Commentary
Little wonder IQ scores are falling. Reading, writing, and thinking are inseparable, mutually reinforcing activities; one can’t learn to write well without reading good books, or learn what one thinks, let alone how to think—how to ask fruitful questions, draw meaningful connections, clarify one’s intuitions, evaluate evidence, and construct logical arguments—without writing. But writing, too, is rusting in disuse, especially with the advent of generative AI. Using AI to summarize books and articles, do homework, and compose papers has become standard practice among high school and university students, from community colleges to the Ivy League.
A reading and writing specialist at Harvard told Horowitch that undergraduates at the university who resent having to wrestle with dense texts believe that “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from them by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.” But reading is much more than a means of assimilating information. It furnishes and forms the mind, the innermost core of a human being, and, in the best case, makes one capable (to quote John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University”) of arriving at an “instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.” Yet the collapse of reading and writing doesn’t just impoverish individuals’ inner lives. It betokens a general eclipse of thinking for oneself, which is both a foundation of individual dignity in a democratic society and a community’s most effective defense against bad ideas.
Informed, independent thinkers are made, not born. Some, like Lincoln, who read fewer books but in greater depth than the eminently learned Jefferson, are self-taught. Most, however, require a formal liberal education, in which students read across multiple disciplines in courses that explore fundamental questions in an atmosphere of civil discourse and open inquiry. These disciplines include mathematics and the natural sciences, which arouse wonder at the order and complexity of the world; history and the social sciences, with their sober lessons on human nature, cautionary records of folly, and inspiring models of greatness; literature and art, which imaginatively inhabit and perceptibly envision the lives of others; and philosophy and religion, which open minds to transcendent realities and the enduring sources of meaning in life. Liberal education is by definition non-partisan, because its aim is to see things whole—the essential condition for sound judgment and intellectual creativity, including in the sciences. Kepler found in Plato’s “Timaeus” a conceptual model for his Third Law of planetary motion, while Niels Bohr’s insight that electrons make quantum leaps between orbits was inspired by his study of a fellow Dane, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard.
Liberal education, civil discourse, and open inquiry were once the bread-and-butter of American liberal arts colleges and university core curricula. But professors are now among the most left-leaning major sectors of society. Colleges and universities—especially elite ones, to which Americans have entrusted the education of the intellectual class that furnishes the vast majority of cultural and political leaders—have substantially abandoned liberal education in favor of more partisan forms of instruction. In their classrooms, many humanities and social science faculty (and at more than a few schools, most) model not the open-minded study of Western civilization and the American experiment in ordered liberty, but their aggressive “interrogation,” interpreting the historical and cultural record according to the dogmas of post-colonial theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality. Trustees and university administrators have also climbed aboard the social justice bandwagon, with most four-year institutions and almost all major research universities establishing DEI offices by the early 2020s.
Related Stories
These and similar developments—like the introduction of hotlines for anonymously reporting professorial “bias”—have significantly narrowed the range of acceptable views on campus, constrained class discussions, and effectively given students, faculty, and administrators permission to be militantly intolerant of ideas that challenge their opinions. The suppression of opinion, anti-Semitism, and in certain cases, open violence are indisputable.
Harper, who researches late-modern British literature, was pained to realize that his colleagues, exhibiting their own racism, considered him “visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.” And while the dean declared that “racism, sexism, ableism, classism, are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” Harper came to see Bates as “a place where current and future elites paid—or were paid—for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both.”
Put another way, the American academy now attracts a substantial number of mediocre status-seekers who regard being a professor not as a vocation, but as just another career, and who know “the right buzzwords” to succeed. With no deep commitment to what Harper calls “the core ethos of what a university or college is supposed to be about,” these professors are inclined to see teaching and learning not as essential human activities, but as a constantly renegotiated transaction. Worse, they are ready to embrace whatever social causes or systems of belief are in fashion, and just as ready to abandon them when others come along.
Liberal education is endangered by more than just professorial careerism and ideological groupthink. The advent of generative AI risks turning institutions of higher education into diploma mills, yet academic leaders have so far mounted no coherent response to this existential threat. Few, if any, have taken the opportunity to explain what universities are, why they exist, and what it means to get a real education, which might at least discourage some students from outsourcing their thinking to machines. What is more, the default position across the academy is that professors should individually determine what constitutes fair use of AI in their courses. Because this approach guarantees that AI-use policies (which are in any case difficult to enforce) will vary widely, students will likely gravitate toward more lenient professors, including those who use AI to write their lectures and grade papers. Many universities have introduced required courses in using chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT, or partnered with companies like OpenAI and embedded their products across disciplines. Others, like Purdue and Ohio State, have even mandated that students use AI in their majors. These initiatives risk reducing all fields of study to one meta-major: prompt engineering and information management.
One thing is certain: AI has exponentially increased the difficulty of teaching undergraduates how to read deeply and write well. Proctored examinations make it hard to cheat by using AI, but they are no substitute for the leisurely reflection, deep thinking, organizational logic, and artful crafting of language required to write a good paper. Yet the fact that students routinely use AI to write their papers has burdened the dwindling number of professors who still assign them—or at least those who care enough to uphold academic standards—with the sheer drudgery of academic policing.
What happens if liberal education vanishes from American colleges and universities? We already know the answer, at least in outline, because it happened in the Soviet Union. Nadezhda Mandelstam—the wife of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag—writes in her memoir “Hope Against Hope,” published in 1970, that the “basic error of our times” was the replacement of education by indoctrination and the rejection of “any study of real life.” Intent on reengineering the human soul, the Soviets cut themselves off from the Western intellectual tradition. They censored works of history, literature, philosophy, and art on the ground that they were bourgeois, reactionary, or decadent; those they preserved were reinterpreted so as to serve the state’s ideological purposes. “Holders of high office … ensconced in their ivory towers” purged scholars and teachers in whole fields of study, including scientific ones—classical genetics, quantum mechanics, comparative linguistics—because they conflicted with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. “The fundamental rule of the times was to ignore the facts of life.”
Mandelstam writes that Osip actively read “really formative books with which he entered, as it were, into lasting contact and which left their mark on some part of his life, or on the whole of it.” (He carried a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” with him, so he would have it in prison in case he was arrested.) But the education of the “new Soviet man” (and woman) relied on “reading of the passive type,” which “made it possible to propagate predigested ideas, to instill in the popular mind slick, commonplace notions”—abstractions that treated living individuals only as soil to be baked hard and shaped into bricks for a new Tower of Babel. The danger of such half-education cannot be overestimated. “The threat to the human race comes not from its communal morality,” Mandelstam observes, “but from the extravagant innovations of its more volatile elements.” The Bolshevik leaders came from the Russian intellectual class, the intelligentsia, while the peasants, who were the majority of the population at the time of the Revolution, were reliably conservative. American intellectual elites, too, are much more volatile—quicker to adopt new values and political attitudes—than their fellow citizens. Yet these elites are also quick to abandon those values and attitudes, at least in private. The Soviet intelligentsia’s initial enthusiasm for the Revolution soon gave way to rank careerism; by the 1930s, academic institutions were producing mere “technocrats or bureaucrats” with “university diplomas.”
All of this—the anathematization and willful ignorance of the Western tradition; the deformation of intellectual disciplines by projects of political constructivism; the use of specious “science” to crush dissent; the replacement of active reading with ideas that are today predigested not only by ideology, but by AI; the pathological detachment from the facts of life; the rampant careerism—is eerily familiar. Because American colleges and universities have for some time fallen short of endowing students with what Mandelstam regards as the essential characteristics of the true intelligentsia—“a certain degree of education, the ability to think critically and the sense of concern that goes with it, freedom of thought, conscience, humanism”—our cultural and political elites are already exhibiting characteristics of the Soviet intelligentsia. We would be foolish not to heed Mandelstam’s warning in “Hope Abandoned,” her second, more pessimistic memoir, published in 1972: “Every day hope diminishes as one sees how the younger people in the West have no faith in anything and are blind to what has happened elsewhere. Their blindness, indifference, and idiotic egotism will lead to what we have already experienced.”
Restoring liberal education in colleges and universities will be a long, slow effort. It won’t happen unless students are required to read and write about what Mandelstam called the “really formative books”—the great books that shaped Western culture. These works don’t carry their meaning on their jacket covers: they force readers to attend to every word, to ask questions and make inferences about what is left unsaid. Careful readers of the “Iliad” will notice that Hector is wearing Achilles’ old armor when the two finally meet in combat: what does this mean? Does the text of Genesis suggest that Isaac was traumatized by his near sacrifice, as one would expect? Why does Plato compare the soul to irrational numbers in the “Republic”? Why, in “Crime and Punishment,” does Raskolnikov hate his mother and sister for loving him? To raise such questions and try to answer them is to develop one’s powers of interpretation, of sorting signal from noise—arguably the essential intellectual skill.
But great books are rarely studied in higher education, at least without being intellectually pulped and pushed through a steel mesh of interpretative presuppositions. The National Center for Education Statistics puts the number of public and private non-profit, two- and four-year degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States at around 3150. It’s unclear how many of these offer programs in which students must take at least two courses in the great books. A 2023 report by the James Martin Center identified 48 colleges and universities that do so, while the Association of Core Texts and Courses published a longer list in 2016. These two sources yield very rough (and doubtless out-of-date) estimates: 60 colleges and universities require all undergraduates to take at least two courses in the great books, while around 120 offer elective programs in which students may do so—fewer than two percent and four percent of all 3150 institutions, respectively. Even if these estimates are too low by half, most undergraduates will never take a great books course.
Changing this situation quickly will not be easy. The first obstacle to establishing core programs in great books is financial: teaching students to read and write about challenging texts is expensive. Large, cost-effective lecture courses won’t do; this work must be done in discussion-based seminars, where students can raise problems of special interest and concern, test and refine their ideas, and exchange insights. Leading these seminars requires much time and effort, and is incompatible with a heavy teaching load. Some undergraduates—perhaps many—require remedial instruction, as Horowitch points out in her article; and to curtail AI cheating on papers, professors must, at a minimum, use in-class exams to establish baselines on individual reading and writing skills and hold oral examinations for completed essays.
Nor should universities entrust great books seminars to graduate students, although doing so would save money. Because these works are in conversation with the intellectual tradition, instructors need to be broadly familiar with classic texts across related disciplines; what is more, leading a seminar is an art best left to experienced professors who can let classroom discussions flow while occasionally nudging them toward important points. But teachers with these qualifications are in short supply, which means new ones will have to be hired and trained. This, too, will be expensive and will require changes to how candidates for faculty openings are evaluated. Job advertisements typically specify a relatively narrow area of expertise, e.g., feminist approaches to modern British literature, and applicants often know little outside of their subject of specialization. (This recalls the old joke that professors these days know more and more about less and less, and will soon know everything about nothing.) Great books programs must look for candidates who demonstrate interdisciplinary breadth, love teaching, and are good at it.
This necessity raises other problems that have become visible with the recent establishment of roughly 20 schools and centers of civic thought, most of which offer at least some seminars in great books. One is the limited supply of faculty who can teach Tocqueville, Aristotle, Melville, and the like: if these civics schools expand and multiply, as is likely, we will need to establish new graduate programs—or expand existing ones—in core areas like political philosophy and American literature. New great books programs will face the same problem when teaching classics like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Homer, Plato, Thucydides, Dante, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky.
Another problem is that faculty at highly ranked universities—where most professors are still tenured or on the tenure track, and research requirements are substantial—are often too busy writing books and articles to devote much time to teaching. If these institutions make reading and writing about great books a core requirement for undergraduates, they will probably have to establish two tracks for tenure and promotion with separate criteria for advancement: a teaching track and a research track.
A final obstacle is the resistance of existing faculty to intellectually conservative programs, which tend to attract strong support from political conservatives. Overcoming that resistance will require academic leaders to display the sound judgment and intelligent persuasiveness that are themselves the fruit of a liberal education. What must be understood and communicated is that teaching young people—especially future political, cultural, and commercial leaders—to read, write, and think for themselves is an urgent and essential task that helps all Americans. That doing so might also help colleges and universities to rediscover their core mission as institutions that exist not to promote social justice or to turn students into political activists, but to preserve, transmit, and extend the hard-won knowledge and wisdom of our forebears, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
