Great Books and Good Intentions

Someone at Columbia University owes David Denby an honorary degree. As matters now stand, he’s already received a B.A. from Columbia College, where, in 1961, he began his undergraduate career by taking Columbia’s pair of required courses in Western literature and civilization—Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization (Lit Hum and C.C., for short). In the fall of 1991, at the age of forty-eight, Denby returned to Columbia to take those courses again, impelled partly by the 1990-1991 media frenzy over higher education and political correctness and partly by disgust at the machinery of media frenzy itself—”the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom.” Great Books is a detailed chronicle of Denby’s second immersion in the Western tradition, and though it would probably be too much to say that the West itself is richer for Denby’s efforts, I doubt that Columbia could have asked for higher praise—or better advertising—for its core courses. Indeed, it seems likely that Great Books will eventually become, for any number of parents, students, and interested onlookers, a kind of layperson’s Friendly Companion to the Classics—a perfect gift idea for the holidays or for the college-bound high school senior on graduation day.

...