The Canons Under Fire

By Ezra Bowen

For two years a debate has raged at Stanford University and reverberated through scores of other schools over a question that could set new directions for American higher education. The issue: Should students be required to read a fixed core of works on Western civilization, and, if so, what should be in it? The heart of the dispute at Stanford has been whether to amend or remove from the university's freshman Western culture courses a roster of 15 prescribed classics. Many scholars regard those works, ranging from Homer and Dante to Darwin and Freud, as part of a sacred canon. But revisionists, including many blacks, Hispanics and women, want to build a new, theme-based program rather too cleverly called CIV (short for Culture, Ideas and Values).

"Nobody is questioning the value of continuing to teach the great works of Western culture," insists CIV Proponent Thomas Wasow, dean of undergraduate studies. The fear that just such a question was being raised, however, brought bellows of protest from academic conservatives like Education Secretary William Bennett. A devout classicist, he accused Stanford's revisionists of "academic intimidation," claiming that a "very vocal minority is attempting to overpower a less vocal majority." Dismantling the core curriculum, he warned, amounted to "trashing Plato and Shakespeare."

Last week Stanford's faculty senate voted 39-4 for a compromise revision of their canon. This fall the original 15 books, all of them written by white, Western males, will be pared down. Out goes Homer, as well as Darwin and Dante. The six new requirements are unspecified works from Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx. Next year Stanford's Western Culture Program will be formally replaced by CIV. All freshmen will read works "from at least one" non-European source chosen by the professor, who is required to give "substantial attention to issues of race, gender and class."

Faculty members point out that the new list, which was never meant to be exhaustive, will be supplemented by readings that will vary depending on the emphasis of different CIV teachers. Yet the compromise is a clear signal that Stanford intends to recognize the essential pluralism of Western civilization -- in literary as well as social terms. The major remaining question is how far professors will go in bringing the study of women and minorities into CIV courses.

All the way, if hard-core revisionists are able to suit the word to the action. "We want the idea of a canon eliminated," insists William King, 21, chairman of Stanford's Black Student Union. "The idea that there could be a core list is Eurocentric and biased." Similar opinions are heard at other schools. At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Professor Arnold Krupat declares flatly that there is nothing sacred or broadly cultured about any such canon. In fact, he claims, the idea "is almost exclusively Wasp, male and East Coast."

Many professors who grew up on the turbulent campuses of the 1960s now challenge the notion that any particular book should be required. They point out that classic literature courses have ignored books not written by white males. Says Cornell Professor Henry Gates, architect of a new 30-volume anthology of pre-1910 works by black women: "The center of power has shifted within traditional ((studies)) as a result of the growing presence of women, blacks and people of color." Duke's Barbara Hernnstein Smith, president of the influential Modern Language Association, notes approvingly that "writings by women and black authors are now being studied and taught" right alongside the old canon. Examples of the new eclecticism:

-- Sarah Lawrence's Krupat starts his American Lit students with parallel readings in Genesis and Iroquois creation stories (which he sees as part of a neglected oral literary tradition). He dropped selections from William Faulkner in favor of Michael Gold's Jews Without Money, a tale of turn-of-the- century Manhattan.

-- At Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, English Chairman Gary Waller assigns his classes the recent cult film Blue Velvet for comparisons with works by T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.

-- In the University of Arizona's future Western Civ courses, James Baldwin may stand with the seventh-century B.C. poet Sappho, while the Homeric Hymn to Demeter shares center stage with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Such mix-and-match ideas are anathema to the likes of the University of Chicago's Allan Bloom, best-selling author of The Closing of the American Mind, who loudly deplores the blending of noble old wheat with trendy chaff. Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, criticizes the broadening of core lists as a form of "intellectual affirmative action" rather than a fresh infusion of literary blood. Balch complains that revisionists "have designed a project to alter the nature of civilization itself."

To confirmed revisionists, such remarks seem like more of the moss-crusted obstructionism they feel has slowed scholarly progress for centuries. They point to the huffy removal of Sir Thomas More from Oxford by his father in the 15th century because the curriculum had added the newly "with it" subject of Greek. They like to recall the warning of Princeton President James McCosh in 1884 that removing Latin and Greek requirements would leave "the whole ancient world . . . unknown even to our educated men."

Given the probing, contentious nature of scholarly minds, any permanent settlement of these centuries-old issues seems unlikely. Despite the soul searching at Stanford and elsewhere, no reading list is ever going to satisfy everyone. Nor should it. Even friends of Stanford's original 15 readings concede that they constituted a mighty loose little canon -- for example, two pieces by Freud, but no Shakespeare and not a word by any American writer or political philosopher, such as James Madison.

Nonetheless, the debate may be the healthiest thing to have happened around academe in years. "I think this will open up issues that Bennett and Bloom tried to close," says Paul Seaver, a Stanford history professor. "Namely, what is the nature of our culture, and how do we educate our young people to become knowledgeable participants in the culture?"

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston and Charles Pelton/San Francisco