Great Books in the Undergraduate Curriculum.

Many people in Morningside Heights, on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, where I live, know that great books have had a long history in the undergraduate curriculum. When pressed to say how long, most will say very long; some will venture a rounded number of years; and some will even say either since 1919 or 1937, depending on how they understand the term "great books." Indeed, these two dates tend to recur in discussions of what is sometimes called "The Great Books Debate," sometimes "The Canon Debate." The earlier date, 1919, marks the inauguration of Columbia's course known as Contemporary Civilization; the latter, 1937, that of Literature Humanities. As currently configured, these sister courses, each a full year long, introduce Columbia undergraduates to a mostly European philosophical and literary tradition that begins in antiquity and ends in this century. I say "as currently configured" because, as I will have reason to explain later, the boundaries have shifted over time.

Even beyond the borders of Morningside Heights, then, some American educators and some educated Americans will single Columbia out for praise or blame, depending on their side in the debate, as the innovator of the "great books" curriculum--an innovation that during this century helped to shape undergraduate curricula all over the country. I will return to Columbia's "great books" courses, and especially to Literature Humanities, as one longstanding--and maybe even the longest standing--American example of such a curriculum; but first, I want to extend the history of teaching great books, often thought to have originated in Morningside Heights, back a couple of thousand years to the same antiquity that serves as the far terminus for Columbia's and most other courses of this kind. Since Hellenistic times at least, first Greek and then Roman literature professors provided lists of works in poetry and prose, including fiction, history, and philosophy that the young student should read. Perhaps the best known among these lists is provided by one Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also known as Quintilian.

Outlining in some detail the proper education for an orator, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria lays out an encyclopedic curriculum based, as he freely admits, on the enkuklios paideia (1.10.1) or full round of learning of his Greek predecessors. The skeleton of this curriculum forms in turn the backbone of the later trivium and quadrivium. An important part of this encyclopedic education is reading or lectio, focusing not only on how to read but also on what to read.

Quintilian, in other words, can fairly be said to have designed an early version of the "great books" course for the young men of the empire; and several aspects of his design merit consideration. In the first place, as I have already hinted, Quintilian shows every awareness that the enterprise itself is traditional, that other professors before him as far back as Aristarchus have drawn up such lists and that the overlap over time--here some three hundred years-between his own list and theirs is considerable. He is also aware of some changes over time. So he comments that Aristarchus omitted from the canon Apollonius of Rhodes, still a well-known poet among classicists, on the grounds of contemporaneity (10.1.54)--grounds that no longer hold when Quintilian is making his own syllabus, in which Apollonius is respectfully included. In fact, Quintilian draws special attention to this question of the blanket exclusion of contemporary writers, a controversial issue even in the first century. Unlike Aristarchus and even unlike some of his own colleagues, Quintilian covers the novi or moderns as well as the antiqui, the ancients. On the other hand, he recommends extreme caution when assigning modern authors because judgments regarding their work, like those regarding any object viewed from too close-up, are much more susceptible to error (2.5.26).

Without rejecting modern writers on principle, Quintilian further recommends that in most cases these writers are more suitable for advanced students, those who already have some experience reading the ancients. Indeed, Quintilian designs his syllabus with only one eye on the writers to be included; the other he keeps fixed on his young readers. For he knows, like any good teacher, the results of teaching the right book to the wrong students. So, in another cautionary moment, one that Ben Jonson recycles with finesse, Quintilian advises that younger readers should take on Livy rather than Sallust, even though Sallust is the greater historian (2.5.19). Reading "great books," in other words, is not necessarily the same as reading the "greatest books."

By the end of the first century of the Common Era, then, "great books" courses already had a long history in the undergraduate curriculum. As I have also suggested, Quintilian's version holds much in common with his Greek predecessors. Offsetting these commonalities are some equally significant changes. One already mentioned is the inclusion of contemporary authors. Another for Quintilian is the inclusion of Roman alongside Greek authors. In contrast to the scriptural canon of the early church, in other words, the literary canon of the schools remained open and flexible. On several occasions, Quintilian repeats that his list is not meant to be exhaustive. Any writer who measures up to an admittedly high standard--a high literary standard--is eligible. In Greek, the term for that measure is kanon. Long before ecclesiastical debates over the scriptural canon, Hellenistic grammarians like Aristarchus used precisely this term to refer to their reading lists of great books. A writer they deemed kanonikos--that is, one who measures up--Quintilian is likely to call optimus, among the best. Only in the next century will this same writer bear the more familiar title classicus, a classic (Aulus Gellius, 19.8.15). In the later Latin West, on the other hand, Church Fathers such as Augustine will refer to an authorized text of scripture as canonica, canonical (e.g., De doctrina christiana, 2.8.12).

Readily accepting the legacy of a great books course from his Greek predecessors, Quintilian also accepts the responsibility of reevaluating the reading material of that course in light of its place in an encyclopedic Roman education. Critically receptive to the traditional program of teaching a list of "great books," he is no less critical of the writers included. And he labors to instill this same critical attitude in his students. For criticism, in the radical sense of "making judgments" from the Greek kritein, belongs not just casually but formally to the reading practices of ancient education in the Greco-Roman world. Students were encouraged not only to read and to interpret what they read, but also to criticize or evaluate it. And, if beginners were expected to make only the more local judgments concerning this figure of speech and that figure of thought, surely some of these beginners developed into more advanced, more critical readers fully able to judge the part in context of the whole.