Rescuing Socrates

How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

Roosevelt Montás

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691224381
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University's renowned Core Curriculum, one of America's last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás's life. In doing so, the book drives home what it's like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

CHAPTER 1

Turning My Attention Back to Myself: Saint Augustine

I was not the only Columbia student reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions in January 1992. In fact, the entire first-year class was reading it that same week as part of the required year-long course in Western literary classics, Literature Humanities. The twenty-two students that made up my section of “Lit Hum” would come together for two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays to talk about this and other “great books.” Our teacher was Wallace Gray, a legendary English professor who was already an old man by the time I took his section of Lit Hum.

I signed up for Professor Gray’s section because I had overheard someone in front of me in the registration line saying that his brother had gone to Columbia and taken Lit Hum with Gray, “and he told me it changed his life.” This was a nice bit of what sociologists call “social capital” that I just happened to snatch from an August breeze in front of Pulitzer Hall. The College’s admissions literature had claimed that I’d learn a lot from just being around my fellow students. Maybe this was part of what they meant. So I filled out the appropriate circles in the “bubble sheet” with a number 2 pencil and started reading in earnest the first six books of the Iliad, which had been assigned for the first class.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,

hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

since that time when first there stood in division of conflict

Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.¹

So began my Columbia education, as has that of the tens of thousands of Columbia freshmen (and, as of 1983, freshwomen) who have taken Literature Humanities. The course was introduced as a first-year requirement in the fall of 1937, taught by an interdisciplinary faculty of mixed rank that included Jacques Barzun, Mark Van Doren, and Lionel Trilling. The Iliad was then, and has continued to be, the first book on the syllabus. Like probably most other high school seniors headed for Columbia, I had secured a copy of the Iliad soon after my admission. Actually, I got a copy even before admission as a Christmas present from my high school social studies teacher, John Philippides. Mr. Philippides had encouraged me to apply to Columbia, and—I realize in retrospect—was doing his best to prepare me for it. Trying to make sense of this monster of a text is an intellectual initiation that all Columbia students undergo, a kind of rite of passage.

Even though I had read these lines half a dozen times already, they still seemed thoroughly strange on that sultry afternoon—dissonant, stilted, and jagged in a way I found difficult to parse. Goddess. Hades. Heroes. Souls. Bodies. Dogs. How do you sing anger? How do you sing devastation? Does it mean more than singing about anger, about devastation? It must. Does the poet mean “Goddess, sing through me”? Or does he mean “Sing, goddess, and I will listen”? What sense can I make, and how, of a voice from maybe 3,000 years ago in a language that no longer exists? What value could there be in my reading this and thinking about it seriously? And talking about it? What insights would my professor, who was surely a very distinguished and learned person, transmit about this bizarre poem?

These questions, and more, proliferating and cascading without stop with each page I read, would soon begin to find answers, or at least find a place in my growing awareness of the dimensions of my ignorance. And each book on the syllabus—the Odyssey, the Hymn to Demeter, the Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles’s Theban plays, Euripides’s Bacchae, Aristophanes’s Clouds, Herodotus’s and Thucydides’s histories—all in the first few weeks of my new life living in a dorm and being a Columbia student—each of these books would bring its own bewilderments, provocations, and recognitions.

o o o

Literature Humanities was modeled on a course invented by John Erskine in 1919 at Columbia College called General Honors. The course was based on the simple but radical idea that undergraduates would benefit from an intensive, non-disciplinary course consisting of reading, usually in translation, one classic each week in literature, philosophy, and history. “Why not treat the Iliad and the Odyssey and other masterpieces,” asked Erskine, “as though they were recent publications, calling for immediate investigation and discussion?”² Anyone not familiar with the inner workings of academia might wonder that this isn’t already a standard part of a college education and would probably never suspect the difficulty and, in most cases, the impossibility of offering such a course.

To begin with, as Erskine discovered, “It immediately became clear that the faculty could not define a great book; at least they couldn’t agree on a definition” (168). This impasse nearly scuttled the whole plan. To this day, though animated by different concerns, reaching consensus on what matters most continues to be a fundamental impediment to the adoption of common curricula in undergraduate general education. Columbia College’s Committee on Instruction, “worn out by futile talk,” left that task of selecting the course’s “great books” to Erskine himself. Erskine drew up a list of about seventy-five books, guided by the remarkably ecumenical principle that “a great book is one that has meaning and continues to have meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time” (168–169).

Erskine’s General Honors was offered to juniors and seniors in small groups from 1920 to 1928, when he left to become President of the new Julliard School of Music. After a brief hiatus, the course was resurrected in 1932, by Jacques Barzun and others, with the innocent name of Colloquium on Important Books.³ The new name self-consciously avoided the term “great books” to signal its distance from the “Great Books heresy”—the notion that a specific set of “Great Books” constitutes the authoritative foundation of “Western culture.”⁴ The Colloquium, as would become evident in the next several years, also aspired to be more democratic than General Honors, which was restricted to a few highly qualified students.

The General Honors course met on Wednesday nights in multiple sections of twenty-five to thirty students, each led by “two instructors selected for their disposition to disagree with each other” (170). One famous and consequential section of General Honors was taught by Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler. Adler would introduce the Great Books idea to the then Dean of the Yale Law School, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was rumored at the time never to have read a single novel.⁵ Hutchins got hooked and, upon becoming president of the University of Chicago in 1929, brought Adler along to install a Great Books program at the center of the undergraduate curriculum. The Great Books Movement had been born.⁶

In 1937, Columbia took the daring step of turning the Colloquium on Important Books, which stood at the pinnacle of the undergraduate curriculum and admitted only the College’s most serious and ambitious students, into a universal first-year requirement. Reflecting on the early years of Lit Hum on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Quentin Anderson, another distinguished teacher and literary scholar, who began teaching the course in the fall of 1940 and chaired the program from 1956 to 1961, recalled some of the questions the experiment raised:

What had Columbia College undertaken to do!? Did they somehow think we could replace the education of English gentlemen by reading a score of books in translation? Reading them, moreover, in a hurry and drawing on a staff that had itself been trained in particular disciplines and could claim no more than amateur status in relation to most of the reading list. Was the course more than a pretense of stanching a cultural wound that could never conceivably be healed? Moreover, was not the very act of choosing the very books to be read in the given year an implied aggression? Did we think ourselves capable of defining what was essential to the Western tradition?⁷

I did not arrive at Columbia with any desire to be an English gentleman, or even any notion of what that was. But I did go to Columbia with a gaping lack of exposure to the culture of higher education. Besides a fervent immersion in Biblical exegesis, and what I had picked up as a child from my father’s self-education in Marxism, I was as ignorant of letters as probably any student in Columbia’s near 250-year history had ever been.

Erskine had formulated his initial proposal for General Honors in 1917 in response to the complaints of older faculty colleagues about “the literary ignorance of the younger generation.”⁸ That same year, Columbia College had dropped its Latin language entrance requirement, which meant that its student body would increasingly come from the public schools of New York, with its many immigrants, and less from the elite college preparatory schools, with their emphasis on classical languages.⁹

“One of the commonest references that one hears with regard to Columbia,” noted Frederic Keppel, the College Dean who oversaw this transition, “is that its position at the gateway of European immigration makes it socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement.” As Keppel acknowledged explicitly, the problem was the number of Jewish students on campus, or rather the “slowly dying prejudice” behind the ubiquitous question “Isn’t Columbia overrun with European Jews?” Keppel defended Columbia’s admission of some Jewish students, noting that those “who have had the advantages of decent social surroundings for a generation or two are entirely satisfactory companions.” But he also noted another type of Jewish student, those who “had not had the social advantages of their more fortunate fellows” and whose ambition alone brought them to even consider higher education: “Some of these are not particularly pleasant companions, but the total number is not great, and every reputable institution aspiring to public service must stand ready to give to those of probity and good moral character the benefits which they are making great sacrifices to obtain.”¹⁰

These words were uncharacteristically frank even for that faraway world of 1914, and they were written in defense of bringing into the otherwise genteel student body of Columbia College a group we would today call “socially disadvantaged” or “underserved.” But Keppel’s words reek with anti-Semitism. And in any case, they did not satisfy those who were worried about Columbia’s so-called “Jewish Problem.” Along with many of its peers, in the 1920s and ’30s, Columbia began to strictly limit the number of such “socially undesirable” candidates. In 1928, Columbia even opened the Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn—a second undergraduate school with, technically, the same admissions requirements as Columbia College, but that, in effect, worked as an overflow catch basin for qualified applicants, permitting the main campus at Morningside to enforce an admissions quota for Jewish students.¹¹

More than sixty years after the struggle to contain the influx of Jewish students, I did not arrive at Columbia with the advantages of what Dean Keppel meant by “decent social surroundings for a generation or two.” I was definitely the other kind of student, and though a gentile, like the man said, probably not a “particularly pleasant companion” for many of my Columbia College peers.

I had been admitted to Columbia through the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), an always embattled New York State program that partners with colleges to provide financial aid—including a cash stipend to subsidize the purchase of books—to students who meet mixed criteria of financial need and academic under-preparedness. I met both criteria by wide margins. With a still shaky command of English and far from recovered from the shock of immigration, I showed up at Columbia in 1991 for the six-week summer “bridge” program that would round off my academic and social preparation for Columbia College. The HEOP program was the contemporary embodiment of the “public service” Keppel demanded of every “reputable institution” in 1914. There I was at Columbia, one of those students. Waiting for me and for my cohort of about thirty HEOP students was Literature Humanities: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus.”

Many years later, I would come to teach this course at Columbia, first as a graduate student and then as a non-tenure-track faculty member fresh out of graduate school. It was striking to me that while the HEOP students were, as a rule, easy to pick out in September, by the following May they were not so recognizable. As a teacher of Introduction to Contemporary Civilizatio...