February 12, 2014:  From Great to Good to Why Freaking Bother

For years, the idea of a great books curriculum has slowly been watered down in higher education.   Such curriculum may have entered water vapor territory this week when Alamo College’s Chancellor proposed that a course based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People replace the Humanities' requirement in students’ core curriculum. 

The canon of Humanities’ readings has been under attack for years.  Even when I went to college in the early 1980’s, many of the great books that my father read in college were being replaced by newer, often more diverse texts.  Such changes caused enough consternation, but nothing compares to this stand at the Alamo. 

I asked my father to recall some of the texts that he read in his two semester Humanities’ sequence at Harvard in the early 50’s.  Completely disregard for the moment that one of his professors was Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, the kind of book deemed appropriate for my canon in the 1980’s (as well as disregard my complete envy and awe of that fact).

Here’s some of what my father remembers reading:

• John Locke
• Karl Marx - Das Kapital
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
• John Stuart Mill  
• Eric Frome
• David Hume
• Dante - Divine Comedy
• Dickens - Bleak House
• Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
• Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
• Cervantes - Don Quixote

By 1980, at West Virginia University, I was reading none of these for a basic “great books” course.  Although more spread out than two semesters, I would recollect my core “great books” curriculum as being comprised of:

• Homer -  The Iliad and The Odyssey
• Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
• Macchiavelli - The Prince
• Shakespeare - King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth
• Milton - Paradise Lost
• Voltaire - Candide
• Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Thoreau - Walden
• Dostoyevsky -- Crime and Punishment
• Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Is that lack of continuity a sign of the fall of western civilization?  Probably not.  My reading list still entailed some heady reading that allowed for deep thought and interpretation, the objective/outcome sought by a liberal arts education anyway.

So, where are we going to be in 50 years if Alamo College gets its way?  It’s a small step to a “not so great books” curriculum, made up probably of the following:

• Johnson - Who Moved My Cheese
• Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Seuss - Oh, the Places You’ll Go
• Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Lencioni - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• Fisher and Ury - Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
• Collins and Porras - Built to Last:  Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
• Capodagli and Jackson - The Disney Way
• Peter and Hull - The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
• Collins - Good To Great

So, I am proposing, in the spirit of facile thinking everywhere, that we “put lipstick on a pig” and live with this.  For future scholars, trying to desperately elevate this “not so great” curriculum, I recommend you show how each management self-help book is truly an extension of some work from the canon.

Who Moved My Cheese is ultimately a re-telling of Paradise Lost.  (My goodness, those mice never lost paradise, surely those humans can accomplish Paradise Regained!)

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is merely an anthropological revision of the 9 layers of hell, meaning Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Once we discovered there were really only 7 rings, Steven Covey merely turned them around to positive traits to guide us.  (In case you’re wondering, it was limbo and heresay that were eliminated.  They are so old school.)

Oh, The Places You’ll Go is simply Dr. Seuss’s upbeat, more catchy version of Homer’s The Odyssey.  As human beings have evolved, we wanted to maintain the power of the oral tradition of literature represented by Homer, but, damn, all of those lines are so hard to remember.  So, we turned to the master of rhyme and rhythm to recast travel tales.

How To Win Friends and Influence People is Machiavelli’s The Prince.  Enough said. Dale Carnegie had not tapped into something new, people!

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is frankly the entire William Shakespeare canon.  It is the logical next step in the Cliff Notes representation of Shakespeare. Do we really need a separate Cliff Notes for all of those plays?  Can’t you summarize it in one book?  Well, thank you, Patrick Lencioni, you have done that.

Getting To Yes is ultimately just The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, building off of Sawyer’s ability to get other people to paint his fence.

Built to Last is ultimately Alexander Hamilton allowing his ego to take over The Federalist Papers.  However, the mere fact that I am writing this blog about an American college curriculum abandoning the core tenets of a liberal arts background for self-help hell suggests that maybe the ideals of our great country are not built to last.

The Disney Way is just Candide without all of the irony and satire.  In fact, expect Disney to simply create a cartoon Pangloss, half dog, half human, who greets visitors at Disney World with “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds—Disney World!”

The Peter Principle is really just The Scarlet Letter.  I think the evolution of this transition is obvious; well, to everyone but poor Hester Prynne. 

Good To Great is a modernized Animal Farm, only it’s the damn hedgehog (yes, he who defends himself by sticking his head up his ass) who runs the place. 

I look forward to my grandchildren's education. . . . from the 10th layer of Dante's hell:  Ruined Academia.