On Thursday, May 7th, the Faculty Senate voted to extend the COLLEGE program from two to three quarters. I expected pushback from faculty and staff to be about the weight of general education requirements or heavy course loads.
Instead, the most prominent backlash was about “identity politics.”
Professor Ivan Marinovic, who voted against the extension of COLLEGE, writes in The Daily that “The Why College? syllabus is organized around the power-and-identity framework that has done so much to divide our campuses and our country. Selecting Freire, Du Bois and Dangarembga in the same course, without including a defender of a more classic universalist view of the human condition, is tendentious…”
Marinovic writes as if the past world of education, when authors like Freire, Du Bois and Dangarembga were not names on a syllabus, was one in which students were united. Yet I argue that a Western-exclusive education is not one which unites — it is one which obscures. An absence of questions regarding our own identities is not evidence of concord but confusion, a concession made in willful ignorance of the other, either through their deliberate exclusion from the canon or deprioritization by professors without such a set syllabus.
First, Marinovic’s support of foundational Western texts in COLLEGE does not run so opposed to the syllabus as he makes it seem. Students read excerpts of Plato, Seneca and Epicurus, although these do not subsume the curriculum in its entirety. More than just “a single aphorism” of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” is read, and so is Confucius who, while not Western, forms a huge basis for Eastern thought and is certainly a “classic.” This receives no mention in Marinovic’s article.
The writers Marinovic cites, too, make little sense in the context of his arguments. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, in “The Souls of Black Folk,” gives one of the most thorough defenses of “classical learning.”
In the decisive quandary regarding the creation of opportunities for Black people, Du Bois writes, “Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect” — and make no mistake, Du Bois is speaking of the classical education here. He continues, “there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it,” uplifting those who seek higher education through “centres of culture” like university.
How, then, to assess the teachings of a man who loves the classics so much that he “summon[s] Aristotle and Aurelius” other than through the lens of Western universalist thought? Du Bois’ writing is unmistakably a favorable view of the canon.
He and Marinovic, at least on this point, agree completely.
It is then absurd to cite Du Bois as opposition to the “more classic universalist view.” The opposition Marinovic speaks of has nothing to do with the values or ideas Du Bois presents; it becomes simply that Du Bois is a Black man, which makes his inclusion on the syllabus “anti-traditionalist.” Marinovic is not for tradition, he is merely against inclusion.
Marinovic cites issues of identity, central to our becoming citizens, as “a list of narrow electives” rather than a general education course — as though questions of who we are are not important enough to mandate a class. But giving students the language they need to understand themselves and their role in society is not an agenda. It’s not even “progressive.”
It’s common sense.
If our identity markers — gender, race and how we exercise autonomy — are the first things we see of one another, should we not provide students tools to understand those concepts? Should we not provide students with literary materials to prompt further questioning? Do those questions not inherently overlap with ideas of “virtue, agency, freedom and responsibility,” as Marinovic asks?
And here’s the most important question of all: do we, students of the 21st century, not deserve better than arbitrary and unintellectual categories marking those questions as “progressive” or “conservative?”
These bumper-sticker labels driving syllabus politics are why education is a battleground where it should be a bridge. Labels of progressive or traditional split literature into abstract binaries with little meaning for the modern reader and create divisive strategies to bar relevant thought from the classroom. The emergence of inclusivity, framed as “modern,” is considered lower quality and thus relegated to marginal spaces in a curriculum — or pushed out altogether.
Yet literature should not be treated as wine or cheese — its value does not necessarily become greater as it ages. Nor does it necessarily digest better simply because time has allotted the words to ferment. Age is not a determinant of value. To suggest otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of young people.
This is not to devalue the classics — I myself plan to declare a major in Classics, happily dedicated to all texts cited as being the “ones of worth.” I am also a student in SLE, which, curiously enough, seems the epitome of the type of education Marinovic praises and yet fails to mention. I read Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Dante, Locke and Rousseau along with 79 other students in my cohort who realized very quickly that the values in these texts are not just within the content but in the conversations we can have around them. Those discussions are what make me a critical thinker — not just the consumption of so-called great works.
Reading “the classics” is one way to become a critical thinker. It is, by no means, the only way.
That community engendered between readers is not limited to those who pick up books of the canon, and it’s why we have programs such as SLE, ESF and ITALIC open to incoming students alongside COLLEGE; they are all different pedagogical methods from which we may choose, not opposing forces that glorify certain texts in favor of contrary political agendas.
Whether or not it is true that students deserve better than COLLEGE, the conclusion one must come to is that an inclusive general education program has a place at Stanford, a place to make room for questions that truly matter to the modern freshman.