Liberal Arts, the Way They Ought to Be
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? (Bloomsbury) seems at first glance yet another conservative salvo in the culture wars. An indictment of university liberal arts departments and a defense of the Western canon, the book’s litany of concerns echoes Allan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind and its many successors.
But if that’s what the book was, it would be more difficult to recommend. Haven’t we heard all the arguments before? Why Read?, a short book in long essay format, is something quite different. Expanding on his famous Harper’s Magazine essay, "On the Uses of the Liberal Arts: As Light Entertainment for Bored College Students," Edmundson combines a typically leftist concern about the university as business with the traditionally rightist concern that the university no longer teaches what Matthew Arnold called "the best which has been thought and said in the world." The result is a passionately argued, but ultimately sound how-to for today’s teachers, students, and anyone who wants a liberal education.
Edmundson’s condemnation of the commercialization of colleges is not new, but what is refreshing is whom he holds responsible. Most critics have placed the blame solely on money-hungry administrators. But Edmundson, the NEH/Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia, says his fellow instructors are just as culpable.
"When they [students] get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and preprofessional training are theirs, if that’s what they want," he writes. "The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that’s fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they’ve been living in."
Professors don’t push their students to immerse themselves in the difficult classics. Instead, teachers aim at being popular, with the goal of giving students an enjoyable experience rather than a learning experience. (Edmundson wittily compares the obligatory class evaluations to television pilot ratings, with their numerical scores and emphasis on whether or not the professor provided a "fun" hour each week.) "Universities have become sites not for human transformation, but for training and for entertaining," he laments. The great books are merely "a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside."
Unlike so many college liberal arts professors (and here I speak from experience), Edmundson actually cares about the books he is charged with teaching. "Reading woke me up," he declares. "It took me from a world of harsh limits into expanded possibility."
There is only so much we experience directly. Books tell us of other worlds, introducing us to new people and new ideas we might not come across in our own lives. We can become better people by challenging our beliefs through what we read. Books radically changed Edmundson’s life. He wants the same for his students.
At the core of a liberal arts education, he says, should lie four basic questions: "Who am I? What might I become? What is this world in which I find myself? How might it be changed for the better?" Anyone who knows the state of higher education in America today will immediately recognize how radical this is. Too many professors instead ask questions like, Was Chaucer gay? How many contradictions can you find in this work? And was Shakespeare gay?
Even more revolutionary, Edmundson often begins his classes by inviting his students to share their conception of God. Like many of his colleagues, Edmundson is an agnostic. But as he says, "We secular professors often forget that America is a religion-drenched nation." Through religion, the professor can access his students’ most deeply beliefs. He advises other teachers, "Uncover central convictions about politics, love, money, the good life. It’s there that, as Socrates knew, real thinking starts."
Unlike many of his colleagues, Edmundson doesn’t want the university to be an assembly line churning out progressives (although he certainly is one himself). He believes students should be encouraged to use literature to work toward their own highest aspirations.
Edmundson should be applauded for his thoughtful, nuanced approach to a well-tread subject. Both liberals and conservatives should find much of value here. The canon, for example, becomes not a collection of Dead White Males, but the books that can best help us to live our lives well.
But his unapologetically personal approach at times seems like literature as therapy. One wants to dampen his enthusiasm just slightly, to avert a generation of readers from always wondering, "What can I get out of this?" There are important things one can get from literature besides personal transformation--knowledge and enjoyment are only two.
*****
Bestselling author Anne Rice is leaving her famous New Orleans mansion and moving to a Tuscan-style villa in La Jolla, California, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. The new six-bedroom, 10-bathroom mansion is complete with an exercise room, spa and lap pool, and media room. Look for Lestat to become blonder, buffer, and more likely to complain he can’t get a reservation at Spago.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
