Last week, I attended a dinner with Georgetown politics professor Patrick Deneen. He discussed some ideas from Wendell Berry’s book “Home Economics,” in which Berry fears that modern students are “ ‘upwardly mobile’ transients who will permit no stay or place to interrupt their personal advance. They must have no local allegiances; they must not have a local point of view.” A modern student’s life, Berry writes, “generalizes the world, reducing its abundant and comely diversity to ‘raw material.’ ” Displacement is the dark side of globalization.
I can’t help but think that Princeton students need to rediscover that lost sense of grounding, because our displacement distorts how we interact with the world in campus debate and, eventually, in our careers. In the 21st century, the importance of the local may never be recovered, but a viable surrogate is America as a nation. To find this mooring, our generation should return to the American classics of literature, the arts and especially political thought.
As students, we don’t always have the time or know-how to assemble that sort of experience on our own, but the faculty could put together a kind of “American Traditions” class. Course sequences like the humanities sequence and integrated science provide an intellectual paradigm to students in other disciplines. A course on the “American Traditions” could do the same for Wilson School, politics and other concentrators. Believe it or not, many Princeton students actually want to read James Madison and great American novels like “Huckleberry Finn,” but right now, there’s no one-stop shopping for that in the Princeton curriculum.
Some professors and students will surely complain that such offerings simply celebrate dead white men. But that argument ignores the relevance of Americans like Maya Angelou. For those who fear that studying the American classics is not global enough, well, that’s exactly the point (minus the pejorative tone, of course). America is home for most of us, even if Savannah, Ga., or Peoria, Ill., has lost its resonance with us. We should understand the United states just as well as we understand Latin America or Madagascar, if not better. This course needn’t exclude international students, many of whom would doubtless want to study America while here just as Americans study Arabic while in Cairo. It also does not preclude continued study of foreign subjects, but Princeton students should understand our home as well.
More generally, returning the American greats to higher education could reinvigorate beyond-the-bubble awareness. At Princeton, publications often discourage student commentary on real-world issues because it’s said no one wants to hear an undergrad chatter about taxes. I’ve always found that argument specious, but the surefire remedy is to ensure that budding pundits at Princeton have the grounding in American ideas to offer mature opinions. The University has a responsibility to thoroughly prepare students to be thinkers and leaders. If generations of American citizens have read the classics, there’s no reason why this generation should be any different. Just ask President Obama, who seems profoundly influenced by the writings and life of former president Abraham Lincoln.
In terms of the nitty-gritty, an American Traditions course would likely fall within the purview of the Program in American Studies, as either a revamped version of its current introductory course or perhaps an entirely new one. The director of the program, professor Hendrik Hertog, said in an e-mail that “the Program is in the midst of trying to construct a new 100-level survey course” along these lines with other departments, but it will take at least two years to assemble. Wilson School professor Stanley Katz confirmed that “American Studies does not have a separate faculty, and it is sometimes hard for the Program to recruit faculty time.” The University should remedy that shortage immediately.
After all, studying the American classics is not some right wing, jingoistic brainwashing conspiracy. It is an honest appraisal of our national heritage and contemporary education, and a way to prepare responsible citizens and leaders in the most time-honored fashion. It is also a way to revitalize campus debate. Most importantly, it just might restore something washed away by the 21st century by proudly and prudently instilling a kind of diversity often smothered by its politically correct opposite. A true liberal arts education needs to undo the displacement of Princeton students so that, as Berry writes, we can each be “a responsible heir,” beginning today on campus.
Brian Lipshutz is a freshman from Lafayette Hill, Pa. He can be reached at lipshutz@princeton.edu.
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