Phlit: A Newsletter on Philosophy and Literature: The Harvard War: 2025-5 C

May 17, 2025

1. Ending the Harvard War

I started writing philosophy in the summer of 1984. One topic I wrote about was testing. I said that we often tested aptitude (SAT = Scholastic Aptitude Test), rather than knowledge. I said that if we tested knowledge, we would encourage students to acquire knowledge. My focus was on the humanities — history, art, literature. Now conservatives are making a similar argument, and developing knowledge-tests, tests that are used from Grade 3 to Grade 12. These tests are being used for admission at Florida universities (Governor DeSantis of Florida is trying to restore classical education). Could Harvard help in developing such tests? Should Harvard consider such tests in its admissions process?
Neil Rudenstine, who was President of Harvard from 1991 to 2001, recently published Our Contentious Universities. “While Mr. Rudenstine laments the decline of the humanities and the fact that students no longer leave college with a shared fund of knowledge, he seems resigned to the existing order.” Rudenstine seems to think that “a shared fund of knowledge” is important but impossible. Conservatives aren’t convinced that it’s impossible. Should Harvard explore the possibility of teaching “core knowledge”? Perhaps “Civilization 101” for first-year students? Even if only fifteen students took the class, it might be a valuable experiment.
Perhaps Civilization 101 would deal, not only with the Greeks and Romans, but also with the Chinese and Russians. Thus, it would be relevant to the contemporary world, and to the challenges we face today. Conservatives would doubtless see the value of this approach.
Conservatives are experimenting with “classical education” at colleges like the University of Austin, Hillsdale College, and the New College of Florida. Could Harvard share ideas with such colleges?
E. D. Hirsch was an English professor at the University of Virginia. He noticed the lack of basic knowledge among today’s students, and he wrote a book called Cultural Literacy (1987). “Hirsch is the founder and chairman of the non-profit Core Knowledge Foundation, which publishes and periodically updates the Core Knowledge Sequence, a set of unusually detailed curriculum guidelines for Pre-K through 8th grade.” Some schools are using Hirsch’s Core Knowledge, and combining it with Core Virtues. Could Harvard’s School of Education evaluate Hirsch’s approach, and perhaps assist Hirsch’s efforts?
Like E. D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom decried the lack of basic knowledge among today’s students. Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Bloom advocated the study of the Great Books. Bloom taught at the University of Chicago (and elsewhere). The Great Books approach can be traced from the Columbia professor John Erskine, to the Chicago professor Robert Hutchins, to St. John’s College, which still bases its curriculum on the Great Books. Can Harvard learn anything from this approach?
Many leading writers have recommended a survey of the classics. Isaak Babel and F. Scott Fitzgerald designed surveys (reading lists) for their friends. Hermann Hesse and Ford Madox Ford published books that described how the classics could be organized and surveyed. My book Realms of Gold: A Sketch of Western Literature attempts to map the literary world.
Joseph Bottum wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal recently. He said that it’s widely believed that today’s students can’t read classic novels. He said he’s going to teach a class at the University of Colorado that will require students to read numerous classic novels. His class is based on a class taught by W. H. Auden. “In 1941, W. H. Auden listed nearly 6,000 pages of required reading for an undergraduate course at the University of Michigan. In 2018, the historian Wilfred McClay tried re-creating that course at the University of Oklahoma. It quickly became one of the school’s most popular classes, wildly oversubscribed. The undergraduates even printed up T-shirts that read, ‘I Survived the Auden Course!’” Could the “Auden Course” work at Harvard?
Could Harvard’s library make its digital resources more widely available? One way to help the humanities is to make more resources available at a lower price. One of the best resources for students of the humanities is archive.org. Perhaps Harvard could have some sort of partnership with archive.org.
Could the Harvard University Press publish CoreKnowledge books? Currently the Loeb Classics are available online to individuals for $175 for the first year. Could the Harvard University Press make more materials available at a lower price?

If Harvard took steps like these, it would show that Harvard was trying to meet conservatives halfway, trying to find common ground, and it would also enrich the Harvard education, and perhaps achieve Rudenstine’s “impossible dream” of a shared fund of knowledge.