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meeting. On the docket was whether or not we should add a required
course in works that English majors should presumably know but often
don't. Most of my colleagues agreed that the proposal was a good idea,
and that we could quibble about the exact readings later.
So far, so good. The rub came when somebody was foolish enough to
suggest that the course be titled "Great Books for English Majors." I
suspected that there would be howls of objection, and I was right. One
member voiced her objection this way: "Over my dead body!" Another
more conciliatory chap opined that such a course just might work, but
insisted that we call it "Some Pretty Good Texts." What he didn't want
to convey, to our students or others, is that some works were "privi–
leged" over others.
That department meeting, now lodged securely in my memory bank,
is part of the reason I read Hart's treatise with more than cursory inter–
est. After all, what I've just described is hardly an incident limited to the
small liberal arts college where I happen to teach. The resistance to all
that Hart holds dear is a widespread phenomenon that includes profes–
sors who can rattle on about why a perfectly sound education need not
include even a cursory exposure to the likes of Homer, the Bible, Plato
and Aristotle, or Shakespeare, and those who, if truth be told, don't
have much acquaintance, if any, with these writers.
Hart's title holds out the promise that higher education, long on the
skids, can be revived. Better days, he confidently proclaims, lie just
around the corner, which is why he casts a grinning face over the cul–
turallandscape. About all this, I count myself a citizen of Missouri-not
only skeptical but also inclined to serious worry. Still, I remain as much
a believer in the power of great books as I ever was-and that's why
Hart's good cheer is almost infectious.
Hart, I should say at the outset, makes no bones a bout how he
became a lifetime reader of serious, demanding, and most of all, essen–
tial books. His appetite was whetted, and his critical skills set into
motion, when he went through the strenuous paces of Columbia Uni–
versity's fabled Humanities-I-II course under the tutelage of Lionel
Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren. At stake now is what
was at stake then-namely, preparing students to become citizens in the
fullest sense of the term. For Hart, this means having the capacity, if
need be, to re-create civilization. Among other things, this mythical cit–
izen "should understand his civilization in the large, its shape and tex–
ture, its narrative and major themes, its important areas of thought, its
philosophical and religious controversies, its scientific development, its
major works of the imagination." Such a liberally educated person
