Category: Blog Post

The director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, where I currently teach, makes a powerful argument in the Chronicle of Higher Education that robust general education requirements are essential for cultivating a notion of citizenship and “the freedom of intelligent critique” among American undergraduates:

A student should not have to go to law school to study the Constitution, nor to graduate school in political theory in order to understand the principles of liberal democracy that undergird our national compact. The disintegration of the undergraduate curriculum across American higher education reflects the inability, or unwillingness, of university leaders and the faculty to have the sometimes contentious conversations that any serious design of a curriculum requires. The prevailing posture has been a kind of epistemological ecumenicalism that refuses to make commitments to any hierarchy of knowledge — remember that the “post-truth” era began in the university as a “postmodern” rejection of objectivity — or to approach the fundamental question that must guide college curricula: What should all students learn? The outcome of the 2016 election vividly illustrates that the answer to that question is vitally important.

Objections to required core curricula are typically couched in ideological terms: that they inevitably reflect a history of violence and exclude the already marginalized; that they always serve the interests of power; that they are forms of political indoctrination. But more often than not, these objections disguise the real impediments, which have to do with the resistance of the faculty to the hard and often ill-recompensed work of teaching outside of their disciplines, and the fear of college leaders that rigorous requirements will drive away students who approach their college education as the quickest way to a decent job. Both impediments speak to how the values of the marketplace have deformed the institutional structures upon which the health of a free society depends.

Education for citizenship is not — and should never be — education for partisanship. The “great books” of the Western canon do not, as some conservatives would have it, contain a set of timeless truths beyond dispute. Nor are they, as some liberals would claim, an ideologically debased product of “dead white men.” They constitute a tradition of open and unsettled debate without which we condemn ourselves to the provincialism of the present, to confinement within the pieties of the day, and to a sense of moral superiority that has been the enemy of free thought through all of history.

[Price] was the first black American woman to win widespread recognition as a symphonic composer, rising to prominence (with William Grant Still and William Dawson) in the 1930s.

…

Price played the theatre organ for silent films, wrote popular music for commercial purposes and orchestrated arrangements for soloists and choirs who performed with the WGN Radio orchestra in Chicago. She is best known for her songs: her art songs and arrangements of spirituals were sung by many of the most renowned singers of the day including, besides Marian Anderson, Blanche Thebom, Etta Moten and Leontyne Price. Although her music was widely performed, her output, comprising over 300 compositions, remains unpublished, apart from a handful of songs and piano pieces.

Grove Dictionary of Music, “Price, Florence Bea”

When visiting churches and graveyards in and around Munich, I was always on the hunt for Latin inscriptions. Gravestones and memorials often have good ones, and I especially like those that speak to the living, usually with some kind of request to the “viator” to pause for a moment to ponder the memorialized dead.

There are countless examples: the picture above is from St. Peter’s Friedhof in Salzburg, the one below is from Regensburg in Bavaria.

Although such graveyard inscriptions are mostly from the early modern and even modern eras, the practice of addressing cemetery visitors is an ancient one. A quick search through any epigraphic database will give scores of results. One example in Etruria asks the passerby to lament that the interred had died too young:

resiste viator et

lege non dignus

morti abreptus sum

iuvenis annorum XXVIII

Another example for which an available image shows the weathered letters of viator above a recorded lifespan—“five little years, ten months”—forces us to pause not just out of its request but out of curiosity. Were fourth-century children often honored with epitaphs? Do these few words suggest we’re looking at the memorial of a young imperial aristocrat? What story did not survive along with this chunk of stone?

Like their more recent counterparts, these ancient inscriptions barely sketch the whole lives of which we see only a small fragment. Next time you find yourself in a graveyard, you viator of the information age, consider taking a moment to listen to these stones that still speak on behalf of the silent.