Classic role

LITTLE ROCK — The canon of great literature, philosophy, and art is thriving-in the marketplace, if not on college campuses. For the last 20 years, a company called the Great Courses has been selling recorded lectures in the humanities and sciences to an adult audience eager to brush up its Shakespeare and its quantum mechanics. The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want. And that, it turns out, is a curriculum in the monuments of human thought, taught without the politically correct superiority and self-indulgent theory common in today’s colleges.

To open a Great Courses catalog is to experience an intellectual seduction. “When was the last time you read the classics of American literature?” teases one course description. “Possibly not as recently as you’d like. These carefully crafted lectures are your royal road to recapturing the American experience-and our intellectual and cultural heritage.” A course on Plato’s Dialogues-“for millennia the objects of devoted study by the noblest minds”-invites you to “become engrossed in the ‘romance of the intellect.’ ” The company uses words to describe learning-such as “joy,” “beauty,” “pleasure,” “classic,” and its favorite, “greatness”-that have long disappeared from the academy’s discourse. “Asyou read or reread these masterpieces, you will likely experience such joy from great reading that you may wonder why you have spent so much time on contemporary books,” asserts one course description, committing several transgressions against the reigning post-post structuralist orthodoxy.

And the company offers a treasure trove of traditional academic content that undergraduates paying $50,000 a year may not find. For example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600-1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. There are lessons here for the academy, if it will only pay them heed.

The Great Courses, originally called the Teaching Company, wasn’t begun with the goal of creating an antidote to today’s politicized academy. Tom Rollins, chief counsel and chief of staff to Senator Ted Kennedy’s Labor and Human Services Committee, quit his post in 1989 with the idea of finding the most charismatic college professors and having them tape college-level courses for the adult-education market.

Rollins, then 33, soon discovered that his assumptions about the university-that it existed, in his words, “to transmit to the young everything the civilization has figured out so far and to discover new things”-were not shared by everyone in the academy. “My first baptism came quickly,” he says. An American literature course by two theory-drenched Ivy League professors provided one early learning experience. The professors made little effort to conceal their contempt for the presumed racism and sexism of their audience and of the authors they were discussing. Within a month of the course’s release, customers were calling the company to complain about the lecturers’ condescending tone. In an institution that would live or die according to its customers’ satisfaction, Rollins couldn’t afford to alienate his audience. He destroyed all the master tapes of the course, so that no further copies could ship out, even accidentally.

Some of the early surprises involved the camera’s power to terrify even seasoned lecturers. By 1992, Rollins was living in an attic, after burning through his retirement savings to invest in his company. Maxed out on his credit cards and having sold 12 of his 13 Washington power suits, he had bet everything he had left on a history of Western philosophy course, for which his customer polling indicated a huge demand. A $10,000-a-day film crew had set up in the basement of the Georgetown University School of Medicine, ready to tape the course’s Machiavelli lecture-but the Columbia University professor who was supposed to deliver it was nowhere to be found. Rollins assumed that he was having a last smoke in the stairwell; instead, he found him there curled into a fetal position. “If I have to leave this stairwell, I will either throw up or faint,” vowed the professor, a large, strapping fellow. “I need Machiavelli in 30 seconds!” Rollins called out. Michael Sugrue, one of the two other lecturers in the course and a historian of colonial America, volunteered. He gave a superb talk, and the series became one of the company’s biggest sellers.

From the start, some customers developed an intensely personal relationship with the product, accusing Rollins of failing if he wasn’t constantly putting out new material.“They’d call me to say, ‘C’mon, Tom, I’m done with your latest; when’s the next one out?’ It was like intellectual crack.” The audience-mostly older professionals with successful careers-sees the liberal arts as a life-changing experience, observes Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University who has recorded courses on C. S. Lewis and on literary criticism for the company. “They are hungry for this material.”

In promoting its wares, the Great Courses breaks one academic taboo after another. The advertising copy for “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life” asserts: “Beginning with the definition of a great book as one that possesses a great theme of enduring importance, noble language that elevates the soul and ennobles the mind, and a universality that enables it to speak across the ages, Professor Fears examines a body of work that offers an extraordinary gift of wisdom to those willing to receive it”-a statement so reckless that it would get its proponent thrown out of the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. The Great Courses’ uninhibited enthusiasm is so alien to contemporary academic discourse that several professors who have recorded for the firm became defensive when I asked them about their course descriptions, emphatically denying any part in writing the copy-as if celebrating beauty were something to be ashamed of.

True, the Great Courses emphasize breadth over depth and offer largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools. But there is also none of the specious specialization of such courses as Wesleyan’s “Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in Eighteenth-Century England” or Bowdoin’s “Renaissance Sexualities,” which “reimagines the canon of Renaissance literature from the perspective of desires that have not yet been named.”

So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to Rollins complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.” In its emphasis on teaching, the company also differs radically from the academic world, where “teaching is routinely stigmatized as a lower-order pursuit, and the ‘real’ academic work is research,” notes Allen Guelzo, an American history professor at Gettysburg College. Though colleges ritually berate themselves for not putting a high enough premium on teaching, they inevitably ignore that skill in awarding tenure or extra pay. As for reaching an audience beyond the hallowed walls of academe, perhaps a regular NPR gig would gain notice in the faculty lounge, but not a Great Courses series. Jeremy McInerney, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998 that he wouldn’t have taped “Ancient Greek Civilization” for the company if his tenure vote had been in doubt: “This doesn’t win you any further respect. If anything, there’s a danger of people looking down on it, since many people are suspicious of anything that reeks of popularism.” So much for the academy’s supposed stance against elitism.

Do the Great Courses’ professors live up to their billing? Not always. A few ramble in their presentations or oversimplify (even sugarcoat) their material-making Nietzsche, for example, sound almost like a self-help guru. But most of the professors are solid to very good, with the best exhibiting an infectious enthusiasm for their subject matter.

The Great Courses’ highest-selling lecturer-music professor Robert Greenberg-unquestionably deserves his devoted following. Greenberg’s patent love for the music of the past isutterly endearing. During one course, he implores: “My friends, if it wasn’t an unseemly thing to do, I would go down on my knees and beg all of you to go out and get a recording of [Robert Schumann’s] magnificent piano quintet. You will never regret it.” Recounting how Johannes Brahms destroyed hisfirst 20 string quartets, Greenberg says mournfully: “We rightly ask: ‘J.B., J.B., did you have to?’ ” Greenberg’s blue-collar New Jersey persona (“I grew up in Levittown,” he explains; “if you spoke hoity-toity, you got the shit kicked out of you”) might put off some super-serious listeners-to their loss, since his composer biographies are superb, vividly drawn portraits of quixotic geniuses and their cultural environment.

Predictably, the Great Courses has come under pressure for not having enough “diversity” in its teaching ranks. Rollins has received angry letters from women complaining about the paucity of female lecturers; his nonstop efforts to recruit them have yielded few results, in part because women lecture less than men. As for the truly big-name female professors, they command speaking fees so high that the Great Courses’ pay scale looks insignificant. The same applies to the black superstars, one of whom told Rollins: “Tom, honestly, I make several thousand dollars a night from Martin Luther King Day through Black History Month; you’re not even on my radar screen.” A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance. The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course.

The very fact that Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm’s 200-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims lecturer Adam Guelzo, that “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses. A professor who teaches the Civil War as the “greatest slave uprising in history” to his undergraduates because that is what is expected of him, says University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors, will know perfectly well how to teach a more intellectually honest course for paying adults.

Unfortunately, even some Great Courses faculty demonstrate the narrowing of the academic mind. I contacted another Penn history professor to interview him about his experiences with the company. After a positive initial response to my request, he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t speak with me. “I ought to have looked up the Manhattan Institute [City Journal’s publisher] before I replied to your first e-mail,” he wrote. “I cannot in good conscience contribute in any way to any project associated with an institution which rejects everything I believe. It says something about the undeclared civil war in U.S. life that I have to say that to you.”

While the Great Courses, then, are only an ambiguous marker of the academic scene, the meaning of the audience’s response is far clearer: there is a fervent demand in the real world for knowledge about history and the high points of human creation. Public libraries have formed discussion groups around the most popular courses. Customers accost Great Courses professors in airports as though they were celebrities.

The company releases no information about its buyers, but professors say that they have been told to think of their audience as just as educated as they are, but in a different field. The customers must be well-off enough to pay what can be a hefty sum for the courses; a typical 24-lecture course costs $255 on DVD, and Greenberg’s 32-lecture course on Verdi runs $520, though patient customers wait for sales to snap up courses for around $70. A few professors suggest that the company has pegged the audience as leaning conservative. Seth Lerer claims that the firm told him in the 1990s that some of its clientele would be uncomfortable with his including Black English in his “History of the English Language” course. “They were very conscious of their political demographic,” he says. Lerer got an angry e-mail from a customer asking how he could include that “leftist son of a bitch” Noam Chomsky in the course. John McWhorter was told to omit from his linguistics lectures his usual argument that the idea of grammatical “correctness” is an “arbitrary imposition.”

But the Great Courses confronts a major challenge as it tries to expand its course offerings: “finding great lecturers, a talent that seems to be increasingly rare these days,” says Lucinda Robb, the company’s director of professor development. In fact, the company has been recycling its most popular professors on topics increasingly remote from their official competencies. The growing reach of free online university courses might seem to pose a competitive challenge, but for now, the Great Courses adds enough value to its lecturers to justify the product’s sticker price.

The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand post-colonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’ ” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.

But the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves-discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children’s.

Universities are certainly doing very well for themselves, despite ignoring their students’ demand for traditional learning. But they would better fulfill their mission if they took note of the Great Courses’ wild success in teaching the classics. “I wasn’t trying to fix something that was broken in starting the company,” Rollins says. “I was just trying to create something beautiful.” Colleges should replicate that impulse.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal (city-journal.org).