Academic Horatios

Ottowa Citizen (Canada) January 29,  2000

       In Hurricane, the acclaimed film about the wrongful murder conviction of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, begins with the story of an American innercity teenager who is passing high school even though he can't read. Fortunately, some socially conscious Canadians teach him. The first book he buys is The Sixteenth Round, Hurricane Carter's prison story of his struggle to clear his name. The teen is so moved that he and his Canadian friends undertake a campaign that eventually win Carter his freedom.

The lesson we take from this story is the power of the printed word to change lives. The moviemakers sensed this, too: Several scenes show the characters reading aloud from Carter's book, or from his letters.

But there is a telling irony to this. For while the film industry customarily turns to books to deliver great moral stories, many of the people who supposedly teach us about books have turned away from the best. One of the casualties of the culture wars over the last two decades has been the Great Books canon that small selection of masterpieces from Homer to Joseph Conrad that forms the bedrock of our culture.

Today's trendy thinking says too many classics reflect a Eurocentric and phallocentric bias that excludes ethnic or female writers. One result has been the gradual suppression of courses and programs rooted in the Great Books.

Yet three decades ago, the Great Books tradition provided the intellectual core to a liberal arts education. Generally, students encountered the canon in first and second year English, and introductory Western Civilization courses. But even a cursory glance at current university calendars shows an absence of Great Books courses in favour of more fashionable culture studies

The University of Victoria's English department, for instance, offers an introductory course in cultural studies that "may" include literary texts (books, to the unwashed), as well as "texts" from magazines, the Internet and video or audio presentations. There's no introduction to the canon.

Ditto the University of Ottawa's English department. It offers first and second year courses devoted to children's books, mystery novels, Arthurian legends, horror, science fiction, women's writing and "world" literature. We don't object to this, of course. Women's literature, gay writers and even Bugs Bunny cartoons should all be open to critical study. But not to the exclusion of the Great Books, the great "conversation" that We are, therefore, thankful to see a few scholars still holding out. These academic Horatios aren't necessarily found on big campuses. Rather, you'll see them on the academic margins, at such places as Wilbur Wright Community College on the north side of Chicago. There, English Prof Bruce Gans oversees a Great Books program with an enrolment of 900 mostly black and Hispanic students. Mr. Gans describes them as "manicurists, bank tellers and baggage handlers looking to improve their lot: Despite this  or, maybe, because of it  the program has been a great success.

  "They come in not knowing what they don't know," says Mr. Gans. "Sometimes, they're frightened, thinking it'll be too difficult for them. But once they experience this stuff, they become hungry for it. They leave full of self-respect, knowing that they've accomplished something of scholastic value.