, Professor Heffernan, 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:
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly
stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was
astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Can Dartmouth find a way to accelerate this kind of discovery as its students work their way through the first year? And when the MAGA millions in this country are now caught up in blind devotion to Trump, is it not obvious that more than ever before, we need leaders deeply versed in all the lessons that the humanities have to teach us about our history and about ourselves?
Furthermore, if you ask me whether or not these lessons would serve only the children of the rich and over-privileged, let me tell you about a remarkable Black teacher named Bill Cook, who joined the Dartmouth English Department in 1969 after teaching English and Drama to high school students in Princeton, New Jersey. In the summer of 1969 he came up to help run a "bridge" program for newly enrolled Black students. To prepare them for our normal first year English class, whose reading list then included all of Milton's Paradise Lost, he spent the summer leading them through the first five "books" of the poem--a little less than half of it. If you wonder how on earth these students--or any other students new to Milton's Latinate syntax and densely allusive texture-- could possibly find their way through even part of this great English epic, you simply had to see how Bill could dramatize it for his students. He was not only a poet himself but also a fount of rhetorical resonance and a brilliant amateur actor who eventually played--among other roles-- a captivating Falstaff in a production of Shakespeare's Merry Wives at Hopkins Center. All of these talents helped him to make students hear and feel the power of Milton's rhetoric--especially in the speeches of Satan whenhe dares to defy what he calls the "tyranny" of God, which now reminds me of nothing so much as Trump denouncing the would-be fascism of the impeccably fair Judge Juan Merchan.
Let me say one more thing to those who may still believe that reviving the humanities at Dartmouth would be a waste of time for any student bent on a career in business. For a start, consider why business needs the humanities just as much as the humanities need business and the funds it provides. A brand new essay on the topic, which has just appeared in The Globe and Mail for January 27 comes not from any management consultant or tech wizard but from Ira Wells, Professor of Literature at Victoria College, University of Toronto, but he repeatedly quotes from business leaders who argue with overwhelming evidence that the best preparation for success in business is a solid education in the liberal arts and above all in the humanities.
Wells concludes as follows:
"The humanities provide students with space to contemplate
their own ends, their life's purpose, which is not to be
undervalued in the midst of a mental-health crisis, and is not
reducible to educational or career outcomes. A human being is
not to be 'usurped by his profession,' wrote John Henry
Newman in his book, The Idea of the University -- advice we are
still learning to heed. We can recommit to the reciprocity
between the two -- or embrace the economic and spiritual
immiseration that is our only alternative.
So I turn at last to our brand new dynamic president, Sian Beilock-with an urgent answer to the question she herself has posed in her very first interview with Abigail Jones of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Rather than dwelling on her past triumphs or even her present standing as the first woman president of Dartmouth and the youngest president in the ivy league, Beilock said:
"I don't feel there's a time in my life I wish I could go back to. . . . . If anything, I wish I'd taken more time to enjoy instead of always looking at what's next, which is a common theme in my life: What am I going to do next? How am I going to achieve?"
President Bdeilock, since you have already laid out five specific ways in which you plan to answer this question for Dartmouth, may I suggest you consider a sixth? If you truly believe that Dartmouth must become a place of "brave spaces," are you brave enough to invite the faculty to revive the study of humanities at Dartnouth by restoring the one full year of humanities courses that were required of all first-year students until 1958? Are you brave enough to make Dartmouth once again a fountain of essential education, a deep well of the truly liberal and liberating arts?
During the sixty years that I have spent in Hanover since arriving in 1965, Dartmouth has never been led by a humanist. Its presidents have included a diplomat (John Dickey), two mathematicians (John Kemeny and Phil Hanlon), a businessman (David McLaughin) a specialist in the financing of health care (the abysmal Jim Yong Kim), a lawyer (Jim Freedman), and an historian (Jim Wright). Among these seven, John Dickey was the great champion of the liberal arts and James Freedman was a true lover of literature who shared my fascination with Joyce's Ulysses and even sat in on one of my seminar sessions on it. So it seems to be quite possible that a brilliant, young, dynamic neuroscientist might be capable of truly recognizing the value of the humanities and willing to do whatever it takes to let us re-establish a full year of humanities for all first year students as the indispensable foundation of an educated life. If she does this, I believe the overwhelming majority of students who take this course will remember and cherish it as the single most transformative experience of their lives--especially because they would all be reading the same list of major works together--and thus forming bonds of communication that would be intellectual as well as social.
Since first year students in he Class of 2027 now number 1209, I envision a course taught in 60 sections of 20 students each. It would require a team of TEN humanists who would each teach two sections per quarter, six sections a year--plus perhaps one or two more to fill in for staff on sabbatical. (Those who teach four years in a row might be given a whole year off every five years.) To endow a teaching staff of 10-12 full time salaries averaging 100K per year would require an endowment of $25 million yielding--at 5%-- 1.25 million a year. A further &25 million could endow a Humanities Building: a great naming opportunity. So the whole thing could be handsomely done for 50 million dollars, and Dartmouth has just raised almost eighty times that amount--3.77 billion dollars--in its present campaign, Is 1/80th of that figure too much to pay for reviving what we and the whole country so urgently need right now?
Also, since weekly essays would be a vital part of the humanities sequence, you could launch it simply and inexpensively by first absorbing the Writing Center and assigning its coaching duties to the new Humanities team. One or more members of the present Writing Center staff--whichever of them is willing and able--could then work under the guidance of a single new hire: a specialist in humanities teaching who would take the lead in designing the First Year Humanities curriculum and directing it.
Two teachers could then offer a total of twelve sections, accommodating 240 students, and if those places were not filled by volunteers, all applicants to Dartmouth would be told that any one of them might be required to fill them. Once the FYH staff reached ten, the team would manage all first year students.
Furthermore, by means of plenary guest lectures to be given during an X hour each week, this year long Humanities sequence could fully open itself to faculty members from all departments. During a week in which students read Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, an atomic theorist from the physics department might give a guest lecture on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura --the first poetic exposition of atomic theory. Students reading Goethe's impassioned Sorrows of Werther (1774) might get a guest lecture on the categorical rationality of Goethe's contemporary, Immanuel Kant. And along with Wordsworth's account of the French Revolution in his autobiographical epic, The Prelude, a historian could offer a guest lecture on the Revolution itself. Such lectures would not only link the humanities to both of the other divisions but also showcase the teaching talents of any faculty members who wish to draw these students into their upper class courses.
Ever since I joined the Dartmouth English Department in the fall of 1965, I have had the great experience of continuing my own education as well as teaching others, for I firmly believe that a teacher must never stop learning. Thanks to Dartmouth and especially to a teaching load that allowed me ample time for my own research and writing, I have spread the wings of my curiosity far beyond the original boundaries of my dissertation (and first book) on Wordsworth's theory of poetry. Besides immersing myself in the works of great authors ranging from Homer to Joyce, I have been free to study the fascinating relations between literature and art as well as between literature and history. And as a small token of my thanks, I offer this final testament to the humanities--and a dying wish that Dartmouth College may not only revive them but also re-integrate them with every new work of literature that represents our present selves in all our diversities --whether in income, race, gender, or ethnic category. Let us henceforth live, learn, study, and grow by the undying words of Terence; "Humanus sum; nihil humanus puto alienenum a me." I am human; I consider nothing that is human alien from me."
Brashly casting myself as a one-man Committee on the Future of the Humanities at Dartmouth (CFH), here specifically is what I recommended for all first-year students with no exceptions:
1. A three-term course in the humanities ranging all the way from classical philosophy and the classical epic to modern works of literature such as Joyce's Ulysses and Toni Morrison's Beloved.
2. To offer this course to 1000-plus first-years in sections of no more than 20 students each, establish a new department (First Year Humanities) and hire 10 humanists--mainly teachers of literature and philosophy-- to staff it.
3. Each year, a steering committee of the FYH will set the curriculum, which may include excerpts from major works such as Paradise Lost, but all sections of this three-term long humanities course will read the same set of works, and all teachers would commit to the full three terms, though they would be free to switch sections from one term to another. Faculty outside the first year team would be welcome to join the team for a year if one or more of the team is on sabbatical or wishes to teach in another department. This system will ensure that every first-year student can share his or her first-year reading experience with any other student in the class. It will also ensure that all Dartmouth students who advance to the sophomore level are steeped in the same rich tradition of humanistic literature--as the soil in which their minds will continue to grow.
4. By 8:00 AM on each day of class, every student may be asked to submit to his or her instructor 1-2 pages of informal commentary--anything at all -- on any brief passage that he or she finds provocative in the reading assigned for that day. This will ensure that every student will be ready to say something about the reading--and also that the teacher will know exactly whom to call on for comment on particular passages. (I used this method for years in my Joyce seminar and it really works!)
5. Via guest lectures fully Zoomable at any time by all frist year students, faculty in all divisions of the college would be welcome to showcase their specialties and teaching talents to every single student in the first year class—provided only that the lecture wouild be linked in some way to the great tradition of humanistic texts. A physicist, for instance, might offer a lecture on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, the first poetic expositon of atomic theory. To complement the study of Milton’s Paradise Lost, an historian might lecture on the execution of Charles I, the rise of Cromwell, and the civil wars of 17th century England, and a mathematician could lecture on Newton's Principia Mathematica of the later 17th century. After students read Paradise Lost, which brings them to the end of the 17th century, a cognitivce neuroscientist such as our new president could show them how John Locke radically discards all inherited knowledge and faith by arguing that the mind is a tabula rasa on which is written the only things we can claim to know: our sensations. From there a specialist in the Enlightnement such as Sam Levey could take students through the radically skeptical epistemology of Hume to the categorical rationality of Kant, whose theories of perception directly influenced the English Romaniic poets, especially Coleridge (best known for "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), whose theory of imagination grows out of Kant. And as students work their way through the 19th century, an anthropolgist could offer a guest lecture on Darwin's Origin of Species. Do you not see how this kind of participation can leaad all Dartmouth students to see how profoundly and extensively this new program could liberalize their minds--as a solid foundation on which to build their Dartmouth experience?
6. Papers: 500 words on the week's reading due at the Friday class, 2500 word term paper due at the final class.. 5000 word term paper due at final class for spring term.
7. Informal commentaries will not be graded at all, but will get comments from the instructor. Weekly papers and all term papers will be meticulously analyzed for clarity, concision, continuity, and cogency, because this will be a writing course as much as a reading course. And students will be encouraged to revise their work and submit for a higher grade.
Colleagues, if you take this bold step, I am betting that every single Dartmouth student who takes this year long course will remember it ever after as the single most transformative experience of his/ her life. It will also bond the class more profoundly than I think even you can imagine.
So that's my proposal. Why not take a swing at it?
Just as the Departments of Math and Computer Science have taken their stands in Kemeny and Haldeman at the northwest corner of Baker--Berry, the new Humanities building--named for its most generous donor--could take up its stand at the southeast corner of Baker-Berry-in the space between its east wing and Rauner, where there is already a basement under the ground. Pedestrian access through this space can be easily preserved by the kind of archway that now passes under the Hood.
With four stories (three above ground, one below), this building could readily accommodate all members pf the first year Humanities teaching team plus the Writing Center and the Leslie Humanities Center as well as one or two seminar rooms and / or meeting rooms. And since the basement is already dug, I strongly suspect that this building would cost not over ten million dollars, Which means that this whole project could be endowed and handsomely housed for no more than 37 million: ONE PERCENT of what Dartmouth has just raised in its present campaign!
Could any simple step that Dartmouth might take into its future be more irresistible as well as more transformative?
If we are brave enough to take it, Dartmouth can lead the way back to what we now so desperately need in this country: the restoration of truly liberal—as distinct from vocational—education.
James A.W. Heffernan
Hanover, NH
March 8, 2024