Several weeks ago, as I walked to Spanish class from Professor Vickie Sullivan’s Western Political Thought I lecture, I ran into four classmates who were deep in conversation about that day’s reading from Plato’s Republic. I quickly joined the lively conversation, offering my opinion on whether or not Plato was advocating for a tyrannical form of government. I got so carried away that I was late to my Spanish class.
Unfortunately, this is not a conversation I would be able to share with all of my fellow Tufts students. Beyond Professor Sullivan’s class, most have not read Plato’s Republic, and many Tufts students will go through their college experiences without reading a book in full.
At Tufts, students can satisfy their writing requirement after taking Expository Writing (English 1), and a First-Year Writing seminar (English 2). For their seminar, students can choose from 10 options, including Love and Sexuality, Road Stories, and Other Worlds. These courses may be interesting, but they lack a common set of texts and do not necessarily provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the field of literature as a whole.
This means that Tufts students can complete their English requirement without ever reading any of the foundational texts or “Great Books” that comprise the Western literary canon. The term “Great Books” was popularized by Mortimer J. Adler in his Great Books of the Western World, a 54-volume compilation of some of the West’s most influential works of literature, published in 1952.
A number of universities have made the Great Books required reading for all of their students. Take the University of Chicago, for example, which was ground zero for Great Books education. In the 1920s, the university developed a required course in which students studied the Great Books in roundtable discussions. It was intended to fill in the gaps in students’ liberal education and make them historically well informed. Columbia University has continued this tradition, requiring that students read the Great Books—as well as works by some non-Western authors—as part of their Core Curriculum. To fully realize the ideal of a liberal arts education, Tufts should do the same.
What is the value in reading the Great Books? For one, these works have been the foundation of many major societies, including the United States. From The Republic to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Great Books were on the minds of our nation’s founders when they constituted our government. So, our understanding of history would be incomplete without an understanding of these foundational texts.
And, as historian Niall Ferguson and philosopher Jacob Howland note in a 2024 piece in The Atlantic, titled “What the Freshman Class Needs to Read,” students must understand history before attempting to change the present.
Liberal education, they write, “requires that students … face backward in order to move forward … they must regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities.”
By reading works written centuries or even millennia before us, we are reminded that we are a part of something greater than ourselves––an “unfinished tapestry,” as Ferguson and Howland put it. They may be imperfect but these works offer a glimpse into the events and ideas that have shaped our world today.
In our current moment, we are more divided than ever, something we students see vividly on our campuses. One factor contributing to campus polarization is that there are few courses or texts we all have in common. If we lack a common reference point for political discussions, misunderstanding and resentment are all but inevitable. With foundational texts as a shared reference point, our debates would be less bitter and more constructive.
Understandably, some worry that by mandating that all students read the Great Books, we would be inevitably leaving out some voices, since many of these books were written by white men and reflect a predominantly eurocentric perspective, neglecting historically marginalized groups.
That’s a fair critique, but it misses the point of a liberal arts education. When we read classic works, we should not accept everything they say as fact but rather wrestle with what they have to say about our society. They are not important simply because they are “correct,” but because they form the foundation of the society in which we live.
There is definitely a place for other voices, and our education would be incomplete without hearing from those whose perspectives have been traditionally excluded. But how can we fully engage with all voices if we don’t have a shared foundation of historical understanding with which to approach them?
Ultimately, our time at Tufts is about more than simply improving our career prospects: we are here to learn how to become responsible stewards of the world we will soon inherit. To achieve these ends, we need to have a shared understanding of where we’ve come from and where we hope to go. We won’t always agree, but, as literary critic Harold Bloom notes, we must always “read deeply,” so that we may have some hope of “encountering the extraordinary.”
The authors of the Great Books reached for the extraordinary, and they often encountered it. We, too, can achieve lofty and extraordinary goals—both societally and in our own lives. But to do so, we must read the Great Books, because there are enough people who thought they were extraordinary for them to stand the test of time.
And don’t worry, reading them won’t make you a nerd. For all you know, the next time you run into a bunch of friends, they could be discussing Plato.
Photo by Sascha Dembling