It shouldn’t be either newsworthy or controversial to discover that college students are learning about the work of Aristophanes, studying the Peloponnesian War, or analyzing Aristotelian notions of happiness. But this is 2018, when college administrators often seem more focused on the subtle colonialism of the cafeteria’s Taco Tuesday than on the necessity of a well-rounded curriculum.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that the New York Times reports (or rather, tries to incite) controversy over some new course offerings in Arizona, where the state legislature recently approved $7 million for a School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. The ostensible goal of the school is to offer classes that encourage undergraduates to engage with original texts “from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers,” as the Times described.
The initial course offerings appear innocuous enough and are hardly lacking in diversity: A course on capitalism explores the work of John Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith, for example, but also Marx and Keynes. A class called “Women in Political Thought and Leadership” includes Catherine the Great and Golda Meir as well as Hillary Clinton. As Paul Carrese, the director of the school, told the Times, “The program is not pursuing a party line or dogma. . . . It’s making space for debate.”
Such efforts at curricular heterogeneity have not fooled some people, however. As the Times notes, “Many liberal professors view these efforts as reviving an antiquated Euro-centric view of history,” and some people derisively refer to ASU and another recently funded department of political economy and moral science at the University of Arizona as “Freedom Schools” (freedom being a suspect thing on college campuses these days). Worse, evidently, is the fact that some of the money approved by the state legislature pays for “six new professors with intellectually conservative pedigrees.”
The portrait drawn by the Times suggests that ASU is at risk of becoming a hotbed of right-wing indoctrination. But like most college campuses, ASU has long been replete with classes guaranteed to satisfy even the most avidly liberal activist-in-training. It has a School of Social Transformation that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in social justice and in women’s and gender studies, for example, and which lists dozens of courses such as “Mapping Intersections of Gender,” described as teaching “theoretical concepts, metaphors, and frameworks employed by feminist scholars to understand the way gender articulates with other categories of difference,” as well as a class on “Transgender and Intersex Literature and Film,” among others. Undergraduates in these programs complete internships with a wide range of liberal activist organizations and unions such as Arizona’s AFL-CIO. Are a handful of classes that study the work of dead white men really such a threat?
As many colleges eviscerate Great Books and Western Civ courses, it’s reassuring to witness Arizona’s attempt to offer classes where students can engage with and debate classical texts rather than be spoon-fed fashionable academic theories about those texts. But it should be unnerving to liberal readers of the Times to learn that on today’s college campuses, you don’t need to wear a MAGA hat to be denounced as a reprobate right-winger. You just have to read Aristophanes.
