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pand membership in the list to include them as well. According
to
the
traditionalist theory, one of the advantages of higher education is that it
enables us to see our own civilization and mode of sensibility as one pos–
sible form of life among others. And one of the virtues of the tradition is
the enormous variety within it. In fact, there never was a "canon. "
There was a set of constantly revised judgments about which books de–
serve close study, which deserve to be regarded as "classics." So, based on
the traditionalists' own conception, there should be no objection to
enlarging the list to include classics from sources outside the Western
tradition and from neglected elements within it.
As I have presented it, the challengers are making a common sense
objection, to which the traditionalists have a common sense answer. So
it looks as if we have an obvious solution to an interesting problem and
can all go home. What is there left to argue about? But it is at this
point that the debate becomes interesting. What I have discovered in
reading books and articles about this debate is that the objection to the
so-called canon - that it is unrepresentative, that it is too exclusive -
cannot be met by opening membership to include works by previously
excluded elements of the population, since some people would accept
such reform as adequate, but many will not. Why not? In order to an–
swer that question I am going to try to state the usually unstated pre–
suppositions made by both the traditionalists and the challengers. I real–
ize, to repeat, that there is a great deal of variety on both sides , but I
believe that each side holds certain assumptions, and it is important
to
try
to make them explicit. In the debates one sees, the fundamental issues of–
ten are not coming out into the open, and as a result the debaters are
talking past each other, seldom making contact. One side accuses the
other of racism, imperialism, sexism, elitism, and of being hegemonic and
patriarchal. The other side accuses the first of trying to destroy intellec–
tual standards and of politicizing the university . So what is actually going
on? What is in dispute?
I will try to state the assumptions behind the tradition as a set of
propositions, confining myself
to
half a dozen for the sake of brevity.
The first assumption is that the criteria for inclusion in the list of "the
classics" is supposed to be a combination of intellectual merit and histor–
ical importance. Some authors, Shakespeare for example, are included
because of the quality of their work; others, Marx for example, are in–
cluded because they have been historically so inf1uential. Some, Plato for
instance, are both of high quality and historically influential.
A second assumption made by the traditionalists is that there are in–
tersubjective standards of rationality, intelligence, truth, validity, and gen–
eral intellectual merit. In our list of required readings we include Plato
but not randomly selected comic strips, because we think there is an im-
