HumCore Workshop #5: Western Civ, Values, and Beliefs
Graphic design by Sheena Lai; image by Andrew Brodhead.
Read analysis of this session on Arcade
Transcript
Lora Burnett:
Awesome. Thank you. Okay, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor and pleasure to be here. I was here as an undergraduate during the 1980s and so had a front row seat on some of the curricular debates at the time, have thought a lot about them since, and I'm using this narrow focus on the history of debates over Western Culture at Stanford to talk about the broader history of- Recording in progress. History of Western civilization. What do people mean or what half people meant historically when they said that, and the Stanford debates are a pretty good window onto why that's a controversial idea right now. So I wanted to give just a broader overview very quickly, and this is going to be old news to a lot of you, of the history of curricular change at Stanford as it relates to required courses in the humanities because this is a seminar about thinking about the humanities in a global context. Where have the humanities broadly construed fit into the Stanford curriculum?
Lora Burnett:
The beginning of Stanford up until 1919 is what I call the laissez-faire period of the curriculum and my basic observation for all these slides, and I'm not going to spend tons of time on all of them for this whole talk, is the idea that the college curriculum always reflects broader currents and social thought. The college curriculum is almost never countercultural, even when it seems like it is to people who want to change it. It is usually reflective of the broader culture.
Lora Burnett:
The Stanford curriculum in the early days was also reflective of some practical concerns. They didn't have a full faculty, they didn't have professors in some major subjects. And so in terms of requirements, there was no ability to require kind of a course of study for all students. Majors were left up to professors. So the curriculum was laissez-faire in the sense that the professors as kind of the moguls of learning or the captains of erudition as Thorstein Veblen would have it. They had a lot of control over designing the course of study for students.
Lora Burnett:
Now that changes in 19... Well nuts. I touched the wrong button, so that changes. In 1919, with the emergence of what I would call the Highwater mark of the progressive era in the Stanford curriculum. If you think about it, American historians date, kind of the end of the progressive era to 1924, which is when immigration restrictions were put in place and Calvin Coolidge is having a great time, I guess, as president, but really progressive era ideas.
Lora Burnett:
The idea that problems can be solved with organization, with systematization, that social problems need to be addressed in a systematic way, that science and kind of scientific processes of inquiry hold the answers to solving our social problems. You see that reflected at Stanford in a few ways. You see what Warren Wiebe called The Search for Order, the kind of chaotic and laissez-faire stuff gets more organized and systematized.
Lora Burnett:
So the university develops departments in 1901. There are schools, it organizes the faculty into schools in 1925 and 1926. And we see for the first time a systematization of the course of study at Stanford. Now the faculty is large enough and diverse enough, and departments exist. So instead of having individual professors in charge of everybody's major, now you major and your department manages that. And then the entire college manages undergraduate course of study.
Lora Burnett:
So what that looked like was this, and this is the first of my pie charts. And I have to tell you, as a Stanford undergrad I wouldn't have made it out of here if we weren't allowed to take Intro to Logic as a math requirement. So this is the extent of my mathematical skill as a Stanford grad, is adding. And even that is tricky, but this is what the curriculum looked like from 1920 to 1935. Six hours of English and Comp, three hours of reading in a foreign language. And if you couldn't pass that, then you had to take a bunch of foreign language classes until you did, but this is the minimum here.
Lora Burnett:
Nine hours of U.S. History and the nine hours of "General History," which would be like world history. Twelve hours of citizenship, that's the problems of citizenship course that was instituted at Stanford in 1920. It wasn't Western Civ. It was a present focused course. It was a set of sociology courses really, sociology, economics and history were the three disciplines that taught these courses. And it was focused again, that progressive era idea that we're going to examine the various problems that confront leaders in America today and think about them, and then nine hours of biology, nine hours of chem.
Lora Burnett:
So as you can see, if you take humanities as English language and social sciences as history and other social science disciplines, and that's where history has been classed at Stanford, and move those together as the humanities, if we want to be generous in our definition of the humanities and include history, then 39 hours of humanities courses were required out of the... excuse me, out of the 90 hours of the lower division, there's 180 quarter hours. So 90 hours of lower division.
Lora Burnett:
Okay. That system stays in place until the mid-1930s. What we see in the early and mid-1930s at Stanford is the same thing we see a lot of other colleges and universities across the country, particularly private colleges are struggling financially. Public colleges don't struggle as much because they are public colleges and because they are taxpayer-supported. Those state institutions were the last to reduce hours and reduce teaching loads for people, and public colleges paid better during this time period.
Lora Burnett:
So what we see at Stanford is a lot of departments struggling with enrollments and just a lot of financial pain in general. So in the mid-1930s, the curriculum changes and in the mid-1930s, there's a Western Civ requirement introduced. Lawrence Veysey, the historian of American education, he's argued that Western Civ classes are usually introduced during war time.
Lora Burnett:
But this is an unusual, kind of something that doesn't meet his norm in the sense that in-between two world wars and during peace time, but a time of great stress, this Western Civ requirement was introduced. And I look at this period of the curriculum as kind of the new deal for Stanford humanities and other disciplines. As you can see, the share of hours that each kind of basic school within Stanford gets shifted around a little bit, humanities used to have just nine hours... excuse me. Yeah. Liberal arts used to have just nine hours, with about 30 in the social sciences.
Lora Burnett:
Well, now these requirements are divided a little bit more evenly. So everybody gets a piece of the pie, six hours of English, three hours of foreign language, and then six more hours of electives in the school of letters. The idea being to require more courses from those professors. You get Western Civ now, instead of problems of citizenship, but then nine hours in other social sciences, which still covers those sociology and economics classes that other people, other disciplines were teaching.
Lora Burnett:
And then 15 hours in the physical sciences and mathematics. So a little bit less for natural sciences and mathematics, a little bit more for the liberal arts, and a little bit less for the social sciences, but a more evenly distributed pie for everyone. But if you look carefully, you'll see that the overall share of required hours for the humanities, which embraces, say the liberal arts literature and the soft social sciences shrinks just a little bit, just a little bit from 39 hours to 36 hours.
Lora Burnett:
All right, then we get to the Cold War, and I guess you should say that this New Deal/wartime curriculum, Stanford does undergo a lot of changes to respond to kind of the whole institution or whole national war effort during World War II, but it's noteworthy that Western Civilization is a class that is introduced here as a requirement, replacing the other history requirement. Stanford students used to have to take 18 hours of history, nine of U.S. and nine of other world history.
Lora Burnett:
So history as a department gets a much smaller piece of the pie, but the share that it gets is now no longer U.S. history, but a view of this broader idea of Western civilization happening at a time when liberal democratic capitalism is under threat from the right and from the radical left, in the minds of kind of American liberals. The idea that FDR is trying to save capitalism from fascists and communists, and here's Stanford kind of reflecting this broader moment in American society.
Lora Burnett:
All right, the Cold War, the book to read on the history of Stanford and the Cold War is Rebecca Lowen's book on Cold War University, but what we see during the Cold War is the rise of the idea of general education, that all our citizens, we must all be prepared to confront the communist menace or the totalitarian menace. And to do that, we must all be conversant in all the different languages of knowledge, all the different ways that various areas of knowledge speak to one another, and the citizens need this broad education that will make them less susceptible to being tricked by someone speaking in a knowledge language that they don't understand.
Lora Burnett:
So you get this idea of the rise of general education and Stanford's curriculum very much in keeping with the broader cultural milieu, tries to thread the needle between two things, between being so conformist that they're producing automatons and between being so individualist that they're producing people who are misfits in society. So it's that tension between fitting in and sticking out, and what they do is they develop this accordion-like structure for the general ed hours, for the lower division hours, so that depending on your major, you had to take more or fewer required classes in other areas.
Lora Burnett:
You could see, I've listed there on that slide, what this looked like. Everybody has to take nine hours of English, the 12 hours of Western Civ, and three hours of a foreign language. So most of that is a core of humanities classes, but then after that, in two areas outside your major, you took some combination. Let me show you what that looks like because it's easier to see than to say.
Lora Burnett:
For an English major, which that was me, those basic courses required of everything. The Western Civ and the foreign language and the comp lit, 24 hours. Twelve of those hours are in social sciences and 12 were in the humanities. Then you had to take 10 more hours of social sciences, econ, sociology, whatever. Seventeen hours of natural sciences and math, and then four hours of an advanced course in one of those other fields you were not majoring in. That meant that English majors outside their major had to take 55 hours of general ed. And of those 55 hours of general ed, 38 were in the humanities.
Lora Burnett:
For econ majors, it was slightly different, same basic 24-hour course that everybody had to take, but an economics major just needed eight more hours of humanities, that same 17 hours of natural science mathematics, and then a four-hour course in either area. So assuming generously that every economics major took a four-hour course in English instead of a four-hour course in, I don't know, geology, we have 53 general ed hours for economics majors and 36 of those best-case scenario are happening in the humanities. So slightly less for them.
Lora Burnett:
And then for engineers, interestingly, a very balanced curriculum in terms of the requirements, only eight hours of humanities, only 10 hours of social sciences, one more four-hour course in one of those two, 46 general hours overall, and engineers at Stanford have always had a couple of provisions and protections. One is that the engineering school can always require classes where most students would have electives. Engineering can dictate an entire four year program and these hours that are just listed as elective in my first slide, those 33 hours in yellow or whatever they are for engineers, those are all filled with engineering classes if you're an engineering major. Those are only really open as electives if you're not an engineering major.
Lora Burnett:
All right. So what happens during the Cold War is that there's this kind of accordion-like approach to the required courses so that everybody is kind of brought to what Stanford believed was a similar level of preparedness in disciplines outside your own so that there was some kind of perception of parity.
Lora Burnett:
All right. The mid-to-late 60s at Stanford feature a lot of student protests about various issues, the absence of Black and women professors, the need for Black studies in the curriculum, Chicano studies, the anti-war movement. All these things are happening and the university decides that that is a good occasion to propose a complete overview or a complete revamp of the curriculum. They do a study of education at Stanford. It's a 10-volume report issued, and fascinatingly, the language of the report as it's touting the changes that the administration and students have agreed need to happen, really borrows heavily from the language of free-market economics.
Lora Burnett:
It does not talk very extensively about the pedagogical or sociological need for the curricular changes they're proposing, so much as, "We are going to allow professors to compete for student enrollments and allow students' freedom of consumer choice," and really using those words, that it's a free-market competition between professors for undergraduate enrollments and the subjects, and the topics that the market of student enrollments wants to see will flourish, and sparking this kind of competition among professors is going to be good for research and good for teaching.
Lora Burnett:
And so we get what I call the free to be, free to be you and me, and the free to buy curriculum, which is almost no requirements and almost everything elective, but again, the school of engineering can take those 63 hours and prescribe what classes students should take. Other than the laissez-faire era, when there were no distribution requirements, this is as slim as the set of distribution requirements that Stanford has gotten up into the 1980s.
Lora Burnett:
I should say though, about the engineering school, that... and Western Civ is no longer a requirement. From 1970 to the Institution of the Western Culture program in 1980, there's no longer a social sciences requirement for all students, the same class for all students. But I should say, to tip my hat to the engineers, that in the degree plans for engineering, if you look at the catalogs or the university bulletin from 1970, '71, '72, and you look at all the different kinds of engineering that Stanford offered at the time, every single one of those degree programs lists that students should take Western Civ, and that's explicable for lots of reasons.
Lora Burnett:
The engineering school knew that it fulfilled the nine hours of sociology requirements. You could take those classes in order as a freshman, bang, bang, bang, you get it over with. It's schedulable and manageable. So even though Western Civ was no longer required of all students, the engineering school, interestingly, still directed their students toward it because it was an easy and orderly way to fulfill the nine hours. It was actually 12 hours, so it gave them three more hours than needed in the social sciences. That's what we get from 1970 to 1979.
Lora Burnett:
It's against that context of absolute kind of the bottom dropping out of institutional support for required enrollments in different disciplines, and some broader cultural changes that you get a call for a return to some kind of prescriptive curriculum. There's a group of professors at Stanford meeting around 1974, 1975. They call themselves the Humanities Circle. They're very concerned about enrollments in the humanities.
Lora Burnett:
Think of this though, against the context of broader developments. In 1970, the courts rule at Title VII, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion. Title VII applies to universities because they receive federal funding. So all of a sudden, universities who do not have women and minorities on the tenure track are scrambling to come into compliance with federal law.
Lora Burnett:
So at Stanford, there's a huge push to hire women and minorities on the tenure track. We have the rise of feminist studies, the rise of Chicano studies, the rise of Black studies, disciplines that are fascinating and interesting to a lot of undergraduates and are appealing to that, "free market," of students who are driving enrollments. And what we get is something... I don't call it a backlash at this moment, but it is a sense among some humanists, kind of that New Deal order, that institutional commitment to making sure that every major discipline or every major school in the university has its share of undergraduates is something that the humanities professors in certain... not so much certain disciplines, but in certain approaches to disciplinary teaching feel like is necessary. So they institute the Area Requirements, areas one through eight, and I think you're familiar with all of them. As you can see, I've listed the different schools that these area requirements broadly fell into. So some of them were purely humanistic. Some of them were more social science, some were STEM, and one course in a non-Western culture.
Lora Burnett:
Here's what that looked like in practice, best case scenario for the humanities. This would be the case if you had a student who took the great works of Western culture class, it would be a humanities Western culture track. Whereas if you took values, technology, science and society, that's really a social science track, but best-case scenario, this is what an undergrad's classes would look like with all these area requirements. Humanities has a nice big chunk at 21 hours. You have six hours of social sciences, nine hours of STEM, and the rest in electives.
Lora Burnett:
But if you've been tracking these lovely pie charts all along, what you can see is the longer trend. As the university became more organized, more systematized, more prescriptive, and more responsive to financial and social pressures, the share of the curriculum that was allocated and distributed just to the humanities has shrunk significantly. My takeaway from this in terms of the culture wars history from 1980 to 1988 is this: That quarrel was not a quarrel about whether or not students should read, or whether or not students should study the humanities. It was really a quarrel about how a discipline should be approached or how a course should be taught, and that quarrel is not the cause of the shrinking pie, so much. I think it's a symptom of the shrinking pie.
Lora Burnett:
I think as the pie begins to shrink, professors become more anxious about whether or not students will be pushed into their classes or dissuaded. Either way, whether it's a cause or a symptom, internecine warfare never, ever grows the pie. That's my historical takeaway. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Alexander:
Thank you. Thank you.
Lora Burnett:
Uh-huh (affirmative) Let me stop sharing here so you can-
Alexander:
Okay.
Lora Burnett:
Or you could just stop me. I have stopped sharing.
Alexander:
Yeah. That brings that. That brings this big board up. So everyone can hear me?
Dan:
Yeah. Very, very briefly, Lora, that was fascinating. Just a quick comprehension question. Hours, we can basically translate as credits, like three hours would be a three-unit course? Okay. I just wanted to confirm, thanks.
Lora Burnett:
[inaudible 00:23:43] in the bulletin over the years. Sometimes they call it hours, sometimes they call it credits. Sometimes they call it units, but yeah, quarter hours.
Alexander:
Brilliant. Okay. So yeah, with one, thanks to Lora, because one thinks of what one wants to say about the humanities education at Stanford, and I have all these great ideas, and then listening to Lora, I realize that other people have had these ideas a 100 or so years ago. And here I am reinventing the wheel in a very sort of classic academic fashion. So it's humbling, and at the same, incredibly valuable to know the history of the last century or so.
Alexander:
So the big thing I wanted to start off with was a sense that I have the... when it comes to humanities education, we're always talking about deeply held underlying values and beliefs, beliefs that one could call theological if it was a different context. And I use theological not in a pejorative sense at all. In the beginning of this workshop series, Muhammad Harris asked, "Is there such a thing as a neutral paradigm?" And the answer tended to be no. And Dan asked, "How do we do this thing that we are doing in a way that isn't ideologically corrupt?"
Alexander:
So this idea of underlying values, and there's another great phrase actually from Muhammad Harris's initial thing, where he says, "The conversation begins with the idea of inheritance and historicity. In this present, in this historical moment, and us being in Pakistan, what is the inheritance that we are contending with?" So what is that inheritance for us at Stanford today? In the conversation about humanities education, I think it's inextricable from the Anglo imperium, the Anglo empire that created the institution that we're in.
Alexander:
And again, this is an imperial project with very clear... it's a settler colonial project. It's got very clear designs on land. It's got a clear attitude to the Spanish genocide of the Native Americans. It's in favor of it, that's why we have Junipero Serra Boulevard. It's in favor of the continued removal of the Moche [inaudible 00:26:12] people from the land, so we can build a university on it. And those values are reflected again in the statues that we have around the quad, in the statements that we have in the Cantor Arts. So there's absolutely no question, this is a university founded on certain values, and equally that these values are under question today. Junipero Serra Boulevard is no longer called Junipero Serra Boulevard because of a community recognition that, that was a statement about founding values that the university no longer stands behind.
Alexander:
When it comes to humanities education, there's also on a pragmatic level, not much future in trying to persuade one's university that it should teach a story of itself as a story of violent racists. True as that may be historically, it's a hard sell as a value that we should be honest about what made this institution exist on this piece of land in California.
Alexander:
Another kind of big underlying value that hangs there in background is I think the question of progress. Humanities education is inextricable from, I think some underlying question about whether or not we believe in progress. This came up, I think at multiple times during the workshop series. Often, it's generational, like is this generation of our students less confident about the future compared to our generation?
Alexander:
And it also comes out in questions of... the underlying question of progress comes out in moments like when we talk about a humanities curriculum that will in enable our students to cope with brutality, the brutality of the world, that will enable them to cope with the world as it is today. You only want to teach your students to cope if you think there's a purpose to teaching them to cope, if you think that there's an underpin of progress that you believe in as an institution. It also comes out in the way we talk about impact. We would only want our university to have impact if we genuinely believe the impact was going to take our communities forward to a better place, but we don't often put that into words.
Alexander:
And again, the question of progress is also tied up with something we've talked about in the series, which is the problem of presentism. So on the one hand, if I think about the curriculum at Habib and how it focuses on modernity, focusing on modernity sort of raises the question and I think an explicit focus on modernity avoids the kind of presentism trap because it doesn't say, it doesn't assume that the present is all there is. By labeling it modernity, it makes it clear that this is a new situation we are living in that has a past. It's kind of a focus on modernity implies the existence of a past we should study, and works against presentism.
Alexander:
But again, the question of progress also impacts the assumptions we have about teaching history, right? Because if we are working in a curriculum that's taking us forward, whatever that we is, then history takes us backward on some level, and it's hard to get out of that trap. And again, wherever we are, whether it's Karachi or California, and we are talking about saving the students from the world, or we are talking about protecting them, or we're talking about deprogramming or reprogramming like Andrew was talking about in Singapore, all these things assume that there's a point, there's this trajectory that we're not just dealing with a flat line of human haplessness throughout history.
Alexander:
Talking like this, I'm highly conscious of a certain queasiness in the academy about having the conversations about values and progress, and universal qualities out loud. And again, because it's hard to make these statements in the abstract. One can do them in a workshop when the purpose is to talk about the global humanities, but it's hard to imagine my one self talking to the deans in terms of these big values, not least because as soon as you talk about these deep values and beliefs, I believe humanity is not getting better, then it gives people great deal to disagree with.
Alexander:
So if we say something as Najib Jan said in one of the earlier workshops, what we really should be teaching is global brutalities, not global humanities. And again, once you say that it makes it easy to disagree with because not everybody sees the world in terms of relentless brutality. And it's equally hard to say things like assumptions like the undergraduates should share our confidence that what this university is moving towards justice, for example, or the undergraduates we're teaching should share our values and they should believe that we can face the future together. Again, it's hard... as soon as the arguments get that kind of big and weighty, they're harder to say out loud, but at the same time, they're kind of absolutely fundamental to everything that we're doing, I think.
Alexander:
Yeah. And I remembered another great thing that Najib Jan says, the basic question is who's winning the argument, God or Satan? And that gives us a line into sort of what I think that the humanities core can do but I'm going to get to that in a second. It's in this space, this kind of space of having these beliefs, not necessarily being practically and pragmatically able to voice them explicitly, but then controlling the situation. This is where Western Civ as a discussion lives, I think. It's right in this space.
Alexander:
On the one hand, we live in, Western Stanford exists as and in Western Civ. It represents Anglo settler colonialism. It represents an Anglo project on the Western shores of the North Americas. We have the statues, we have the art gallery. We have Rodin in the quad. There's no question that we are living in Western Civ. At the same time, with our global and diverse faculty that doesn't all subscribe to this project, and our diverse student body that also doesn't subscribe to this project, but it constantly intention with it. It's both inevitable and inevitably contested.
Alexander:
I should also note here that when I make these broad brush statements about Western Civ, for me, Western Civ as a label is both the Plato to NATO historical run through great white men who, when you go far enough, weren't actually white because they were from Syria-
Lora Burnett:
Or great.
Alexander:
We'll leave the great there. We'll take all the great. It's another one of those values questions. So for me, Western Civ as a label includes both the cannon of great dead white men of Europe and North America and their interlocutors, and their feminist anti-colonial interlocutors who were reading the same things and exposing the hypocrisies in those values. So for me, Caesar, [inaudible 00:35:05], James Baldwin are absolutely part of... absolutely fall under the label of Western Civ because it's like existing in this discourse that's a continued conversation that includes its own criticism.
Alexander:
So why then... and really, what I'm building towards here is a statement that we should teach Western Civ, that a program like HumCore should have a Western Civ element in it. And I think because on the one hand, it's a hard argument to make, to drop out of a conversation that's been so important in human history. If a particular conversation that has literally brought statues by a 20th century French sculptor, of a political event that happened in France in the... I'm forgetting when the Rodin statues... when the town that they were going out to [crosstalk 00:36:16] Yeah. What century was that?
Lora Burnett:
I don't know. I don't know.
Dan:
14th century, I think.
Alexander:
Yeah. There we go.
Dan:
I think. Someone can Google it and prove me wrong.
Alexander:
[inaudible 00:36:29] the conversation and discourse so powerful that it can take a 14th century political event on the other side of the world and bring it to Western seaboard of North America and enshrine it in a 20th-century French statue. But then why teach Western Civ? It's only because of this empire, we're only teaching it because of this empire. There's no sort of essential truth that it speaks to. It just speaks to the reality of a certain imperial project that we exist in institutionally.
Alexander:
We can't ignore it as scholars. We can't abandon it or say that we are not in it. We can think about whether it ends, although Spangler... as Dan pointed out, people have had these end of the civilization conversations before. It's a Western Civ discourse that is itself as a discourse imagined out of a much more complex set of connections and networks, like Dan mentioned, and I think Nasreen mentioned, Sandra [inaudible 00:37:50] with this idea of interlocking areas.
Alexander:
So the idea that you can imagine some pure discourse out of the real complexity of history isn't imagining, but nevertheless, nevertheless, on some level, the burgers of [inaudible] don't belong on the land of the Moche [inaudible 00:38:11], and yet here they are, and here we are at Stanford. So we have to study Western Civ.
Alexander:
If then we have to study Western Civ, how are we doing it at Stanford? And here, I'm indebted to my colleague, [inaudible 00:38:33], who gave a brilliant presentation of what it is that we are doing in HumCore, a couple in the previous session. I think to put it into the conversation that we are having today with Lora and the stuff I've just said about values, on the one hand, HumCore is... the humanities core, this particular project started by Dan continued by me with the group of people who are in it, it's a creature of the Stanford ecosystem.
Alexander:
And so its boundaries and limits, and successes and failures tell us a great deal about the ecosystem more than they tell us about some universal model of humanities, global humanities education. Again, as our colleagues at the university made clear, it's the historical moment and the inheritance that each of us deal with in different types of places.
Alexander:
So HumCore, I think here, it gives us a space to talk about these large values and belief structures through the primary text that we work with. So the advantage of pulling up these texts dealing with Neoplatonism for example, is it enables us to talk about European Neoplatonists or Muslim Neoplatonists. And to say to the students, "Do you believe there's a big structure out there with a hierarchy towards a guard that you can ascend or not?"
Alexander:
So again, by having a structure built on reading basically 10 primary texts, a quarter plus and more in the plenaries, that gives you a space to talk about the underlying beliefs without necessarily having to commit to one's own beliefs as an instructor, or sell one's own beliefs to one's employer. It also gives us a structure in which we can teach Western Civ without allowing it to become the default. So it's just one option, like this incredible story from Plato through Homer, Machiavelli, Locke, Russo is an incredible story, but it's not the story. It's just a story. And as soon as you have a cluster of three or four seminar courses, one of which is dealing with Western Civ, it becomes abundantly clear in the plenary sessions that it's a great story and there's a great amount to take out of it, but it's just one story.
Alexander:
It's interesting here, of course, really, what we are dealing with is we're dealing with the faculty contending with the limits of their own PhDs, I think. We all did PhDs. This provides us with a framework and then we see the world through that framework. So I get like, same with me. I can see the world through the kind of Hickma or Islamic theology framework that Nauman was talking about, or a Neoplatonic framework, or a more Western Civ framework, but I can't really see it through the framework of my colleagues who work in classical Chinese, and that I can see it through some frameworks, not others based on what I did my PhD in is I think a valuable thing that harkens in the plenary sessions.
Alexander:
The last thing I would say that HumCore does, and this fits with the story Lora was telling about the feelings of the faculty and at different moments, is the kind of absolute reliance on faculty instructor autonomy, enables us on the one hand to dodge a lot of the big questions because we don't have to agree. The faculty teaching in each of these seminars in a cluster have complete control over what they think is most important. Be it core, be it core, periphery, center, crossing continents, not crossing continents, giving up on the idea of anything other than complete autonomy over what the content of the course is enables us to get around that.
Alexander:
Also, what's been interesting is the complete autonomy of the individual seminars has not produced conversations that talk past each other. It's still always produced, even though you would think, the classic, the problem with the humanities is 50 trillion tiny specialized courses that have no entryway, which is fair enough to an engineering student looking at the humanities and thinking, "Where do I go? It's also specialized."
Alexander:
But when you give complete autonomy to faculty to be as specialized as they want, and then you fit them into a seminar structure, you get an accessible conversation is I think what we've learnt. You get an accessible conversation out of the autonomy and the choices to specialize or not.
Alexander:
And yeah, with that, I'll end. I'll pass it back to Lora for a brief comment, and then we'll open it up.
Lora Burnett:
Very interesting, and I'm especially interested in your last point because one of the big concerns expressed by professors in the 1980s who did not want to see a change to the Western culture program, they wanted to conserve the core reading list, and their argument was that this core reading list, this list of required texts was foundational for students to have a shared conversation. That was a hugely important value, a shared conversation, almost more important even than a shared body of knowledge.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
Was this idea that it almost doesn't matter specifically, although maybe it does when we get down to brass tacks, Plato must be more important than Tony Morrison, but what's really important is that all the students have the opportunity to always talk about the same things, and they get this through a shared reading list. But what you've pointed out is, well, actually you don't need a shared reading list. You don't even need a shared list of topics to cover.
Lora Burnett:
If you take a 100 humanities professors and give them all autonomy, they're going to come up with something similar enough so that people can talk about it, which may say a lot about the invisible working conditions of humanities professors. When I think about these conversations, every debate about curriculum is a debate about working conditions. It's a debate about labor relations. It's a debate about the allocation of resources.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
So yes, you have these faculty with all these different specialties and they have to use 10 texts, and they have to arrange this class over the course of a quarter, which is 10-ish weeks, right? You're not going to get a lot of variety because there's just simply not... we're not going to have [inaudible 00:46:30] and field trips to wherever and stuff because the calendar and the clock still rule the humanities classroom as much as they do the engineering classroom.
Lora Burnett:
And all our training, though it's very different in terms of the focus of our research, I think we have all been pummeled and cajoled into particular mode of knowledge production. That's going to be very similar no matter what the specific focus of our inquiry is. So in a way, I think your leadership here, administration and kind of faculty leads have revealed the dirty secret of humanities instruction, which is that we're not that revolutionary. We're kind of [foreign language 00:47:21].
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
When it gets down to brass tacks. We were talking about deep beliefs and value, that is the language that... that's the passionate language that people bring to these debates over should we require Plato or not? I'm sorry. [crosstalk 00:47:44] Siri is having trouble understanding me, so I'm going to take Siri off. That's the language we bring to these debates, but the language that deans speak and the language that university presidents speak is very much about dollars-
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
And enrollments and how much revenue does your department bring in versus how much revenue does it cost? And I hate to say it, but the best argument for the humanities is that it takes almost no overhead.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
Right? It takes almost no research overhead. That's probably more true at less prestigious schools than this one, but I guess I'll leave it there, just these two observations that the conversation is going to be similar because professors are similar.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lora Burnett:
No matter what the subject is, and that the arguments that we want to frame in terms of deep core beliefs are also always at the same time arguments about shares of the pie.
Alexander:
Yeah. I find myself sort of wanting to make an argument in favor of the humanities cores as if I was speaking to the deans, but yeah, the autonomy thing is kind of my way of thinking about overhead in the sense that the faculty already exist. They're already here, you've already given them long-term contracts, teaching courses anyway. It's just a matter of creating a structure that puts them together. And then what happens when they're put together is in the end accessible within exactly as you said, within exactly as you said, this tight kind of quarter-based 10-week framework.
Alexander:
One of the things we do say at the beginning is we have to give up on coverage. For me, the very word humanities means giving up on coverage. Coverage is what you do as a professional, as a researcher, but in your field of study in your PhD, but as soon as you talk about humanities education, yeah you're not talking about coverage. You're talking about an intellectual experience or a moment. And it's how can we create that with a particular structure that uses our existing resources?
Alexander:
And the last thing, the shared conversation, which is something that we've talked about a lot at Stanford as well. This is thinking of college and looking at Dan, shared conversation is very much the goal. And what's interesting is that if it's a shared conversation at Stanford, and this is just me, my reading of what happened in some of the meetings I was at, is that it can't be humanities. It has to involve all the schools, and that's not a crazy idea. We have all these really interesting ideas in engineering.
Lora Burnett:
Yeah.
Alexander:
So a shared conversation can't just be humanities.
Lora Burnett:
No.
Alexander:
And the other thing is that if you think about something like HumCore, you think about the conversations about how we may or do, or do not fit HumCore into the new first year. What are the costs and benefits? Can you take the structure that we have of the [inaudible 00:51:21] clusters and scale it, and what would you gain or lose? But yeah, these are fascinating questions.
Alexander:
Okay. And now I will open it up, see if anybody has any questions. Yeah, Dan has a question and yeah, do just wave your hand or put your little signal up. Dan?
Dan:
Well, first I just want to thank and just both of you, that was so fascinating. I also want to apologize that I couldn't be there in person. I feel really bad seeing the two of you in that room and wishing I could be there. I'm unfortunately also looking after children this evening. So Lora, wow, that was so informative. I wish I had access to all that brilliant historical reconstruction when we were engaging in yet another curriculum reform a couple years ago since, as Alexander said, it does sort of feel like we keep reinventing the wheel.
Dan:
I guess, Alexander I sort of wanted to bring your two points together about... well, of what you were both talking about re: Western Civ. I guess first, a question for Lora. I've been struck recently by how Western Civ didn't really go away. Obviously, we no longer have it at Stanford, other schools, other elite institutions, especially no longer made it a requirement, though it's still kind of lurking around. There's DS at Yale, Princeton has its program in interdisciplinary humanities, but it's basically Western Civ. We have Slee.
Dan:
So it's like it's in all these places, but mostly, I'm still struck by the number of schools, especially like big state universities that still have a Western Civ requirement. So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on sort of what's with the zombiefication of Western Civ? Why is it that it's still there and so prominent elsewhere?
Dan:
And then for Alexander, I guess my question to you would be have we successfully provincialized Europe? I agree with you that you can't not pretend that Western Civ isn't there. And it's interesting, as I'm teaching in the HumCore this quarter, and when we have these plenaries where all the sections come together, which is, I would note, there we do have shared reading on those days. So there is some overlap and we did kind of agree on what we were all going to read there, but what's striking is that the other faculty who are talking about Oceania, South America, Middle East, they talk about Europe almost more than I do.
Dan:
So it's like it's so unavoidable. Obviously, it's in different ways, but I feel like maybe we have successfully provincialized... just, it's one. As you say, it's there, it's a story. It's not the only story. It's not even the central story. It's helpful to know it, if you want to understand some of the other stories because it has such a big footprint, especially after the age of exploration, but maybe this is just sort of, we found a good equilibrium.
Dan:
As for your last point, it's funny. I was going to talk to you about HumCore in college. I think that if we're really going to be honest though, there's a way in which right now, HumCore has a little bit of an affirmative action structure, which is that under this big tent and with all these different tracks, we're able to support very small seminars in focusing on the Middle East and the ones that Diana and Roanne are teaching. And that's sort of, because we have big enough enrollments in the West and sometimes in China, and that's fine to me, but I think actually, if it were folded into college, we would be able to fill all of those sections. And so it would be a more balanced way of running HumCore because this is the thing, to get to Lora's other point, once you go into the Laissez-Faire model that is sort of like the default for academics, right? When we don't agree, we just say, "laissez-faire," right?
Dan:
I feel like that was sort of even one of the other after lives of the culture wars, is like, "Okay. We can't do Western culture anymore. So first, we try Civ, then we try, IHUM, then we get to thinking matters," which is sort of like the ultimate neoliberal curriculum for gen ed. Every school gets a choice, any class can qualify pretty much. So it feels like that's what we do and we can't agree on anything, but I think that actually comes at the highest price for the humanities.
Dan:
We do the worst in a Laissez-Faire environment because when the students are voting with their feet, they're not taking our classes or very rarely so. So sorry, that was very rambling, but just also an expression of my enthusiasm for this conversation.
Lora Burnett:
Well, historians shouldn't make predictions as we know. I will say this, couple things. The reason that Western Civ still flourishes or has flourished up to this point to some degree at other institutions is because Stanford is not typical, and it's super important to remind yourselves, to remind ourselves of that. Sometimes the atypical can be a very useful lens. This is right out of William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience. You study the completely bizarre and off-the-chain experiences in order to get more insight into the everyday. Stanford is completely bizarre and off-the-chain when it comes to educational institutions in America. Most of the educational institutions covered by the New York Times are completely atypical. What's typical is Texas Tech or Cal State Stanislaus, or Colin College in Texas.
Lora Burnett:
So in those large public institutions with large history departments, and with statutorily required gen ed distributions, I think you see the persistence of classes like Western Civ or classes like two-semester English course or different things like that, because of the kind of the institutional structure that's there. And the fact that there's just more inertial weight behind, or there has been behind Western Civ and other survey courses like that.
Lora Burnett:
But I think, not to be predictive, but just to kind of sound a Cassandra note of warning here, I think we will see not only Western Civ classes disappear, but much more concerningly from my perspective, American history classes disappear. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, the Governor of Florida, other people are threatening to intervene in academic freedom and prohibit the teaching of critical race theory or whatever they think they're prohibiting. Probably that's not going to be possible because of the Supreme Court support for the AUP's idea of academic freedom in a lot of cases. It's not going to be possible legislatively. It's not going to be possible.
Lora Burnett:
What will happen then, I think is that state education systems in conservative states that have been requiring students to take history will stop requiring it. U.S. history will become an elective. Say, if the state of Texas can't compel a jingoistic U.S. history curriculum, then they will simply make U.S. history no longer is now required. People have to take so many hours of U.S. history, so many hours of Texas history, God help us. They will make those elective. That will do more to kill the humanities than any curricular change at Stanford or anywhere else. If states start to say, "Okay, history is so controversial. Let's make it an elective," history departments will shrivel, funding will go away, enrollments will go away.
Lora Burnett:
So I think we'll start to see the battle, not, again, internecine warfare among professors about how to teach reading a text or what texts we should teach students to read are a welcome side show for people who are really looking to just gut the entire prospect of humanistic education.
Alexander:
Yeah. I want to get in on the zombie Western Civ questions. Well, if I answer Dan's other questions. I think you get the persistence of Western Civ for a good reason and a bad reason. The good reason being it's a recognition of what I was saying, the inevitability of thinking about Western Civ when we live in Western Civ institutions, whether they're land grant universities like in Virginia, or whether they're settler colonial institutions at Stanford, we live in Western Civ and that is a reason for it to kind of keep rumbling on. Otherwise, you would literally have these statues around the quad and the cantor, and not know what they meant.
Alexander:
And then the kind of bad reason I think it persists is, if you think that the founders of the university wanted to teach European thinkers because they wanted to erase the native culture, it is a strong political argument for teaching Western Civ. It's the same thing. If you want to teach a racist story of America, Western Civ is a good vehicle to do that. I think of the teaching I got in England growing up in which England is the savior of the world, because it morally stops the slave trade. So the Western Civ for mine is a powerful vehicle for those kind of purely political arguments to be made, so it hangs around. Right.
Alexander:
And then Dan's other questions. I think that the plenary structure of HumCore and having only one European seminar in the cluster has genuinely achieved the provincialization of Europe in the discourse. I think it works and I think you can see that working clearer in the pre-modern period. So that the courses in the fall, in the winter, when the sort of discourse omnipresence of European ideas in global conversations just doesn't exist, doesn't exist, hasn't happened yet.
Alexander:
And yeah, when you're talking about modernity, I think this is the value of the modernity phrase, going back to what Nauman and Muhammad, and Harris were saying, is like yeah, modernity is inextricable from a certain set of ideas coming out of Europe, but it's a phase. Again, using modernity labels it as an anomalous phase in history, like an interesting anomalous moment to study when European ideas get broadly disseminated, but not a kind of default truth about history.
Alexander:
And the balance, the filling the sections, that dynamic whereby there's a big imbalance between the different sections, the different seminars and the seminar cluster, we saw it happen in the fall because the most popular one, which was ancient near east kind of Judaism, and Gilgamesh filled up so quickly and had a cap of 30, but then it bled over into the other ones and the other ones filled up as well.
Alexander:
So yeah, I guess an artificial seminar cap on your and Keith's course might have led to overflow. It would be better of course, to say it's a requirement, it's part of college. So then they would fill up that way, exactly like you said. The only thing I can think of is the faculty. Then we run into the fact that Stanford has not managed to diversify the areas of study of its faculty as quickly or effectively as it wanted to, never mind the diversity identity of its faculty as quickly as it says it wants to. But yeah, Kiara and then Harry have got questions. Kiara?
Kiara:
Yes. Let me just fix my camera. It does this annoying thing every time I turn it on. Okay, there we go. Thank you so much. That was really different from some of what we've had before and I really like the variety in the topics that we cover in these workshops. I had two small questions that I wanted to ask about. One, Lora, you actually started to kind of touch on it in your response to Alexander, where you started talking about labor conditions. And I wonder if you could just expand a little bit more on that? It seems to me that working conditions are really the heart of what gets taught and what doesn't get taught.
Kiara:
My entire relationship with college is outgoing graduate students who are on their way out to tenure track jobs who say, "Oh, if you need to hang on for a couple of years, while you wait to get a tenure track job, apply for college." And I wonder what that sort of quite utilitarian attitude does to the relationship that we have as an institution and as a profession to these kinds of curricula, because we've talked about the students and we've talked about the faculty, but we haven't talked about the graduate workers or the post-doctoral workers who are sometimes doing a lot of that teaching, often for quite career-centric reasons. So I wonder if you could talk about that.
Kiara:
And then my other question is just about the shared conversation, which is the extent to which the three books thing at Stanford succeeded or failed in fostering that kind of shared conversation across disciplines. Thank you.
Lora Burnett:
Sure. There's a great book by Evan Watkins. It's called "Work Time" and it examines the freshman English requirement, because so many colleges, including Stanford has a freshman English requirement. And it kind of examines this as a way that colleges institutionalized in their students a certain kind of character as workers or producers of texts, and how it is also a working environment, but to extrapolate from that kind of examination to this, there's an article that has traced kind of the end of the Western Civ requirement at Stanford. It's by Gilbert Allardyce, it's called "The Rise and Fall of Western Civ."
Lora Burnett:
And he kind of misread a key memo from Paul Sciver who I understand just passed away pretty recently. Paul Sciver was the History Department chair of the Western Civ requirement up until the end of the 1960s, and he agreed with the university administration that, sure, maybe this requirement is getting kind of frayed at the edges, partly because it's a bunch of grad students teaching it. Everybody kind of does their own thing already anyway. They take the required readings and completely ignore them and do what they want. So there's not a lot of actual conformity, broadly construed, but his bigger concern was if the Western Civ requirement goes away, what do these history PhDs do? What do they teach? That is a fundamental concern.
Lora Burnett:
Anytime there's a proposed curricular change, anytime there's a change in graduation requirements of any kind or any, "Oh, we need to do this." I am not a Marxist historian so I'm not saying that this is all super structural and superficial discussion of beliefs, and beneath it is the real driver of everything, which is material concerns. At the same time, it is certainly the case that academe has a way because we are [foreign language 01:09:30] Remember, this is a [foreign language 01:09:33] institution, that the revolution is not going to start here. It's not going to end here. It's not going to happen here. It is not going to happen at Robert Barron University.
Lora Burnett:
So we have this language of belief and ideals and that we do believe. I do believe that my humanistic education here was a soul-opening experience for me, but I am also aware that my discussion section leaders in the Western culture program were all PhD students. And if not the point, at least one function of these kinds of requirements is to spread work around, and particularly to spread work around among those graduate students who are most likely to not be able to get jobs in the industry, students who are looking for jobs in academia.
Lora Burnett:
I'm sure you have a lot of engineering and science PhDs who are not looking for a teaching position. They may be looking for research positions in laboratories, or they're looking to become Silicon Valley engineers. It's the disciplines where the career path is fairly narrowly within academe that often provide the most labor, compensated labor for grad students, and I do think that's really important to think about.
Lora Burnett:
And when you think about it that way, then you see that, okay... One of the concerns, and Alexander brought this up, was the professors who didn't want the Western culture requirement to change. The proposal was to teach about non-Western cultures. Why can't we read more books from women authors? And why can't we read more African authors and Chinese authors, and this kind of small cadre of English and history professors? Mostly White dudes in the English department, honestly, bless them, was we don't have the faculty to teach that. We can't change the curriculum because what will the faculty teach?
Lora Burnett:
We don't have these specialists and we can't teach that because we teach 16th-century sonnets. We can't teach Toni Morrison, but behind that argument is also a reflection on the labor conditions of professors at elite research universities, who are undergraduate education. Donald Kennedy told us when we came here as freshman, I was sitting freshman orientation, and he came out and gave this speech to my incoming class. And he said, "You need to know that undergraduate education is not the top priority at Stanford." He says, "The number one priority is research. The second priority is graduate education. Third priority is undergrads."
Lora Burnett:
When you're talking about changes to the undergrad requirements, you're really not talking about changes to the core of the faculty's mission here. Really, you're not. You're talking about reallocating instructional hours, but faculty who say, "Hey, we can't make this curricular change because I can't teach that," what they're really saying is, "My research agenda is over here and I'm not going to ding my research agenda so that I can prep for a class that's outside my period of study," or something like that.
Lora Burnett:
So resistance to curricular change is also a reflection of kind of labor conditions.
Alexander:
Yeah. Kiara, what was the second part of your question? Sorry.
Kiara:
Just about the three books.
Alexander:
Oh yeah, the three. I repressed it because I couldn't answer it. I was going to see, I don't know if Graham is here and Dan, if they know.
Dan:
Yeah, I can talk a bit about that because we've actually taken that part of it over because basically, it was kind of a fiasco. There were parts of it that were just logistically abysmal, like try sending three books to students around the world and they don't arrive, and that was a huge problem. But then about one-third of the students read the books, one-third maybe read one book, and then one-third didn't read any books. And then they brought the authors out for like one hour during new student orientation, and that was it.
Dan:
So one thing we've changed is that we took one of the books and then integrated into the curriculum of the fall quarter and brought the author out later. So not when they're flooded with excitement about discovering their new dorm mates, but they also read it in class now. So I think it's a much more structured way of making sure they do have this shared reading. I think we did circle back to that as a value but I think what we tried to do was really insist that you have to be neutral about the content. It can't be, everyone should read the something, and really, it should be Plato, right?
Dan:
No, it could genuinely... anything that is... but is also pertinent to conversations because that's the other thing, I think the three books doesn't do very well. If you just ask a faculty member to pick three random books. If I picked three books that I like and made 1,700 students read them, I don't think it's necessarily going to lead to great conversations around Dan Edelstein's bedtime reading. Maybe they won't like Thucydides as much as I do, but I think what we've done is really chosen books based on different criteria.
Dan:
What are the kinds of texts that are going to really prompt certain kinds of conversations? And frankly, that's often not Plato or a classic. So they have a really hard time with that and some of the most successful books we have are non-Western ones in college.
Lora Burnett:
There was, like I said, a great deal of concern about shared conversation and again, this was not some epiphenomenal language to mask the real worry that these professors were going to lose their instructional hours and their favorite way of doing it, but these were legitimate concerns that humanists have. We need to be able to talk together about the same things.
Lora Burnett:
What I found in my research, and this will emerge with this manuscript that is, I hope just going to spring out of my head and be done at some point, is that there was a shared text at Stanford. It was not any of the Western culture texts that were required on the core reading list, but at least up until the mid-1990s, these shared texts, the Book of Common Prayer that every member of the Stanford community read was the Stanford Daily. That was the source of shared conversations.
Lora Burnett:
Now, I don't know if it's the case to the same extent today because of the way the Daily is published, which is the front page always changes as news stories post, but there was a time, there was a moment when the daily newspaper provided the same set of texts on a day-by-day basis, that everybody looked at, everybody talked about, and conversations, debates between professors and professors, as well as between professors and students, between students all happened in those pages.
Lora Burnett:
So this kind of the architects of the Western culture program had a dream after the complete neoliberal disaster of the free-market curriculum, where everybody picks what they want and no two people do the same thing. So they had this dream of a campus that would be brought together in conversation around certain texts. Their dream came true, but it came true because everybody was debating in the pages of the Daily what to do about the Western culture requirement. And many of them didn't recognize what an exciting thing that all these students are arguing about what we should read.
Lora Burnett:
Wouldn't you all just give your [inaudible 01:18:23] if students were up in arms and marching, demanding, "Assign us different readings or more readings," or something? Students don't do that, do they? Are students any more up in arms about what we should or shouldn't read?
Alexander:
Complex students [crosstalk 01:18:40].
Lora Burnett:
Oh, okay. Well-
Alexander:
But I think going back, it's like the lever we have with the neoliberal choice is just the structures. So like in HumCore, it's just the fact that there's no negotiation of the plenary. You just have to go and you have to go and sit there and you can say what you want, but you have to go to a space where there are these other faculty teaching, there are other things.
Alexander:
The conversation through the Daily, I think the three books, I think it was really important in terms of discussions that the university has when we had signed Chanel Miller's autobiography about being raped on campus, and that was very... I remember the university didn't want to do it but this was a real self-reckoning moment about how bad things were for undergraduates.
Dan:
But I think that's the only time that I know of where it was the student who requested that reading.
Alexander:
Yeah.
Dan:
I don't think there's ever been another case where the three books, one of them has come from the students.
Alexander:
Yeah. Yeah. [inaudible 01:19:53]?
Harry:
Yeah. Thank you so much, really fascinating discussion. I have just two kind of minor sort of things to ask about, Lora, about your talk. The first one was, it was fascinating too, and I just found the whole history, it's so weird. It's like a parallel universe. It's so strange, but the whole Cold War era worry about not getting tricked by someone who's speaking in a knowledge language that you don't understand made me think of... I'm not sure if it's just that my brother's always talking about this, but it made me think of conspiracy theories nowadays, particularly ones to do with vaccines and things, and the worry about not being able to read primary sources about that, but I guess that doesn't necessarily have... I'm sure it does, but I suppose there must be equivalent ones that you could make an argument that we need people to be able to speak the language of humanities in order to not get tricked by nowadays, I guess.
Harry:
But my real question is more, I was fascinated to hear about how in 1925-6 it was all like a big school of letters. And I wondered if you could say more about what happened to that and why it kind of fragmented into a few smaller like GLCL English classics, EALC?
Lora Burnett:
Well, broadly speaking, what you see throughout the 20th century and really, the Cold War is kind of a high point at this moment. What you see is the specialization of knowledge and the valorization of expertise. Now, part of that is a progressive era thinking where you get scientific management, you get efficient management of the plant. So we go to a quarter system, which divides the year into equal parts. And so you get this kind of tailorization that happens within the college and curriculum, but knowledge generally in the world, and America becomes more specialized areas of expertise, become more siloed from one another in the terms of kind of the language and the gateway to further specialization becomes more discreet.
Lora Burnett:
And that's why this concern for conversation arises and that concern for conversation among discreet knowledge-producing areas is an anthropological concern. It really comes out of kind of the language theories of Kenneth Burke, and it's kind of the comparative anthropology, this moment where language and the ability to communicate, it's like the discipline of disciplines, right? It's the only way to get knowledge from one side to the other, is to train ourselves in language and in linguistic fluency.
Lora Burnett:
The Cold War is this moment where expertise is still highly valued, but experts can be misleading. It's that sense that everybody has to have some knowledge of every major area of expertise is not so much to keep experts in check, as it is to check one another. The Cold War is this... And the book to read on this is Jamie Cohen-Cole, who talks about the creative mind and the rise of the idea of creativity as a way of being both not a conformist, but also not a dangerous outlier during the Cold War.
Lora Burnett:
So there's this sense that we revere our experts, we can trust our scientists, we can trust our sociologists, we can trust our English professors even, and we're not going to be experts in everything, but if we know a little bit of everything that the experts are telling us, we can recognize wackadoodle thinking when it comes our way. And this is very much a Cold War defense posture against both totalitarianism and communism, or communism as totalitarianism.
Alexander:
Yeah. It's fascinating. Really, it's fascinating to hear, to think about because I always say, oh, humanities education speaks to me about the absence of a real expertise or coverage. And it makes so much sense that it was designed as a defensive posture to cope with conceptual threats from around the globe basically.
Alexander:
Yeah, and the question of language expertise is very pertinent because so much of what we do in humanities education works directly against language expertise, which is at the same time, the thing that so many of us believe in most of all. Yeah, no question about it.
Lora Burnett:
There's no foreign language requirement at Stanford, is there?
Alexander:
It's a one year that you can test out.
Lora Burnett:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, because in terms of the courses in the curriculum, there was a specific foreign language requirement until 1970, and really, for that period from '70 and even through the 80s, you could take a language class, but you could also take linguistics or human development, or something like that to fill it.
Alexander:
Fascinating. All right. So we're at 6:29. Thank you ever so much for coming, everybody. Thank you ever so much for coming Lora, our guest here. Yeah, we'll see you at the final workshop which is going to have our own Grant Parker and Annette Lannel talking about conceptions of the world, conceptions of the world from their research perspectives. So thanks everyone. See you soon.
Dan:
Thanks so much. Wonderful, wonderful talk. See you tomorrow, Lora.
Lora Burnett:
See you.
Alexander:
All right.
Speaker 6:
Hi. I never got you introduce myself.
Alexander:
Sorry.
Speaker 6:
I'm [inaudible 01:26:25] I haven't had the chance to attend your talks except for Zoom. So yeah.
Lora Burnett:
I've only been to one talk [crosstalk 01:26:34].
Alexander:
PhD candidate. [crosstalk 01:26:39]
Speaker 6:
I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of History, and I had a lot of thoughts as you were talking. [crosstalk 01:26:42]
Alexander:
You're coming to dinner, right?
Speaker 6:
Yes.
Alexander:
Yes. So yeah, we can-
Speaker 6:
That's right.
Lora Burnett:
When is the final talk of the series?
Speaker 6:
May 17.
Alexander:
It's on the poster.
Lora Burnett:
May 17th. I'm hoping to come to that in person-