Harvey Mansfield in the WSJ
In today's
Wall Street Journal, Harvey Mansfield attacks the proposed new Harvard curriculum and gets in a few digs at the rest of the faculty while he's at it. (Here's a link, but it may be behind a firewall.)
Mansfield begins:
The recent Harvard faculty report on general education has made waves for its new requirements to study America and religion. These may be good -- we shall see -- but the report is more remarkable for the trendy thinking it reveals in the higher reaches of American education.
A promising start. (
We shall see!) But I'll be honest: After those two sentences, I have very little idea what the hell Mansfield is talking about. Because almost instantly, he wanders away from making an argument to calling people—unnamed people, of course, because that way nothing has to be substantiated—names.
For example...
Our postmodern professors, however, do not care for principles....
The professors believe that every mind has a perspective or point of view it cannot escape. There's really no such thing as an open mind; all minds are closed.....
It is apparent from the courses that students seek out and from the dissatisfaction they express that they are more interested in big questions (Great Books) and in the big picture (Western Civilization) than [are] their professors....
(Hey, wait—wasn't the big course last year something about how to be happy?)
The professors, however, teach the Great Books not out of principle, or, dare one say it, affection, but because they feel the need -- despite their principles -- to justify why they don't believe in the Great Books; and because they want to cut them down to size.....
Who
are these wacky professors? I feel that we should hunt them down and throw nets over them. 'Cause, man, these cats are crazy!
In the end, I think what Mansfield is arguing is, basically, for a return to the Red Book. But his piece is built much more on attacking a straw man—"the professors"—than in making a positive argument for a general education based on teaching Western Civ and religion.
The reason, I think, is that a) Mansfield enjoys stirring the pot more than he likes to make a serious argument (cf. Manliness), and b) if you try to argue that Moby Dick and a dose of God are all Harvard students need today, the limitations of that curriculum will show themselves pretty darn quickly.
In the end, I'm slightly mystified why the
Journal published this piece. It's tough enough to make sense of if you're following the debate at Harvard. For anyone who isn't, it would be incomprehensible.
Except maybe those nasty cracks about the professors.
