Admired, Not Read

Last year, I was invited to Dickinson College in southern Pennsylvania to debate the meaning of success in higher education. My counterpart in the discussion was Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College, a small liberal arts school in Annapolis, Maryland. We were introduced by our host, and Nelson went first. His speech was erudite, passionate, and replete with classical references. He waxed eloquent about the meaning of knowledge, and how teaching as an enterprise was central to the St. John’s philosophy. I found myself glancing uneasily at my own notes, which had always served me well in the past but suddenly seemed paltry by comparison.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had run headlong into the Great Books of the Western World, the subject of a smart, engaging new book by Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe. In A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Beam traces the history of a peculiar moment in the development of America’s striving middlebrow culture, when hundreds of thousands of families across the nation decided to spend a lot of money on ancient texts that few would ever read. It’s also a story of higher education, and a 140-year-old argument about the responsibilities that colleges have to students.

Beam’s narrative begins in 1869, with the appointment of Charles Eliot to the presidency of Harvard University...[for more, in which I argue that the great books matter and liberals need to reclaim the liberal arts, click here]