how the freshman class needs to read

Recently, I read a piece in the Atlantic called "What the Freshman Class Needs to Read". It is the clearest expression I've seen in quite a while of a position that fascinates me with its profound lack of self-awareness.

First, let me begin with my credentials (as Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland did not):^[1] I don't want to dox myself, so I will only say that I am a recent graduate of an elite American university, one of the few to which I believe the authors of this essay might not object. I received a BA in classical studies from this university, which I followed with an MA in classics at another institution, and I am currently studying for a PhD in classics at a third.

I have at this point spent upwards of a decade reading exactly the sort of books that Drs. Howland and Ferguson believe a well-rounded student should read. I've read Herodotus, I've read Aristotle, I've read the Odyssey and the Oresteia and the Bacchae. I've read both Plato's Republic and Homer's Iliad in Greek in the last year.

All of this is to say that I am not coming from a place of defensiveness or anxiety with regards to their standards. My problem with Ferguson and Howland's argument is twofold: the presumption of how the texts on the list should be read and the criteria for exclusion of texts not on the list.

how we read

I have many opinions about the subtext here, but let us begin with a bit of the plain text:

What else might you study in an ideal freshman year? We would suggest an introduction to politics. What is politics? Are human beings political animals? How does a city differ from a pack of wolves, a herd of sheep, or a band of robbers? What is law? From Herodotus and Aeschylus, you would have the chance to learn how democratic Athens defeated the imperial despotism of Xerxes, a man-god who ruled subjects, not citizens. And Thucydides’s History would teach you how Athens itself became an oppressive empire in the space of a lifetime, leading to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

In my first year of college, I took a class in which I read Herodotus and Aeschylus both, though I must note that I read Aeschylus' Oresteia, while I assume that Ferguson and Howland here allude to Aeschylus' Persians, the only historical play of the surviving Greek tragedies and one which I've only read on my own.^[2] It was a great class that I genuinely enjoyed; you could absolutely take the books listed here and make an compelling course.

My interest lies, however, in the authors' framing, in the emphasis on democratic Athens defeating an empire (all on her lonesome, apparently), becoming an empire and being defeated in turn. It carries the neat little implication that democracy wins, autocracy loses. There are two issues with this framing: the association of Athens with modern democratic values and the elision of two different meanings of the term "empire".

I question the idea that Athens can be considered democratic by modern standards. I don't want to step too far into the realm of political science, which is not my area, but I would challenge the idea that a government could be said to represent the will of its people when it considers well over half of them less than human.^[3] Even ignoring the misogyny (which you shouldn't), I believe the Athenian opinion on the enslaved is well-encapsulated in one of the words commonly translated as "slave", ἀνδράποδον (andrápodon), which could be more literally rendered as something like "man-footed thing".^[4]

When people pull out these sorts of all-American buzzwords, it is not optional but rather essential to ask: democracy for whom? Representation for whom? Liberty for whom?

Libertas, whence we derive the word "liberty", was a Roman value. Rome was an empire dependent on the forced labor of countless, nameless people whose misery and mistreatment fueled the glorious feats of cultural output at which we still marvel. These things are both true at the same time, and such contradictions beg for examination, for challenge and dissection.

This also brings us around to the difference between "empire" and "empire", or rather the "imperial despotism" of Persia under Xerxes and the "oppresive empire" of Athens in its golden age. These do not mean quite the same thing: the latter is about imperialism, about the colonization and conquest of other territories, while the former incorporates not only that but also a specific sort of government structure based on a single hereditary ruler. Athens did not stop being a democracy^[5] and turn to a Persian-style government, complete with "man-god" emperor; rather, it became a democracy that decided, democratically, to crush other city states under her boot for cash.

Democracy, to misquote Edna St. Vincent Milay, is not all; it may be a necessary condition for freedom, but it is certainly not a sufficient one, especially not when it is so profoundly flawed.

And all of this comes together to my big question about Howland and Ferguson's framing: how do they imagine freshmen reading the texts they name? Would students read these works in seminars in which they could argue about what, precisely, it means for an Athenian author to write an encomium to freedom? Would they read with professors familiar with the texts, who understood it as their duty to encourage such conversation? Or would they be treated as if men who reaped the benefits of imperialism and claimed to own their fellow human beings were the end-all be-all of discourse on freedom?

There is nothing wrong with a class on politics that reads Herodotus, Aeschylus, and Thucydides; I would absolutely take that class and I'd happily teach itl. There is, however, everything wrong with a class on politics, or anything else for that matter, that encourages students to read uncritically. Nothing in this essay convinces me that Ferguson and Howland understand the significance of that latter point, or that it has ever occurred to them that someone like me, who disagrees with them so deeply, could teach the exact texts they recommend in a way that would make them quail if I felt so inclined.^[6]

what we don't read

Part of the reason I do not believe that Ferguson and Howland understand the role of critical readership is the way that they critique the syllabi of which they disapprove:

Instead of reading George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Hannah Arendt, students read Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and the Combahee River Collective Statement—which, as Douthat argued, are “texts that are important to understanding only the perspective of the contemporary left.” This looks to us like a clear case of a university teaching its students what to think, not how to think.

It does not seem to occur to them that to read a text is not to take that text as God's own truth. This leads them to accuse a variety of well-respected programs of indoctrination without, apparently, a single care for what manner of disscussions are had in the classroom. Apparently, even the presence of liberal thought on the reading list is sufficient proof of a course's indoctrinatory intent.

Well, if we're critiquing reading lists, let's critique some reading lists.

First of all, coming from a group of people who seem to spend more time thinking about "the contemporary left" than I do by a significant margin, I am amazed by the implication that we should not aid first-year students in developing an understanding of the theoretical foundations of a significant political movement. We are meant to be intellectuals; that means that, on occasion, we are asked to read works with which we disagree and then discuss what we've read.

It also does not escape my notice that these apparently irresolvably problematic thinkers are a Black man, a gay man, and a collective of Black lesbians. Ferguson and Howland also disapprove of a Stanford syllabus of "Karl Marx, Toni Morrison, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire", which is apparently so self-evidently terrible that they don't even bother to make a complaint, simply presenting the list on its own.^[7]

What would be acceptable? Let us explore.

Acceptable texts include:

• the Epic of Gilgamesh
• the Hebrew Bible (with the Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Job separately and specifically noted)
• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
• Herodotus' Histories
• Aeschylus' Oresteia (the Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides) and Persians
• Euripides' Bacchae
• Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
• Aristotle's Ethics and Politics
• Plato's Apology
• Gospel of John
• Paul’s Letter to the Romans
• St. Augustine's Confessions
• "the history and teachings of Islam",^[8] which I assume entails at least the Quran
• Rustichello da Pisa, The Travels of Marco Polo
• Ibn Battuta, The Rihla
• C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
• Margaret Edson, Wit
• Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

Acceptable authors include:

• Aristotle
• George Orwell
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Hannah Arendt
• Karl Popper
• François Furet
• Leszek Kolakowski
• Vasily Grossman
• Czesław Miłosz

The first thing that jumps out at me is the perfect lack of Black thought. It is total.^[9] Meanwhile, if one counts the Combahee River Collective as a single Black author, seven of sixteen people named in the critiqued syllabi are Black.

It isn't as if no Black author had anything interesting to say about the topics Ferguson and Howland have in mind. For example, it's perfectly bizarre to me that a syllabus concerned with freedom, "the American experiment", and the transformative power of education did not seem to its authors to beg for the inclusion of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

The most generous way I can possibly read this exclusion is that it was simply an oversight, that if Ferguson and Howland were to somehow find this random blog post, they would kick themselves and say "Ah, yes, of course! That was what I was forgetting!" The second most generous way I can read this exclusion is that Ferguson and Howland are made uncomfortable by the contradiction between the American ideal of freedom and the American history of chattel slavery and have not yet reconciled themselves to the fact that being uncomfortable on occasion is important for intellectual growth. Every other explanation I can imagine involves some level of outright dismissal of or hostility towards Black people and their role in the American intellectual tradition.

I focused on Blackness because of the specific way that it interacts with Ferguson and Howland's interest in America's founding ideals, but pretty much any marginalized group you can name goes either under- or entirely unrepresented. Women make up a little more than half the human population and yet apparently the authors couldn't rustle up more than a token sentence's worth of interest in the entire gender. Of the approximately twenty-five suggested texts and nine suggested authors, only one of the former is written by a woman and only one of the latter is a woman.

I don't even want to know what Ferguson and Howland think of queer intellectuals (nothing good, one assumes, based on their relative frequencies in the critiqued and suggested lists).

The second thing that strikes me is that this proposed syllabus includes three separate authors who based their intellectual projects on Marx and his reception, yet seems to find no space for Marx himself. It is perfectly bizarre for authors who claim to be against indoctrination. If I were in their position, I would at least throw The Communist Manifesto on there to give myself the most perfunctory of fig leaves.

Serious intellectuals who wish to critique Marx must read Marx. There's just no way around it and it's irresponsible to give students the impression that there is.

(More liberal institutions, for the record, are also not immune from this critique, but having read the syllabi for myself rather than the cherry-picked selection Ferguson and Howland offer, I am not terribly concerned—I believe I'll have more to say on this point later.)

conclusion

I won't lie and say that this essay didn't make me angry. I was mad when I read it and I got madder the more I thought about it. I've actually been sitting on my reply since late August because I didn't want to allow my anger to make me ungenerous as a reader or incautious as a responder. But it's been over two weeks and I still stand by what I thought when first I read this piece: that in their crusade against what they consider liberal indoctrination, Ferguson and Howland have revealed that they either understand or care very little about readership and even less about intellectual rigor.

I have no doubt that Ferguson and Howland would say they agree that one cannot outsource critical thinking to other people, but nothing in this essay convinces me that they understand what it means to think for one's self. They seem to have split the world into "morally righteous texts which should be consumed without question" and "morally inferior texts which should not be consumed at all".

This makes their suggested reading list profoundly disturbing. For example, in his Politics (a work which Ferguson and Howland recommend specifically) Aristotle says this:

Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master...And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life...It is manifest therefore that there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others slaves by nature, and for these slavery is an institution both expedient and just.

— 1254b–1255a (emphasis mine)

If all one does in a college class is consume texts and incorporate them into one's worldview and/or moral code without question, then would these men have first-year college students consume the theory of natural slavery and swallow it whole? On the other hand, if it is possible to read Aristotle critically, to acknowledge him as an influential thinker with massive impact and significant insights while also examining and criticizing his profoundly disturbing errors, is it not also possible to do the same for Marx?

The best, most charitable way that I can take this apparent conundrum is as a serious lack of understanding, unnerving evidence that these professors do not comprehend their profession. It is, however, difficult to be charitable in the face of such abject failure from such well-trained and experienced educators. I tried my best to assume incompetence rather than malice, thoughtlessness rather than a deep and unexamined distain for marginalized people and those with whom they disagree in general, but I have to say that Drs. Ferguson and Howland have strained my generosity to the breaking point.

works cited

Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Vol. 21. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D1252a.

Zelnick-Abramovitz, Rachel. “Greek and Roman Terminologies of Slavery”. In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries, edited by Stephen Hodkinson, Marc Kleijwegt, and Kostas Vlassopoulos, 1–13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.