I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. We are not better or worse than anyone else. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. However, Menand wraps this all up by arguing something that caused me the same alarm that has called Montás to the academy’s battlements: that humanists such as Montás “need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos” and that “the idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.” Menand concludes: I’ll further note that Montás is a colleague and friend.)
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(I should note, at this point, that I am a fan of Menand - his book, “ The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” is a feast. Menand doesn’t dismiss the value of studying these texts, and notes that he teaches many of them. In the coming New Yorker, Menand writes, “The conflict these professors are experiencing between their educational ideals and the priorities of their institutions is baked into the system” and is an extension of the “dispute over the purpose of college” and that the definition of a liberal education extends across academic disciplines, not just to the traditional canon. The New Yorker staff writer and Harvard English professor Louis Menand seems unimpressed, seeing Montás as well as Arnold Weinstein, a Brown comparative literature professor who has written a similar book just now, of overselling Great Books courses and undervaluing the aims and contributions of other academic curriculums, including in the sciences. Specifically, he stipulates, “The animating argument of this book is for liberal education as the common education for all - not instead of a more practical education but as its prerequisite” and adds, “I want nurses, computer scientists, accountants, engineers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and professionals of every kind, to be liberally educated.” In “ Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” Montás explains why he fears, as many have, that universities have come to put more value on, and resources into teaching, the sciences and more readily marketable skills, as opposed to emphasizing the mind-expanding and personal development that students gain from a rigorous colloquy around certain hallowed texts. Now, he’s written a combination memoir and call to arms. This is a slate of courses required of all Columbia undergraduates that includes a major component on what is commonly referred to as the Great Books. from Columbia and ultimately came to run its Core Curriculum program. Roosevelt Montás came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child, got his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D.
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