In yesterday’s New York Times there was a frustrating write-up (“Arizona Republicans Inject Schools of Conservative Thought Into State Universities”) about the new “School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership” at Arizona State and the “Department of Political Economy and Moral Science” at the University of Arizona. Frustrating for a couple reasons, actually: not only does it suggest that “the study of Western civilization” is the exclusive purview of conservative reactionaries, but it also shows how political entities like legislators and donor groups are successfully propagating reductive, uninteresting, and even misleading interpretations of complex historical material:

Their creation reflects a cultural struggle within academia, one that some conservatives believe requires government intervention to counter a liberal professoriate. Their goal is to promote the study of Western civilization, once a core requirement at many colleges, contending that a well-educated society must understand its roots — the Delphic maxim “know thyself.”

The new courses at Arizona State focus on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond, with an emphasis on free-market philosophy. They draw heavily from original texts rather than modern interpretations.

“There is too much revisionism being taught in universities today,” said State Representative Jay Lawrence, a Republican from Scottsdale who backed the new programs. “It’s a big deal to those of us who feel very strongly about a more conservative education.”

But many liberal arts professors view these efforts as reviving an antiquated and Eurocentric version of history, one that they have tried to balance with viewpoints of women and racial minorities.

A number of longtime Arizona State faculty members, as well as Democrats in the Legislature, also complain that the millions appropriated for the new programs could have been better spent. Steady cuts left state universities with $390 million less in taxpayer support in 2017 than they had before the 2008 recession, requiring steep tuition increases. “Here you want to create these freedom schools for whatever reason, and there are so many other pressing needs,” said State Representative David Bradley, a Democrat from Tucson.

The initial debate over funding the Arizona State program broke along party lines, reflecting the increasing polarization around higher education nationwide.

Years ago I lamented in the Wall Street Journal a similar and unfortunate conflation of politics and course design, and I stand by my belief that “politics don’t have to dictate curriculum.” As then, I’m again struck by the way someone like Representative Lawrence seems to think that a course of study that includes Plato’s Republic, Thucydides, Smith, and Tocqueville is “a more conservative education.” In fact, it’s deeply, deeply misguided to view these texts as the backbone of some uncomplicated right-of-center political philosophy. For all its glorifying of man’s rational abilities, Plato’s social model is a broadly collectivist one. Even as he observes the economic benefits of productive labor, Smith (a complex thinker who wrote more than The Wealth of Nations) nevertheless says the desire for luxury goods often arises from a “base and selfish disposition.” And Tocqueville, while cautiously optimistic about the American experiment, has no shortage of critical words for American individualism.

If these authors had simple messages that mapped neatly onto twenty-first century political ideologies, we wouldn’t be reading them anymore. Their texts are complicated, paradoxical, revelatory, counterintuitive, and often just plain wrong. Figuring out when and how is (still) the task we pursue in the academy.

It’s not clear who is most to blame for this sloppy pairing of curriculum and party: either the Times for framing some new European history classes as “injecting conservative thought” into universities, or Arizona legislators for politicizing curricular development in the service of reactionary Republicanism. The Times rightly notes that the Arizona State program includes “contrasting approaches,” and a quick browse through its course catalog shows that readings include not just Smith but Piketty, not just free markets but inequality. (I do worry, however, that universities are becoming competive battlegrounds for powerful donor groups, a scenario hinted at in the Times article.)

More generally, people of various political dispositions continue to misunderstand the fundamental aims of the academic enterprise. State legislators evidently lust for a study of Aristotle and Cicero that leads into a teleological triumph of Randian conservatism. And the Times bolsters the suspicion that any study of old books can be nothing other than a kind of right-wing brainwashing. How unfortunate that the whole situation reflects “the increasing polarization around higher education nationwide.”

Superlatively celebrated as a “stupendous metaphysical-visual exhalation” by New York, the Met’s exhibition of Micheangelo drawings (“Divine Draftsman and Designer”) closes today after a three-month run in town. In the exhibit’s last room, one finds a tall painting of Michelangelo-as-Moses by Federico Zuccaro (d. 1609) that suggests a view of the exhibition’s subject not simply as a draftsman of the divine but as a draftsman holy himself:

During my last visit, I noticed a Latin epigram underneath Zuccaro’s painting, which reminds me a little of Raphael’s in the Pantheon. Pictured up top, it reads as follows:

Dvm pingis vitam Michaeli Zvccare reddis

Teque una eternvm ne moriare facis

Or in (not especially felicitous) English:

While you paint, Zuccaro, you restore the life of Michael[angelo]

and along with him, you fashion yourself imperishable to avoid dying

A bit hopeful (at least for Zuccaro), but also notably heavy in its slow, spondaic mourning. In fact, aside from the fifth foot of the hexameter and the second half of the pentameter—which require dactyls—the couplet uses spondees throughout.

As gloomy as we might take it, the epigram seems to have kept its promise of long-lasting fame for Zuccaro: there he was in the finale of a “metaphysical-visual exhalation,” enjoying some small portion of that draftsman’s divinity, if perhaps by association.