The value of the Western tradition in higher education
The idea of a Western canon has become unfashionable. When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006, the university offered a course on celestial navigation but no survey course in British history. The English Department recently eliminated its required course in major British writers, which included Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets. In those courses that have insisted on the usefulness of a Western canon, in fields ranging from art history to classical music, professors have felt the need to explicitly defend their approach in lecture.
I understand that this trend away from the canon is an attempt to remedy a perceived bias in higher education toward the Western tradition, taught to previous generations of students to the exclusion of all else. I am hardly in a position to say whether a pro-Western bias exists or whether changing course offerings to combat it is a successful remedy. But what I can say is that I have always found value in the Western tradition, and that there is a compelling argument to be made that the Western—in particular the Anglo-American—tradition is uniquely relevant to American students.
From a historical standpoint, shifting the focus away from the West creates an incomplete picture of global affairs. Imagine teaching a world history course that portrayed Britain and America as two countries like any others. Such an approach would make little sense, since the international affairs of the past two centuries—at the very least—have been largely dominated by those two countries. When the British Empire was at its peak at the turn of the 20th century, a quarter of the world’s population was under British rule. No other country in modern history has been able to make that claim. As two world wars crippled British power, Britain passed the torch of international hegemony to its former colony across the Atlantic. Churchill famously pleaded with Roosevelt to enter World War II, knowing that Britain was unable to singlehandedly defend Western civilization from the terrorizing march of the Nazis. In this and so many subsequent world conflicts and events of the 20th century, American involvement has been vital to success. To deny the monumental and disproportionate impact of these two countries would be to ignore historical fact.
But the trend away from canonical teaching in higher education is founded more on academia’s unwillingness to assert that different cultures have unusual relevance or value to American students. To insist on the equality of all traditions is to deny the inheritance that has been passed down to Americans from the earliest civilizations. Knowledge of the Western tradition contextualizes our own country and society in an historically illuminating way: our legal system, our liberal political philosophy, and many of our social norms and cultural values were developed in the West, specifically in Britain, centuries before America’s birth. Britain, in turn, had built on traditions handed down from antiquity. This cultural chain links America to previous epochs of world history, but higher education seems increasingly reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Inconveniently for academics, America falls on a historical continuum that does not touch all nations of the world.
In earlier eras, Harvard had no trouble establishing this hierarchy of relevance. Reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was once a requirement for entrance to the college, with the understanding that classical knowledge, recognized as the foundation of our society, was best imparted by reading seminal ancient texts in their original languages. I would not argue that Harvard should reinstate these requirements, nor, of course, would I say that the university should go back to denying admission to women and minority groups. But in academia’s attempt to erase all traces of its canonical, male-dominated past, we have gone to the other extreme, so eager to include that we minimize what is of greatest value.
We cannot become global citizens if we do not first understand our own national heritage. In minimizing the value of our own history and traditions, American colleges and universities are doing students a disservice. Hopefully Harvard is not condemning us to prove the truth of the George Santayana adage: “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
Zoey Orol ’10 is the Managing Editor Emeritus.
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