THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
431
in which there are, at least for fifty minutes, certain rules like the net has
to be up if we're going to play tennis, then it seems to me one can go on
with the kind of discourse educationally, intellectually, and culturally that
all of us think is necessary, whose absence is the source of common or gen–
eral lamentation.
Sanford Pinsker:
About the core curriculum. I believe that the great
books are much more likely to present you with disagreements across the
centuries, present the real questions worth pondering over in your life than
any kind of easy reducible answers about the identity politics of race, class,
and gender that currently animate so many professors. Indeed, they animate
us much more than they animate our students. Our best students are ani–
mated by a confrontation with books.
Jerry Martin:
It's academic narcissism. Some professors want their stu–
dents to study them rather than the books. As you know the trend in
scholarship recently is to write about one's own subjective personal reac–
tions to materials- life experience, often sex lives and so forth-rather
than about subject matter of enduring importance. It's said about a profes–
sor whose name I don't recall and who wrote about Thoreau, that she was
told, "Well, what you wrote has very little bearing on Thoreau," and she
responded, "I'm more interesting than Thoreau ." I tried to imagine a
fourteen-week semester on me and concluded that a fourteen-week
semester on Faulkner was much more interesting.
Speaker:
You're not Stanley Fish. He would prefer the fourteen weeks
about Fish.
Sanford Pinsker:
The great books, I believe, are great neither because
they speak to us nor because they don't speak to us, neither because they
argue with each other nor because we simply pass them down. The past
may be terribly uncomfortable to our pedagogic, religious, or moral beliefs
because they're "great." The great often are unpalatable, usually unpalat–
able. We're studying them because they're morally good for us, or uplifting.
That's the hardest thing to actually affirm.
Dick Lanham:
For whatever it's worth, I detected one common topic
of all of your presentations, namely American anti-intellectualism.
Richard Hofstadter, the Columbia historian, in
Anti-Intellectualism in
America ,
traced anti-intellectualism from around 1800. His theme was
that the founders , the revolutionaries of the country, such as Madison,
were very intelligent men. But around 1800 there developed, for reasons
