The Chronicle: 6/28/2002: The Smearing of Chicago: A University Improves Its Teaching of Classic Texts, but Is Accused of Gutting 'Western Civilization'

A university improves its teaching of classic texts, but is accused of gutting 'Western Civilization'

By THOMAS BARTLETT

Word is out. The University of Chicago is selling students "seriously short."

ALSO SEE:

A Wealth of Misinformation

The History of Chicago's 'Core'

Or so claims the Chicago Sun-Times.

It isn't alone. Advocacy groups like the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni denounce the university in no uncertain terms. The novelist Saul Bellow accuses Chicago of giving in to the "mindless narrowing and specialization that has characterized other universities for decades." Harsh words, especially from an alumnus and former professor who is a Nobel laureate.

All of this is a reaction to the history department's replacing most sections of its venerable "Western Civilization" course -- part of Chicago's famous Common Core curriculum -- with two new core courses, "European Civilization" and "Ancient Mediterranean World," beginning this fall.

Chicago has long been known for having one of the toughest undergraduate programs anywhere. Since the Common Core's origin, in 1931, the small, discussion-based classes that focus on classic texts have been a source of fierce pride for the legions who love the university. That group extends beyond alumni to many scholars who see Chicago as a rare force in academe for its emphasis on intellectualism and rigor over pre-professionalism and easy A's.

Critics argue that Chicago is now abandoning that impressive legacy. In this controversy, though, the substance of the change has been repeatedly misrepresented. You may have heard that Chicago undergraduates won't be reading the ancient classics (they'll probably read more), that lectures are replacing seminars (they aren't), or that administrators pushed the plan despite faculty members' objections (the idea came from the professors who teach "Western Civilization," all of whom voted in favor of the change).

The Sacred 'Civ' Courses

Blood-and-guts battles over what to teach undergraduates are part of Chicago's identity. The core has been reshuffled several times during its history, and each time the changes have been hotly debated. In 1999, about 1,700 students attended a "fun-in" mocking then-President Hugo F. Sonnenschein's supposed emphasis on fun at the expense of academics. "Chicago is a strange place," says James M. Redfield, a professor of classical languages and literatures, who has taught at the university since 1960. "The curriculum is the flag. We have student riots about it."

At times, Mr. Redfield counted himself among those who disagreed with Mr. Sonnenschein's proposals. Some of the university's decisions have not been in keeping with its traditions, he believes. But, he says, "this is not one of them."

What isn't changing is that Chicago undergraduates have to take 15 to 18 courses (depending on whether they pass a foreign-language exam) in a range of disciplines, including math, science, and the humanities. That's more than most colleges require. Stanford University students, for example, take nine general-education courses.

Part of the reason for the change is practical: The new courses will be two quarters long rather than three. Because students are required to take only two quarters of civilization, professors thought it made sense to offer them in two-quarter blocks.There will be optional third quarters as well, covering such topics as "The Idea of Civilization" and "The British Empire."

But the change also presents an opportunity to rethink the civilization curriculum. The professors say it will remain faithful to the mission of the core, and will correct what they believe are oversights. For instance, in "Western Civilization," Spain barely showed up. Several professors note that they will also be able to spend more time on the founding of the United States, a neglected subject in "Western Civilization."

"We're trying to create a course that looks at this with more complexity," says Rachel Fulton, an associate professor of history. While the reading list will stay virtually the same, she adds, professors in the "European Civilization" course will try to make more explicit the connections between historical periods.

Others on the campus aren't convinced. Education First, a student group at Chicago, is trying to persuade the university not to cut the number of "Western Civilization" sections. "We're concerned that it's a move toward more specialization, and that it's more about what faculty want to teach than what students want to learn," says Sara Butler, president of the group. It sponsored a student referendum in May in which 68 percent of the voters favored reconsidering the decision. (Just over a third of the 4,000 undergraduates voted.) Campus newspapers have also come out against the change. One student columnist speculated that faculty members are "simply uninterested in teaching snotty-nosed undergraduates about Plato."

Plato's The Apology of Socrates is on Richard P. Saller's syllabus. A professor of history and the university's provost, he helped design the new "Ancient Mediterranean World" course. He says students will read more ancient texts than they would have in "Western Civilization" -- including, for example, a book from Livy's history of Rome. "It will allow me to teach Rome in 10 weeks rather than 3 or 4," he says.

But that's precisely the problem, says Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a contributing editor at National Review, a conservative magazine. He sees the shift as an example of faculty members' choosing to teach their research specialties rather than ground students in the fundamentals. "They're losing the connection between the classical period and the Middle Ages," he argues.

Crucial Connections

That is a key objection. Critics like Mr. Kurtz say that by learning Aristotle in a different course from, say, Descartes, students will miss crucial connections. History professors argue that no history course can be comprehensive, and that it's the professor's job to help students understand the connections between what they learn in various courses. "When you teach history, you start at a certain point fully aware that things happened before," says Tamar Herzog, an assistant professor of history, who calls the controversy "a lot of smoke but no fire."

Mr. Kurtz, though, remains fired-up: "It's absurd, outrageous, and I object in the strongest possible terms."

He did just that on the National Review Web site. In a brief article posted in April, he bemoans the loss of "the jewel of the university's core curriculum" and encourages alumni to "give serious consideration to withholding contributions and writing letters of protest." He also makes it clear who is to blame: "For the past three years, Chicago's renowned core curriculum has been under a slow but steady assault by the administration of president Hugo Sonnenschein."

As it happens, Mr. Sonnenschein stepped down three years ago. The current president, Don M. Randel, supports the history department's decision and says the controversy is based largely on "misinformation."

Mr. Kurtz admits to the mistake, chalking it up to the perils of publishing quickly on the Web. He also concedes that he knows little about the specifics of the plan. In an interview, he insists that the University of Chicago is abandoning its "Great Books" program -- something that it has never had. Unlike undergraduates at Columbia University, those at Chicago do not all read the same set of important works. Even in "Western Civilization," professors choose their own readings, based on the period being covered.

One of the first to dash to the alarm was the National Association of Scholars, which sent out a news release in April denouncing the change. Next came a statement from another tradition-minded group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which included Mr. Bellow's charge of "mindless narrowing." That statement was also signed by a number of well-known conservatives, including Robert H. Bork and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Soon articles expressing similar outrage began appearing in newspapers and on a number of Web sites. In a letter to The Washington Post, a Chicago alumna said she would no longer make donations to her alma mater.

A spokesman says Mr. Bellow does not want to comment further. Glenn Ricketts, an NAS spokesman, says the group heard about the policy change from "various sources" at Chicago but didn't attempt to verify the information with those in charge of the courses. While he acknowledges that the statement was based on "preliminary information" and so was not entirely accurate, he says the organization stands by its condemnation of the new approach. "It doesn't reflect the kind of big-picture focus that Chicago is known for," he says.

Such criticism has frustrated Chicago's history professors. "We're not head-in-the-clouds specialists who don't want to talk to undergraduates," says Ms. Fulton. "In fact, the reason we created this course is that we really care about undergraduate teaching." She and Steven Pincus, an associate professor of history, designed the new "European Civilization" course. The two say students will still read classic texts, like Beowulf and Machiavelli's Discourses. And classes will continue to be small -- 22 or fewer students -- and to favor discussions over lectures.

Mr. Pincus says alumni have asked him why the core courses will be taught in large lectures -- an option that was never considered. Others have asked why the history department is eliminating the study of Christianity -- also untrue.

A similar claim was made in The Washington Times, which reported that an "introduction to early Christianity" would be removed from Chicago's curriculum. The article didn't mention the new "Ancient Mediterranean" course. "It strikes me that it's an incredibly wrongheaded attack," Mr. Pincus says. "What we're trying to do is keep general education alive and well here."

Robert L. Stone will have none of that. A real-estate lawyer in Chicago, he received a Ph.D. in political science and a law degree from the university in the 1980s. About 10 years ago, he bought a run-down fraternity house across the street from the campus and fixed it up. He lives there now with his wife and four children.

Mr. Stone has become one of the university's chief critics. He runs a Web site (http://www.realuofc.org) dedicated to preserving the "real" University of Chicago and is often quoted in newspaper articles. In 1998, he encouraged alumni to withhold donations to protest a reduction in the number of core courses, from 21 to 18. The latest change, he says, is nothing less than "a landmark in a continual slide" toward mediocrity. Like Mr. Kurtz, he blames overspecialization. "The dumbing down of the core really comes from the younger faculty," he says. "They don't like old-fashioned subjects. Newton and Aristotle are old-fashioned." (In fact, the works of both continue to be taught in the new core courses.)

The lawyer took part in a panel on Chicago's core curriculum at the National Association of Scholars convention this month. Several of those present, including Mr. Stone, singled out John W. Boyer, dean of the undergraduate college and a professor of history, as one of the administrators responsible for "ruining" the core curriculum and then trying to cover up their misdeeds. "Boyer is saying things that are manifestly untrue," says Mr. Stone.

The dean is an unlikely target. He has taught "Western Civilization" for 30 years. He has also written a series of papers on the history of the college and its curriculum, in which he explores the continuing debates over how and what to teach undergraduates -- debates that were often as heated as the current one.

Mr. Boyer is, however, an outspoken defender of the new courses. "Some are genuinely concerned with what I would call the virtue of the school," he says. "They need to understand that curricular innovation and developing new courses is part of the natural work of the university."

Like others at Chicago, he has had to respond to an array of faulty conclusions. One of the most common is that Chicago has recently stopped requiring all of its undergraduates to take "Western Civilization." That step actually was taken in 1966. Since the mid-1980s, all students have been required to take a class in civilization -- though not necessarily "Western Civilization." Among the other courses offered are "Islamic Civilization," "East Asian Civilization," and "Judaic Civilization."

Part of the conflict comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of the university's core curriculum. Chicago has more core requirements than Columbia, for example, but students also have more choices. And the core has undergone several substantial revisions over the years. "Alumni want to know why it's not 1954," says Mr. Redfield, the professor of classical languages and literatures, who happened to be an undergraduate at Chicago that year.

The Fun School?

In 1999, another core-related contretemps led to the resignation of the university's president. At the time, Mr. Sonnenschein, now a professor in the economics department, said he was stepping aside in favor of someone who was "less a symbol of change." That was a glancing acknowledgment of the reason for his departure: the protests of a vocal contingent of students, faculty members and alumni, who saw the former president as threatening everything their university stood for.

He wanted to increase the number of undergraduates by 1,000 over seven years, to a total of 4,500. He favored a slight reduction in the number of core courses, so that students could finish their general-education requirements in the first two years. He placed more emphasis on attracting new students, noting that Chicago received far fewer applications than other elite colleges, like Brown University and Yale University. He also pushed to increase the endowment and broke ground for a new athletics center with an Olympic-size swimming pool, replacing the pint-size pool built back in 1904.

That pool became a symbol of Mr. Sonnenschein's presidency. He was seen as the man who wanted to make Chicago more "fun," at the expense of intellectual rigor. Even though it was faculty members who voted in 1998 to lower the number of core courses, many took the move as an attack by the president on Chicago's sacred curriculum.

So what is Mr. Sonnenschein's legacy? Chicago is attracting many more applicants than before. This year it received 8,189 applications, compared with 5,419 in 1996. But it has not, as critics feared, lowered academic standards to do so. The SAT scores of incoming freshman have actually gone up over the past several years. When asked in a survey what characteristics they associated with the college, 97 percent of freshmen marked "intellectual." Only 1 percent checked "partying." Undergraduate enrollment now tops 4,000 and is on course for the seven-year plan. The $51-million athletics center is scheduled to open next year.

The former president did not want to be interviewed for this article. But in a dialogue published by Chicago's alumni magazine soon after his resignation, he said he recognized that some of the changes had been "painful" and "controversial." When asked what he would have done differently, he responded: "You don't realize that there's a particular group of people who are deeply concerned about an action, and you do not explain the action well enough."

Western Civ Lives

One thing that perhaps has not been explained well enough in the current controversy is that, contrary to some newspaper headlines, the "Western Civilization" course will not be dropped altogether. Two sections, accommodating 44 students, will be offered next year, taught by Karl and Katy O'Brien Weintraub (who are married). Mr. Weintraub, who is officially retired from the university, has taught the course since 1954. Ms. Weintraub, a lecturer, has taught the course for 14 years. The Weintraubs are skeptical of the new courses and plan to continue teaching "Western Civilization" as it has been taught for more than 50 years. "It never grows old. For me, it's been very rewarding," he says.

Mr. Boyer, the dean, will teach one quarter of Ms. Weintraub's course in the fall, as well as one quarter of "European Civilization." "I think he wants to support both courses," she says.

For the professors who spent a great deal of time designing the new courses, the unveiling of the results has been flattering and frustrating. Most of the attention the courses have received has been negative. "It's hard to have a conversation when the other person begins with, 'Oh, so you're killing Western Civ,'" says Ms. Fulton. The historians say they understand how an action's symbolic value can take on a life of its own. But that doesn't make this ordeal any easier.

"People worry about what we're doing, and that's fine," says Mr. Boyer. "But they need to get their facts straight."

THE HISTORY OF CHICAGO'S 'CORE'

1931: The University of Chicago's core curriculum is born. The so-called "New Plan," designed by Chauncey S. Boucher, dean of the colleges, requires students to take 15 general-education courses on the quarter system. There is no "Western Civilization" course.

1942-47: The core curriculum is greatly expanded. Robert M. Hutchins, Chicago's president, believes that the New Plan allowed students too much flexibility during their first two years. He favors having more requirements, which are added. Western Civilization is not a separate course.

1949: "Western Civilization," which is taught over three quarters, becomes a required course for all Chicago students. Up to this point, history has been taught as part of the humanities sequence. Now the university's historians, led by Christian Mackauer, convince the administration that it should be a separate requirement.

1959: The "Western Civilization" requirement is lowered to two quarters. It is among the courses that can be waived if students cannot finish all of their general-education courses in a two-year period.

1966: The four undergraduate divisions are given more power to decide general-education requirements. Only one, the Social Sciences, chooses to keep "Western Civilization" as a requirement.

1984-86: A more-uniform curriculum is reintroduced across the divisions. All students are required to take a three-quarter civilization course, but there are many to choose from, including "South Asian Civilization," "Islamic Civilization," and "Latin American Civilization."

1998: The core curriculum is reduced from 21 courses to 18. Some students and alumni protest the move, which the administration says is intended to allow students to finish their general-education courses during the first two years. As part of the reduction, the civilization requirement drops from three quarters to two.

2002: A new, two-quarter course (with an optional third quarter) called "European Civilization" is introduced by the history department. The course will replace all but two sections of "Western Civilization." A new course called "Ancience Mediterranean World" is also added.

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

A WEALTH OF MISINFORMATION

The decision by the University of Chicago's history professors to replace most "Western Civilization" courses with two new courses -- "European Civilization" and "Ancient Mediterranean World" -- has grabbed headlines and the attention of academic associations. But professors in the program complain that the news reports have often failed to get the facts straight. Here are some examples of what has been printed, along with what professors say is the truth.

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Press release from the National Association of Scholars (April 16): "Individual teachers in the new sequence will have greater flexibility in assigning readings and will not be required to organize their classes around Chicago's Readings in Western Civilization, which for many years has defined the core's substance."

Chicago professors say: The new course will continue to use mostly primary documents (like "On Liberty," by John Stuart Mill), many of them from Readings in Western Civilization, a series published by the university. And rather than greater flexibility, the new sequence actually imposes more uniformity across the sections. Each year, faculty members will choose texts that every student who takes "European Civilization" must read. As in the past, professors can require students to read additional texts, which may vary from section to section.

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Article in The Washington Times: (April 19): "A majority of Western-civilization core classes at the University of Chicago will be replaced this fall with European-civilization courses -- a move that will remove an introduction to early Christianity and late antiquity from the classroom."

Chicago professors say: It is true that the new course will start with the Middle Ages. But the article doesn't mention that a new, two-quarter sequence called "Ancient Mediterranean World" has been created, a core course that professors say will allow them to teach the period in more depth.

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Editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times (May 3): "Beginning this fall, the yearlong program will be cut back to two quarters and refashioned as more-compressed European political history."

Chicago professors say: The reduction in the number of required quarters from three to two happened in 1999. While one professor has said he fears that the new course will become a survey of European political history rather than a broader civilization course, those who designed it say that is not the case.

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Column in the Chicago Tribune (June 2): "The new course syllabus will be less rigid than the old one, enabling instructors to teach to their strength -- i.e., their research specialty."

Chicago professors say: Again, the new syllabus will actually allow professors less flexibility than in years past. As for teaching to their research specialty, Rachel Fulton, an associate professor of history, says otherwise. She argues that because the subject is so large (Europe from AD 500 to the present), it would be impossible to focus on a specific area of expertise.

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

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