what the freshman class already reads

I have already posted my measured, charitable response to Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland's "What the Freshman Class Needs to Read".

The thing I didn't say there was this: I think that the University of Austin is a work of ultra-partisan nonsense. It is a fundamentally silly institution built by and for conservatives who have been so fixated on whining about liberal snowflakes for so very long that they have failed to notice that they have built themselves the exact sort of bubble that they accuse liberal of enjoying. In my opinion, the fact that Drs. Ferguson and Howland have been involved in such a project speaks poorly of not only their dedication to intellectual rigor but also their characters.

I believed all of this before I read their article, which is what I meant when I said that "when I read [of their association with the project], the entire piece was contextualized for me". But whatever I think of these men personally, they remain members of my community. I put real effort into treating them with the respect with which I would want them to treat me, had they somehow found this random pseudonymous blog post and felt compelled to respond. I sat on my response for two weeks to make sure I wasn't saying anything stupid in the heat of the moment. I tried my honest, level best to give them the benefit of every doubt I could rustle up.

I'm not saying this to put myself forth as some sort of perfect interlocutor; it's really the opposite. I'm admitting that putting aside my antipathy and reading this essay generously was a significant effort for me, but that I really, genuinely tried. I'm trying to provide context for how profoundly and personally offended I was when I realized that Drs. Howland and Ferguson had not only failed to offer the same grace to their colleagues at Columbia and Standford but had gone so far as to misrepresent them, in a manner so egregious that I cannot imagine that it occurred by accident.

In the process of building their ideal syllabus, Ferguson and Howland criticize the reading lists at Columbia and Stanford specifically and by name. They list sixteen authors in particular: Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Césaire, the Combahee River Collective, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Primo Levi, Karl Marx, Toni Morrison, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Virginia Woolf. (The fact that the critiqued list and the recommended list overlap in the person of Hannah Arendt does not seem to concern the authors enough to prompt some sort of explantory note.)

The selected Columbia author list alone, absent any consideration of framing or approach or classroom discussion, is apparently enough to establish that this is "a clear case of a university teaching its students what to think, not how to think." The implication of Ferguson and Howland's evidence is that students at elite colleges are reading works "that are important to understanding only the perspective of the contemporary left" in place of the more universally relevant texts they themselves suggest.

This implication is flatly false.

For the table below, I have taken every author mentioned in Ferguson and Howland's proposed syllabus. If they recommend a specific text or texts, I have listed that in the F/H column. For the Columbia (C) column, I am drawing from the reading lists for the core courses Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities. For the Stanford (S) column, I am drawing from the Spring 2024 SLE syllabus, to which Ferguson and Howland speficially refer, as well as the Fall 2023 and Winter 2024 syllabi for the first two quarters of the same year-long course—syllabi of which the authors were apparently (quite conveniently) unaware.

Here, I should note the limitations of my methodology. My table does not represent every text read in the Columbia and Stanford courses; I am only indicating the places where their reading lists overlap with Ferguson and Howland's. Additionally, this might lead one to believe, for example, that students at Stanford don't read Greek tragedy, while in truth it's only that they read Sophocles' Philoctetes and Antigone instead of plays by Euripides and Aeschylus.

Of the 25 authors Ferguson and Howland recommend, nine are also represented on both the Columbia and Stanford syllabi; one additional author (Aeschylus) appears on the Columbia syllabus alone. The following authors do not appear on either the Columbia or Stanford syllabi:

• Ibn Battuta: The Rihla
• Matthew Crawford: Shop Class as Soulcraft
• Margaret Edson: Wit
• Euripides: Bacchae
• François Furet
• Herodotus: Histories
• Leszek Kolakowski
• C. S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man
• Czesław Miłosz
• George Orwell
• Rustichello da Pisa: The Travels of Marco Polo
• Karl Popper
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War

There are also a handful of texts that are not of the same genres but are at least in the same historical neighborhood. Instead of the medieval travelogues of Polo and Battuta, both Columbia and Stanford elected to focus on medieval and renaissance philosophy: both have students reading Machiavelli and Dante, and Columbia includes an additional handful of Arabic and European intellectuals while Stanford takes a few weeks to discuss Chinese philosophies.

I find it impossible to believe that Ferguson and Howland were really, truly moved to offense by so slight a change, especially given that they, apparently, would have students read Polo and Battuta to "follow the tension between classical philosophy and biblical faith" (something which St. Thomas Aquinas certainly does at least equally well). I also find it difficult to believe that they are all up in arms over the omission of Edson's Wit or Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft. Maybe, perhaps, the lack of ancient historiography is the sticking point, but I seriously doubt it.

In the end, I can only imagine that it's about the reaction to Marx.

The problem cannot be that Ferguson and Howland want students at Columbia and Stanford to read pre-modern texts because students at Columbia and Stanford are demonstrably, emphatically already doing that. The problem is that Ferguson and Howland don't want these student to read Marxist thought.

That's it. That's the real, substantive difference: Kolakowski instead of Fanon, Furet instead of Césaire, Orwell instead of Sartre. But if they were to say plainly that Fanon is inherently indoctrinatory but Kolakowski isn't, they would sound like a pair of partisan hacks, especially when they're advocation for substitution instead of supplementation and especially when they want to assign anti-Marxist critiques without assigning Marx. They don't want a well-rounded curriculum, in which students encounter multiple opposing viewpoints on influential arguments;^[1] they want a curriculum that aligns with their own beliefs entirely.

But if you put it like that, it sounds bad. It sounds blatantly, grievously anti-intellectual. It sounds, to borrow a conservative term, like cancel culture.

So instead of saying what they mean, Ferguson and Howland leave their readers with the impression that, while Columbia and Stanford would constrain student's minds, sit them in a classroom with only post-modernists and post-colonialists and post-whatever-the-hells for company, they'd be the sensible ones. They'd have your kids reading real books, not that useless lefty nonsense.

And if there just so happened to be a private liberal arts college, designed for just such a program, enrolling its very first class this very fall...well, that would be a lucky coincidence, now wouldn't it?

It's indecent. It's intellectually dishonest. It shows the authors to be poor members of their community, that they would misrepresent their peers and denigrate the academy as a whole to score cheap points. Frankly, I am embarrassed for Drs. Howland and Ferguson, that they could not come up with an argument to support their position that did not require making a strawman of their colleagues. I am also embarrassed for the Atlantic, that they failed to notice so profound a flaw in a piece they published.

And the worst part is that I know full well that their essay went out to an audience of millions. I don't have any sort of analytics or trackers enabled on this site, so I won't actually know how many people read this, but I'd be surprised if I was hitting double digits.

So, they just...get away with it. How utterly disheartening.

1. Something which, for the record, both Columbia and Stanford could probably do better, at least in terms of their reading lists. However, unlike Ferguson and Howland, I acknowledge the importance of discussion and framing, so I'd want to know a lot more about how these texts are treated in the classroom before I made any sort of serious complaint about bias.^{^}