Rescuing Great Books from the Elites – Governing

You can listen to the companion audio version of this and other essays in the series using the player below or onApple Podcasts,Google Podcasts,StitcherorAudible.It was in May of 1985 that young Roosevelt Monts emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, N.Y. He arrived in America in time to celebrate his 12th birthday. The plane trip, the first of the boys life, took only three and a half hours, but the figurative distance he traveled was immeasurable. The boy landed in the United States poor and disoriented and infested with head lice. He spoke no English. His mother, whod made the move two years earlier, worked a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. By his own admission, Monts was a highly unlikely candidate for an Ivy League education.

Six years later, however, with two years of bilingual education and four years of local public high school behind him, Monts entered the unimaginably strange life of a Columbia University freshman. His liberal education began when he discovered the universitys celebrated Core Curriculum, a communal learning experience that includes courses in literature and philosophy from antiquity to the present. The experience would change his life and shape his career. Monts would go on to earn his Ph.D., direct Columbias Center for the Core Curriculum for 10 years, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students.

This interview has been edited for both clarity and length.

Governing: You had only been in the United States for six years when you enrolled in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where you were exposed for the first time to some of historys great discourse. What was that first year like, and how did it inform your 10-year tenure as director of the program?

Roosevelt Monts: An intellectual acculturation happens in that first year. You absorb the modes of inquiry, the norms of debate, the deep categories in imagery, in stories, in arguments, in ethical norms, that have shaped the contemporary world and that give us the deep structure of our culture. It comes slowly and unconsciously, almost subliminally. It happens more like the dawning of a day than the flipping of a switch. Its a slow, cumulative, ruminative process that depends more on conversations between students and faculty than any knowledge that the faculty delivers. I remember as a freshman at Columbia encountering debates about why the Core Curriculum was so focused on the Western tradition? Why was it dominated by white males? What about racism? What about patriarchy?

Roosevelt Monts: Absolutely. Because I know what a liberal education has done for my own life, I see what it can do for others. And I see the ways in which particularly lower-class non-elites are systematically shunted away from access to such an education. Admittedly this is sometimes done in well-meaning ways, as when the educational system in New York City picks out the serious students and channels them into STEM fields.

Governing: In trying to communicate how a liberal education transformed your life, you chose to wrap your discussions around four authors: Augustine, Plato, Freud and Gandhi. You could just as easily have chosen Aeschylus and Marx and Martin Luther King. How did you settle on these four?

Roosevelt Monts: It was hard narrowing down. There are other figures that have had profound impacts on the way I see the world, the way I navigate my reality, but there was something idiosyncratic about these four figures. I looked at what was going on for me developmentally at the point in my life when I encountered them. These four were major decisive figures in my life, not because they're the best or the most important ones, but because they happen to have had this impact on me. And even there, I could have chosen six or eight or 10. In retrospect, however, I see that what brought these four to the top of my list was their absolute dedication to introspection and self-knowledge, their quest for understanding themselves.

Confessions of St. Augustine, widely regarded as the first western autobiography ever written. Paris, 1637.

Governing: How do you make the case to a 19-year-old who says, "What is Plato to me?"

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, lived in the 5th century B.C.E. (Source: upenn.edu)

Former Senator and Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum on CNN. (Screen capture: YouTube)

Roosevelt Monts: Universities have an image problem in broad America. There is in much of America a triumphalist, mythological, rose-colored view of our national history that is profoundly inaccurate. There have been all kinds of problems, whether it's our history of slavery, our history of racial oppression and subjugation, or our history of international venturing gone wrong. If you go into higher education with just that uncomplicated, heroic, triumphalist picture, you're in for a rude awakening, and you or your family may come away thinking that youve been corrupted in some way. A legitimate function of education has to do with puncturing happy narratives and myths, and complicating our sense of moral flawlessness. On the other hand, thinking and teaching about America as the great purveyor of injustice and oppression is also inaccurate.

Roosevelt Monts: Thats a dangerous trend. Part of the danger is that theres a bifurcation happening where the economic and cultural elite still believe in liberal education and still say, "It's worth sending my child to Bryn Mawr to major in art history." The working and lower-middle classes, however, are being steered toward a more practical career education. The danger is not so much an existential threat to liberal education as it is a return of liberal education to the province of a cultural elite. It seems legitimate and justified and understandable, especially for economically anxious families, to see the exorbitant costs of higher education as an investment that needs a return. It is the work of education to say, "Yes, we are going to do that in the university, but there is this other thing that a higher education means. Were going to make sure that even if youre an engineering or nursing student or a pre-finance major, your education also includes this broadening exposure that speaks to you not as a professional in the making, but as a citizen in the making, that addresses needs in a human being that go beyond material security and material well-being, that addresses something more basic and fundamental about our humanity." It is the responsibility of universities to do that.

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Rescuing Great Books from the Elites - Governing