Comment from Jack Becker

The Bible: One suspects that the respondents are thinking less of reading the Bible than of students taking a course in it. Few people simply read the Bible through. Most get their Bible through preaching, and that is always highly selective and almost completely misrepresents the nature of the book. On a straight read through, the Bible rapidly becomes meaningless in its diversity of genres and its inner contradictions. The Bible cries out for context and explanation. The distinction between the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible is one reason. The relation between the two would certainly be confusing to an uninformed reader. One hopes the respondents are not thinking of the Bible as a moral guide, noted, as it is, for divine exhortations to genocide along with the demands of the prophets for justice.

Homer: That The Odyssey outranked The Iliad suggests, perhaps, a certain reverence for the name of Homer along with diffidence about the unrestrained violence that characterizes The Iliad. The violence of the Iliad makes sense if the book is read as a tragedy within epic form, concluding as it does with the deeply human vision of the Trojan King Priam sharing a meal in the tent of Achilles, the Greek hero who murdered his son and desecrated his son’s body. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is more a book of curiosities held together by the sense of loyalty to wife and home. It is puzzling that it should come so high on the list.

Plato: The choice of The Republic by the respondents is probably the easiest of all to understand. As one of my philosophy professors at St. Louis University used to say: the way to make a philosopher is to fill him full of Plato and then beat it out of him. The Republic is an excellent introduction to abstract thought, and seductive to young minds. But it is a complex book that requires teaching. Students easily lose track of the overall argument set up in the first books, and then get lost later in the survey of forms of government. Students seem to miss the fact that Socrates argues for a totalitarian state that, given contemporary experience, we should recognize as likely to be vicious in the extreme. Students tend to latch on to bits and pieces of the book rather than the argument of the whole. The "Apology" of Socrates is probably the most accessible of Plato's readings, and may well be the reading that undergraduates are most likely to remember. Other dialogues, such as the Crito and the Phaedo, and particularly, the Symposium, are curious and, in their way, challenging.

Shakespeare: The three works of Shakespeare that appear in the responses, are all tragedies–a suggestion of the high-seriousness one expects of university presidents when they consider education. The importance of Shakespeare's comedies gets lost here. And yet they are important for many things, particularly their multiple perspectives on the very important issue of young love.

Macchiavelli: The Prince cast a dark shadow similar to the one The Republic casts over political thought. It is significant, however, as is The Republic, for marking the outer boundaries of reflection on governing.

Dostoevsky, Dickens, Tolstoy continue the high-seriousness of the enterprise. Stephen Hawking says interesting things, but I don’t consider either of his books addressed to the lay reader a classic.

In general the list serves to illustrate for me the arbitrariness of much of what students are required to read. I have no complaint against this kind of variety. The list pretty much convinces me that the content of any university curriculum has to be the product of a collective effort by the university’s faculty, and that any other way of requiring readings is abstract and arbitrary. Many of these books I had never heard of. Naturally, they meant little to me.

Jack Becker(Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor Emeritus of English and, a co-founder of the university’s core program.