Staff Writer Sofia Matson attended the Heyman Center for the Humanities’s discussion of Roosevelt Montás work. In his newly published Rescuing Socrates, Roosevelt Montás writes on the transformative power of the so-called “Great Books” and defends their place in modern day higher education. 

This Wednesday night, David Denby, a former film critic at the New Yorker, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton University, and Turku Isiksel, the deputy chair of Columbia’s political science department, met on Zoom to discuss Rescuing Socrates, a new book on the humanities in higher education by Roosevelt Montás. “A high level Lit Hum seminar” was how Denby, midway through the conversation, characterized it. Indeed, the panelists made frequent references to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Homer was also quoted. So, too, was Augustine. And, as if to further emphasize the integral role of literature in their lives, each panelist boasted at least one floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in their Zoom background. 

According to Montás, who was also in attendance, Rescuing Socrates is foremost a defense of “liberal education.” In his eyes, a “liberal education” is not free and disinterested study but rather, and more narrowly, the study of Western literature’s “Great Books.” This pursuit, Montás argues, is gravely threatened by the emerging higher education model which prizes the cultivation of workforce skills over general knowledge in undergraduate study. Since 2009, universities have observed a sharp decline in the number of English majors. Montás has witnessed this decline firsthand; he spent ten years as the head at Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum. It is rather noble, then, that during the discussion Montás seemed as much concerned with his own job as with what his students stand to lose when universities no longer require or offer classes in the humanities. 

The idea that the “Great Books” make their readers better human beings is not new. Since the early 19th century, the English major infiltrated institutions of higher education, marketed towards it’s most marginalized members: women and the working class. The study of literature was considered a civilizing pursuit, a way by which women could add to their repertoire of cocktail party conversation topics and, more critically, a way by which the working class could participate in high society culture without disrupting the socioeconomic status quo. A focus on Western ideology, and on works that explore our shared humanity, would create a harmless illusion of upward mobility and social progress. From its inception, the study of English was thus intended to democratize higher education, albeit under dubious pretenses. 

Montás, who immigrated to the United States from a rural village in the Dominican Republic, found his pursuit of literature genuinely uplifting. Reading Plato at Columbia literally changed his life. While he rejects the “model minority” narrative (“It makes me want to vomit”), the first third of his book follows a narrative memoir structure. He describes his low-income household and learning to speak English at age twelve. He then credits his freshman year Lit Hum seminar with his lifelong love of literary scholarship and his eventual career as a professor of literature. 

Of course, not everyone can become a professor. What, for instance, can a course in the Great Books offer a STEM major whose interests lie not in abstraction or introspection but in empirical research? “The case for liberal education is hard to make,” Montás conceded during the discussion, because liberal education is largely experiential and its results uniquely varied. As Padilla Peralta put it, the excellence of Rescuing Socrates “resides in the singularity of its pages.” The goal of any Great Books course is to harness the “power of the particular” and successfully impose one’s own identity onto the great works of Western literature. Isiksel offered a concurrent anecdote. Once, a student in her Contemporary Civilization class questioned why Columbia so closely adhered to the Western tradition of thought. If we consider Western literature as the authoritative body of knowledge, are we not pulling past repressions of other cultural ideas into the present? Isiksel argued that “ideas have no heritage” and that courses such as Lit Hum and CC encourage students to “read texts against the grain.” 

The most important knowledge students stand to gain from studying the Western tradition, it seems, is that literature is not always the source of truth. If Socrates must be rescued, he must also be reevaluated.

Socrates, chilling via The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.