[published in Williams Alumni Review, December 1991]

Paradise Lost?Or, You Can't Always Believe What You Read
by Robert H. Bell

The curriculum -- what gets in and how we teach it -- was not always controversial. Let's return to the garden of Eden, the days of Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College from 1836-1872. Pull up a log -- and you had better bring a Greek grammar. In the Hopkins era, both the admissions requirements and courses of instruction were extremely particular. To get into Williams you had to have studied enough Greek and Latin to know intimately Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad. Williams students followed a prescribed course of study for their entire four years. Freshmen all took more Greek and Latin, Biblical geography, algebra, etc. Juniors were required to study astronomy. Virtually all the courses were required.

The culmination of the undergraduate education was a course in moral philosophy with the great Hopkins himself. Hopkins was a charismatic teacher, with a very clear vision of what he wanted to inculcate. His moral philosophy course, said one student, "embraces man in his unity and God in his sovereignty." It all rested on a fundamental supposition of Unity. Here is how one student, writing to President Hopkins, described what he had learned: "After you had given us ... somewhat in detail the great principals that underlie all reasoning ... you laid aside your glasses, passed your hand slowly over your forehead, bowed your head amid the reigning silence for a few seconds, then slowly uttered the words, 'But -- Nature ... is moral' and the class dismissed."

Notice the emphasis on the great principles that underlie all reasoning, the reverential "reigning silence," and of course the ultimate lesson so resoundingly affirmed: Nature is moral -- the great first principle of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Though Hopkins encouraged independent thinking, his teaching left little room for doubt. The Hopkins model of undergraduate education has many obvious virtues -- coherence, clarity and force. Constructing such a curriculum was not problematic, for it was self-evident that an educated man should contemplate the authors sanctioned by time: Homer, Cicero, Thucydides, Horace, Plato. The rationale for other subjects, such as Biblical geography or astronomy, was spiritual: the reason to study astronomy from that lovely old observatory was to observe the glory of God in his creation. Astronomy, Biblical geography and Hopkins's moral philosophy all teach the unity, beauty and scope of providential design.

Listen to President Hopkins, in his first convocation address (1836) define the mission of higher education: "The true and permanent interests of man can be promoted only in connection with religion; and a regard to man as an immortal, accountable and redeemed being, should give its character to the whole course of our regulations, and the spirit of our instruction." I wish my own convictions could be that clear, for when one knows without a doubt what is "true and permanent," the "whole course of our regulations" follows logically and almost inevitably. So the Hopkins curriculum, like the music of the spheres, "naturally" fit together.

Yet, let's pause to consider: harmony also depends upon elements being absent. You might be surprised, as I was, to learn what was missing from the president's philosophy. Hopkins freely confessed, late in his career, that "there are things in metaphysics I don't understand." He hardly even tried to read Kant, the great 19th century philosopher, or David Hume, the brilliant 18th century skeptic. From the pulpit, Hopkins regularly attacked, without having read, Darwin's On the Origin of Species. His forte was piety, not learning or rigorous philosophical thinking: for all the power of his unified vision, Hopkins's vision remained pure because it was stubbornly innocent of competing ideas.

Just as there was very little true dialectic in Hopkins's thinking, there was very little diversity in the Hopkins student body or faculty: no women, of course, hardly anyone who wasn't white, middle or upper class, Protestant, mostly from New York and Massachusetts. Like Hopkins's philosophy, the Williams community had a remarkable unity, coming from similar backgrounds, studying exactly the same things, sharing the most basic and important values; many professors were (like the president) clergymen, and many students aspired to the ministry. There were also notable absences in the curriculum; today's four most popular majors at Williams did not even exist. No English literature (by English they meant rhetoric and composition), no political science, no economics and no European or American history. Nor was there any art, music, or theatre, nor Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish. Of course it was easier for the faculty to agree on fundamental values and goals: in 1866 the entire faculty comprised 10 professors.

General agreement on what was true and permanent implicitly shaped the College curriculum (although there was hardly the optimistic consensus some commentators now imagine). Today, when the curriculum and so much else seem comparatively fragmented, we might well long for the Hopkins-era unity -- or wonder how things held together as long as they did. Imagine a student entering Williams in 1930. Freud and Darwin and Einstein and Nietzsche and Joyce have long since abandoned or repudiated Hopkins's first principles and ultimate lessons. But there is no sign of disarray or even distress in the Williams College admissions requirements and curriculum. Just as Mark Hopkins had a unified conception of education, so could Williams still determine exactly its criteria for admissions and courses of study. The 1930 catalogue specifies not only what subjects but what books should be studied by young men seeking admission: which Shakespeare plays, which episodes of the Iliad, which chapter of Macaulay's History of England, which speeches by Lincoln.

Though a Williams freshman in 1930 did have a little more latitude than his grandfather had, his first two years were still pretty thoroughly regimented: either Greek or Latin, history or political science, math, physics or chem, etc. By now Williams offered a major, begun in the junior year. Division 1, languages and literature, offered Latin, Greek, French, German and English. The major was also strictly structured: in English, six required courses organized by author or period -- Chaucer, Shakespeare, the 18th century. The course designated modern drama began in 1642. Of your three electives, three had to be drawn from rhetoric, French, German or Greek.

Let's move forward again, to consider an English major in the early 1960's. Though he would have had a wider range of optional courses, he continued to march lock-step through eight successive courses, still mostly organized around major authors in chronological sequence. And he would have had some great teachers, like Fred Stocking, Don Gifford and Clay Hunt. Let me conjure for you Clay Hunt, one of Williams College's most brilliant and provocative professors.

Clay Hunt held two central convictions: he believed in the enduring value of the great writers, especially Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, and he believed in close textual analysis.  Clay Hunt once said, "A good English paper states the correct interpretation and proves it is the correct interpretation." Armed with these two convictions, faith in his favorite writers and in his method of literary criticism, Clay Hunt was an inspired advocate: he preached the unity, coherence and radiance of great literature. I hope my language ("preached," "faith," "unity") suggests a distant echo: I intend a parallel -- which would outrage both of them -- between Clay Hunt and Mark Hopkins.

In obvious ways the two men were worlds apart. Clay Hunt certainly didn't find nature intrinsically moral the way Mark Hopkins did. In front of his summer home in The Hopper, Clay constructed an artificial pond and removed the evergreens to provide a view: "Nature is a fine thing in its place," he mused, "but nature has no mind." In fact, Professor Hunt was a self-proclaimed atheist and, he enjoyed announcing, a "pagan." Yet I juxtapose the two men to suggest that Clay Hunt read literature the way Mark Hopkins read gospel, in quest of meaning and truth, and as a source of his intellectual faith. It's interesting that most of Clay's favorite authors were highly religious.

Here is Clay Hunt's description, from the 1975 Winter Study catalogue, of his course on the Bible. The approach is, he wrote, "to demonstrate the unifying symbolic historical pattern which the compilers of the Scriptural canon, and later, the King James translators, imposed on this collection of the ancient writings of the Jewish people ... and to emphasize those parts of the Bible which have established some of the basic philosophic ideas, and some of the fundamental common vocabulary for all the arts of post-classical Western civilization."

In a four-week Winter Study course with Clay Hunt, students received a miniature liberal arts education. Notice the stress on "unifying pattern" -- not only of the Bible but of all Western civilization -- a pattern establishing "basic philosophic ideas" and "a fundamental common vocabulary."

Professor Hunt had a majestic command of the Bible's "unifying symbolic pattern," "basic philosophic ideas," and the "fundamental vocabulary of Western civilization." In all this he believed. Just as important is what he did not believe, stressed in this remarkable conclusion to his course description: "The instructor," wrote Hunt, "regards religious belief of any kind as intellectually absurd, but finds the religious operations of the human mind of high intellectual interest, and some value. He also believes ... that any educated man in our civilization who does not, at some time, undertake a critical reading of the Bible, will therefore go to his grave as somewhat of an intellectual hick." In the two parts of this course description you have pure Clay: the bold, irresistible enunciation of purpose, the rigor and scope of his mind, the frank avowal of his perspective, the delight in shocking the pious and conventional.

Clay Hunt's literary criticism, like Hopkins's moral philosophy, demonstrated the great principals that underlie all reasoning: stating the correct interpretation and proving it is the correct interpretation. For all his skeptical paganism, Clay Hunt shared some central beliefs with traditional Christian humanists. Clay Hunt believed in memorizing, contemplating and analyzing great poetry, the way Mark Hopkins contemplated and explicated Scripture. He set out to establish truth by "marching out into the plain" and "trying the matter by dint of argument" (like Milton in Areopagitica). Finally, and most important, Clay Hunt, like Mark Hopkins, maintained the educative effect on human character of reading and thinking. A critical study of the Bible may not redeem any lost souls but it would surely save some intellectual hicks.

The demise of this faith, the educative effect of reading and thinking, dismays many educators. To hear some people tell it, you can't believe anything you read or hear. Over the past decade there have been passionate, sometimes bitter battles in the humanities over what we teach and how we teach. It's no secret that the old verities no longer prevail, and it's unclear to many people what has replaced them.

Let me take up two issues in the humanities -- first, the debate over the canon, then, some changes in how we teach. The word "canon" originally meant "the list of Biblical books accepted by the Church." Today "the canon" signifies the pantheon of great writers, those enshrined in anthologies and curricula. These were Clay Hunt's favorite writers: from Homer, Plato and Aristotle down to James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. At Williams (here as elsewhere) today the very idea of a "canon" of major authors is vigorously debated. One recent spring, during Women's History Week, someone draped banners over the walls of Stetson Hall. Underneath the hallowed names of Dante, Plato and Shakespeare we saw the names of Cather, Woolf, Brontë and Hurston.

The attack on the canon has been widely discussed in the media, and made headlines when Stanford University substantially modified its required course in Western Civilization, after students and faculty (led by Jessie Jackson) protested that it was entirely composed of dead white males. They chanted, "Hey hey/ho ho, Western civ has gotta go!" Catchy, but I don't want to dance to it. Opponents of the canon argue that there is no such thing as a classic, no universal or transcendent norms, only discourse, often advocating or accepting wicked attitudes; racism, colonialism, subjugation of women, the superior virtue of the ruling class, etc.

This anti-canonical movement has had a major effect on the curriculum, on what is assigned and how it is taught. A Harvard English graduate student reports that he has been required to read Kate Chopin's The Awakening three times but has never been assigned any Dickens or Melville. "Moby Dick," he laments, "is profoundly suspect. There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by chapter 29." Our incoming freshmen are more likely to have read Richard Wright or Toni Morrison than Clay Hunt's canonical authors. Some people, who believe in the educative value of the best that has been thought and said, are troubled by the rebellion against the canon, and worry that we've thrown out the baby with the bath water.

From another point of view, though, this anti-canonical movement is natural and inevitable. The most dominant trend in the last generation has been the movement from unity to diversity. As a college freshman I was appalled to hear my college president praising Dartmouth for its "homogeneity." Today no college president or dean would be caught dead praising homogeneity. The demographics of the student body and faculty have changed radically since 1963 -- many, many more black, Jewish, Catholic, working class, middle class, Asian and, of course, female students.

A far more heterogenous group both wants and needs a different curriculum, one which includes Others, those once regarded as "marginal." We no longer require Biblical geography or expect fluency in Greek and Latin. For division 1, the languages and the arts, we ask students to take three courses, such as English or art or theatre 101. In addition to the other two division requirements in social sciences and science, there is one required course in "people and cultures," drawn from a long list of possibilities, to make sure students have some exposure to another culture or to our own cultural pluralism. It turns out not to be a very onerous requirement: when we studied students' course selections we found that almost 90 percent of them took a "people and cultures" course before we institutionalized it. You might question this requirement on the grounds that high school students know almost as much about non-Western culture as about our Western tradition, as defined by those time-honored canonical authors whose names have been temporarily eclipsed by the Stetson Hall banners. The truth is, though, that Western civ is alive and well at Williams -- scores of students take Shakespeare every year, and believe me, we don't have to sell the course. Nobody is effacing or abusing Shakespeare. I learned something by taking a second look at those banners: they don't actually eclipse or cover the old boys. There seems to be room on Stetson's walls for both the hallowed greats and some new names.

Of course every innovation and every requirement means something has been dropped or lost. For years the English major required a two-semester survey called 301-302. This was basically the course Clay Hunt taught in the 1960's: major authors in chronological sequence with emphasis on the organic tradition of English lit, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Our department finally dropped this requirement. It's not that my colleagues don't admire or wish to teach the canonical authors; but many feel that requiring the course privileges these writers, by implying that there is first and foremost all this really significant, central stuff, and then there is all this secondary material. Even American lit took a back seat to English lit. Such a survey also implies that the proper way to comprehend literature is as literary history -- that in order to understand Pope or Keats you have to know Milton or Homer. Younger teachers want to make far wider use of authors most of us never heard of then we were students, like Zora Neale Hurston. And their conception of teaching is much less concerned with the influence of Milton or Pope or the great unity of English lit.

Another important point to bear in mind about the canon is that it was never delivered by Moses on marble tablets. Even if President Hopkins was right that Nature is God-given, the canon most certainly is not. What gets included, whether it's Biblical geography in 1860 or Third World literature in 1990, is always a product of human needs and human values. The curriculum is perpetually value laden, implicitly social, political, philosophical and religious. The question, rarely asked directly, is "by studying these texts or ideas, whose interests are being served? Whose ox is being gored?"

Consequently, the canon is always changing, not simply because Jesse Jackson marched and chanted at Stanford. My field, English literature, was only invented at Oxford and Cambridge around 1890; at Williams in the 19th century, "English" meant "rhetoric and composition," not literature in one's own language. English wasn't taken very seriously for quite a while: studying the masterpieces of one's own literature seemed almost frivolous. In their own time, Shakespeare's plays were popular entertainment, not high art. An official catalogue of the Yale University Library listed the works of Shakespeare, Pope and Spenser as "Books of Diversion." Doubtless Mark Hopkins had higher priorities than reading plays and novels.

Today anybody's canon would include Dickens and George Eliot. But the novel as a genre was not regarded as a serious enterprise by most people until the 20th century. In Tom Jones, Fielding constantly asserts the worthiness of the novelist's project because novels were considered slightly disreputable; Fielding didn't automatically walk into the club, "The Greats." Similarly, critics change our minds about writers all the time. In 1920 Donne's poetry, considered obscure and eccentric, wasn't even in print. T.S. Eliot and the New Critics downgraded Milton and elevated Donne. The revised edition of the Great Books of the Western World evicts my favorites Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy and adds Emma and To the Lighthouse. Personally, I'd like to have all four, but any choice between them is bound to be political, the same way Nobel Prize selections, Supreme Court decisions, of election to the Hall of Fame is "political."

Which reminds me of a story, from Woodward's book about the Supreme Court, The Brethren. In his latter years, Justice Douglas refused to retire, despite numerous ailments, including near blindness. His clerks were concerned that he could not read their briefs and would not know how to vote. When they diffidently raised the issue, Mr. Justice Douglas growled, "I know how to vote, I just wait to see how that sonofabitch Burger votes, and I vote the other way." So it's not always the case that we establish truth by "marching out into the plain" and "trying the matter by dint of argument." Sometimes you just know "to vote the other way."

Since Clay Hunt taught, and since I came to Williams, not only the canon but the whole liberal humanist tradition has come under heavy fire. This brings me to a broader way of viewing changes in higher education, as a debate between what we might call the foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. (For the sake of clarity, I'll overstate and oversimplify.) Foundationalists believe in a firm ground of rational inquiry -- the conviction that one can assess competing claims, reconcile rival interpretations, and attain meaning. "To see the object as in itself it really is," in Matthew Arnold's phrase. To put forth "the great principals that underlie all reasoning," as Mark Hopkins did. "To state the correct interpretation and prove that it is correct," as Clay Hunt defined it. One prevalent attitude today is skepticism about Mark Hopkins's idea of unity. Many teachers now are what I've termed anti-foundationalists, denying the premises of foundationalism, and in the process, upsetting and offending a lot of people. An anti-foundationalist doesn't believe in Meaning (capital M) or "correct interpretation." To an anti-foundationalist, meaning (like the canon) is not a product but a process, always and only man-made (or person-made), an endless process of interpretation, or interpretations, in the plural. Everything is a matter of dispute, meanings may well be incompatible, irreconcilable, elusive or contrived.

How might this difference might be evident in a Williams College English course? Beyond the obvious fact that we now have whole courses on black or female or post-colonial or Jewish writers, the kinds of questions that are contemplated differ considerably. Clay Hunt would ask students to write an essay explaining how the conclusion of Milton's Paradise Lost resolves the issues raised by the work. The very question assumes that one can reconcile the diversity; it posits closure, unity, coherence.

Today, an anti-foundationalist might highlight was is not stated or resolved in Paradise Lost -- the glitches or problems in the narrative. The text becomes less authoritative, less unified, more problematic and open to a wider variety of "correct" interpretations. A professor today might be less intent on defining what is true and permanent, and more interested in encouraging a range of responses, and an understanding of how and why arguments vary. I might not be so eager to settle issues in the poem, or to speak from the pulpit myself. At the very least, I would amend Clay Hunt's question to, "How does Milton's ending address the issues raised by the poem?" My emendation leaves open the possibility that resolution is not necessarily inherent in the text or fully successful. From this vantage point, it might seem more important to call into question the solutions or premises of the text. A real anti-foundationalist might actively encourage resistance to apparent resolutions. Today we might highlight the role of women in Milton's great chain of being. I have taught whole classes on one line, Milton's description of Adam and Eve: "he for God only, she for God in him." There is much more emphasis upon the values -- social, sexual, economic, political, racial -- openly advocated or tacitly assumed in the work -- and in some cases, very clear visions (similar in spirit, very different in kind, to that of President Hopkins)of better beliefs and ideals.

Now, what is at stake here is far broader than what teachers say about Paradise Lost or any other text. What is at stake is the goal of critical reasoning, adjudication, interpretation and evaluation -- that is, the traditional heart of the liberal arts education. Of course, all of us who studied the traditional liberal arts curriculum know that this attack upon authority did not spring out of Jacques Derrida's head in 1971. There is a long, prominent tradition of philosophic skepticism. The demise of authority and certainty has been a condition of our culture. Everybody remembers Nietzsche's obituary for God. Paul Tillich said, "We live in an age of cracked icons." Great modernists like Picasso and Joyce stress not unity but subjectivity, relativism and multiplicity. Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle seem to confirm or figure the modernist world view. Nature no longer seems moral: Hopkins's vision was in itself merely a paradigm.

More recent and striking, I think, than this rise of relativism is the self-scrutiny and self-doubt of the interpreter. We don't just teach that modernist narratives by Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf emphasize subjectivity, multiplicity and relativism. We now, most of us, stress that our analyses themselves are subjective, multiple and relative. Truth is "paradigms lost." The intrinsic limits to the scope and validity of objective analysis seem more important to most teachers today than they did to Clay Hunt or Mark Hopkins. Now, I think I know what Clay would have said. He probably would have responded, "Of course I have personal interests and biases. What I do is to recognize and transcend my subjectivity. My analysis becomes objective and disinterested."

The anti-foundationalist replies: "It is impossible and self-deluded to assert your disinterestedness. You cannot control or discount your subjectivity. All norms, standards and evidentiary considerations are necessarily and only part of being in an interpretive community. When you read Paradise Lost, you read it as a white, upper-class, male, reared in (if not endorsing) the Christian tradition. That is, for better and for worse, your interpretive community. Whether we are discussing the ending of Paradise Lost, a personnel decision, or a Supreme Court deliberation, there is not straightforward marching out into the plain and trying the matter by dint of argument, no more correct interpretation."

Most of me finds this debate not troubling but exhilarating. The rise of more diverse, contentious and passionate approaches to literature has enlivened my teaching. I suppose I should come out of the closet as a skeptical foundationalist manqué, with a nostalgic yearning for what is essential, consoling and educative but a recognition that there is no comfort to be found. I'm echoing Yeats here: "But is there any comfort to be found?/Man is in love, and loves what vanishes./What more is there to say?"

As a teacher I don't find my ambivalence, or even my sense of being outside the gates of Eden, confusing or paralyzing but enabling. In my introductory and lower level courses, I continue to teach much as Clay Hunt did: I move from loving scrutiny of individual words to larger investigations of character, form, genre, to problems of assessment, value and meaning. In my upperlevel courses the making of meaning becomes more of an issue. In a seminar on Paradise Lost, we'll spend six weeks reading the text, then another six weeks exploring and comparing liberal humanist, feminist and Deconstructive interpretations. In my tutorial on Joyce's Ulysses, I continually juxtapose the way I first made sense of the book, in liberal humanist terms, and the way I now see it in the light of recent literary theory.

I don't mean to present these developments the way Disneyworld dramatizes Progress. It's neither as simple nor as felicitous as a stately movement from old-fashioned unified authority to new-fangled pluralism and diversity. What troubles me is not the breakdown of consensus, the loss of unity, or the demise of the old verities -- but the rise of a new orthodoxy. I worry about any uniformity of ideology or dogma, treating gender, class and race as the only issues worth considering. Texts are read or misread as though they all tell the same story: the hegemony of the ruling class, the subjugation of women by the patriarchy, the oppression of minorities. Flattening the complexity of great works is of course easier than grappling with their complications.

But the question of ideology in the text or classroom is a very complicated issue, more so than some recent commentators and pundits acknowledge. Obviously there was an overt dogma in the Mark Hopkins curriculum. And of course there are explicit dogmas and tacit beliefs in canonical authors: Shakespeare was a monarchist; Milton a Christian polemicist. Any good teacher would show how these values shaped the writer's vision and investigate their implications. It's less obvious but arguable that there is also implicit ideology in liberal humanist, new critical approaches to these writers, just as there are ideological elements in, say, Marxism or feminism. We all like to believe we think from an objective, disinterested and fair perspective. I have a reasoned and moderate philosophy -- you have a subjective ideological agenda! George Orwell was probably right that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." In a sense, accepting the status quo -- let's say the status of women in 18th century fiction -- is political as well as aesthetic.

Just as there is not, to my mind, a God-given canon of great books we all must know -- I confess that I have never given Archimedes the attention a canonical author deserves -- there is no such thing as the God-given meaning of a work of art. Some conservatives lament our paradise lost, and wish to restore the time when we all knew what the great books and right ideas were, when we could all quote the best that had been thought and said. I heard one such critic, bemoaning the politicization of the curriculum, cite as distressing evidence feminist critiques of Milton. He thinks that must be ridiculous because Milton lived long before feminism and couldn't possible "mean" anything feminist. Well, sure, and Shakespeare never heard of Freud and Jane Austin preceded Marx. But that doesn't mean one can't construct a stimulating Freudian or feminist or Marxist analysis of these writers. The point of undergraduate education is to put young minds in contact with powerful, stimulating ideas, to encourage intellectual and aesthetic engagement, the spirit of critical inquiry, the joy of knowing and feeling more deeply and broadly.