Interview: Dr. Eric Adler on Battle of the Classics | The New Thinkery Ep. 68

Welcome back to the New Thinkery, and I'm David Barr. And with me as always, this is my good friend Alex, pre you, how are you doing, Alex? I'm doing well. I'm very excited to have a class.

This is our first class, this is on the show. Yeah. Well, before we get to that house, I guess our lean sex and house doesn't count for the folks at home. Alex, I have a question for you before we introduce Greg or Sam's over there.

You dressed up as a yellow chicken for Halloween. Is that correct? That's correct, yeah. Yeah.

A full chicken. A feathered vipet is it? Yeah, but the last time I saw you in that studio was during some bizarre after hour stuff we were engaging in at St. John's College.

So I've used that. I go to these eyes wide shut parties. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So find the be seal and man. That's what I show up as a chicken. And apparently chickens are the sexiest animals. Right.

They're like the massive horns and things like that. And Greg, how are your braves? Greg is the, I mean, this is how much I'm excited for tonight's show. I'm actually missing game six of the World Series between my beloved Atlanta Braves, and the universally despised Houston Astros.

So yeah, coming out to life in the world of hip wars and nice people, National Ohio. Let me be nose game four is the most important of all seven games. One in the middle. Yeah.

Yeah. So today I'm excited to we're all excited to have Professor Dr. Professor, Professor Eric Adler, who's the chair of the classics department at the University of Maryland. We give a quick bio.

So Adler's scholarly interests include Roman history, historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship and the history of the humanities. He's the author, author of three books, the first of which, Valorizing the Barbarians, enemy speeches and Roman historiography was praised by Martha Nussbaum and the Bryn Mawr review as quote, the greatest work of classical scholarships since Edward Gibbon. Hold on, hold on. Fan of the show, Martha Nussbaum, praise his book.

Fan of the show. And of the premium whoosh, Martha Nussbaum. Very same. Back with the US labor country.

Yeah, who I ran into in Chicago. Right, right. And he challenged to a regal for it. Yeah, yeah.

All right. You have to start to very hard to point out review, but I uncovered it. Professor Adler comes from a distinguished intellectual family. His grandfather, Mortimer Adler, founded the great books curricula at the University of Chicago.

But his brother, Stephen, helped found famed intellectual rock supergroup Guns and roses. And in fact, it was during the European leg of their 1987 appetite for destruction tour that a group he said to Eric, if you think being a metal god is thrilling, take it to the next level and become a classicist. So we owe it to her. So that we have Eric.

But today he joins us to discuss his latest book, The Battle of the Classics, How in 19th Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today. It's available through Oxford University Press. How are you? Thank you very much.

That is the best and worst introduction to me that I think that I've ever had. Many of those things rely on, but I don't think we should really revisit them. OK. But thank you very much, David.

As a fan of the show, it's a delight to be here. Well, we thought that it might be nice since your class is to give you the sort of Diagees L'Aerti's biography. Mostly apocryphal, but always always interesting. Yeah.

I appreciate it. So Eric, we're here to discuss your latest book. Can you give kind of an overview of the book? I mean, the title, to me, is interesting.

You were the subtitle, rather, How in 19th Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today. I think listeners could be forgiven for thinking that the Battle of the Classics or the Battle of the Humanities started in 88 or 89 when Bloom wrote The Close of the American Mind, or even more recently, since it's more headline grabbing. But it started a long time ago. Indeed, it's been with us for centuries.

Yeah, that's right. So yeah, the Battle of the Classics, how in 19th Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today was my attempt to try to offer a sounder defense for the modern humanities today that, in some respects, at least, was more tethered to the history of the humanities, going all the way back to Roman antiquity, all the way to the present, as a means to try to understand the predicament of the modern humanity. And it is my contention in the book that a series of disputes that occurred in the late 19th into the early 20th century, called by historians of the American Higher Education, the Battle of the Classics, is a particularly useful window for us to judge the kinds of defenses that are written today about the modern humanities. In the late 19th century, there was a series of disputes surrounding mostly elite American college campuses about the role of Latin and Greek, then seen as the humanities or the classical humanities, we might call them now, but then synonymous with the humanities, and the role that these languages should play in American higher education.

Since the founding of Harvard in the 17th century, all the way up until the Civil War, Latin and Greek dominated the American college curriculum, and they were required subjects for all students at elite colleges and many non-elet colleges as well, if you wanted to have a bachelor's degree, this is what you needed to study. And so this came to a head in the late 19th century into the early 20th century, in which there was a kind of extended series of disputes about what role Latin and Greek were the classical humanities, or the humanities themselves, should play in American higher education. And the traditionalists in the Battle of the Classics argue that Latin and Greek should remain the centerpiece of an American college education, and they should be required of all students, as they had been since the founding of Harvard in 1636. And the so-called modernists in the debate argued that this shouldn't be the case any longer, that we should move to an elective curriculum, in which students could choose whatever they wanted to study, and that there was no need for anyone to study Latin and Greek at all.

And their goal, it seems, was to minimize the influence of the humanities on American higher education, along with theology, and reorient the American college curriculum around the scientific method. It occurred to me when I was examining this series of conflicts called the Battle of the Classics, that this was a particularly useful window to look at the arguments for the modern humanities that are made today, because it seems, and as I try to argue in the book, that the losing arguments that the traditionalists made during the Battle of the Classics were Latin and Greek, are largely the same arguments that are dominating today in defenses of the modern humanities. And that seemed to me to be a springboard for trying to offer a different solution for how best to defend the modern humanities. And so it's almost like a cautionary tale.

Yeah, I guess, or at least it's something that we can learn from, it seems to me. Yes, the chance that we were going to retain a Latin and Greek curriculum into the 21st century, in which those were required elements, doesn't seem very likely. But there had been attacks on the role of the classics in the American higher education, going all the way back to the colonial period. So this is when they lost, this is when the classics lost, and it is my sense that the losing arguments from the Battle of the Classics are those arguments that are still being bandied about today in the defense of the modern humanities, which took the place of the classical humanities from early American higher education.

And one thing I found interesting, Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, that the rock kind of set in through the back door, or you had these well-meaning humanities boosters who thought the best way to defend the field was by hitching their horse to this, argument based on the critical thinking. So that, no, no, no, you guys think, Latin and Greek are retrograde, and so we've got this, we'll teach our students critical thinking, and your book, you make a kind of juxtaposition chemistry, or learning German or something. And so they thought they were making an argument, but a strong argument, but in a sense they were conceding too much to the new science of the day. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, so in the late 19th and early 20th century, the chief defense, not only, but the chief defense of the classical languages was the idea that they supplied something called mental discipline. And the idea behind mental discipline theory for faculty psychology was that the mind is a kind of muscle. And just like you need to exercise your muscles in order to be strong, you need to exercise your mind. And therefore you need to study those subjects that offer the best kind of calisthenics, mental calisthenics.

And it was argued that Latin and Greek because they're hard languages, I guess, do that along with mathematics. And therefore they should remain the centerpiece of the American college curriculum. The problem with that, or there are a series of problems with that argument, one is the people making that argument had no proof that that that was true. They couldn't point to anything in which they could actually say that this was true, that it was actually better for your brain to learn Latin or Greek as opposed to German or Italian or English or anything like that.

They had no proof. That's number one. Number two, their chief opponent were social scientists. And the empiricists among them could test empirically which subjects actually supply the most mental discipline.

So they actually outsourced to their opponents the role of being judges of the quality of education itself. And then the third thing I try to argue about the problems with mental discipline as an argument is that essentially it's anti-humanistic. It's opposed to the notion that content can have an influence on people's inner lives and can make someone better, which is essentially humanistic argument. Instead, anything that's mentally taxing could be useful.

So playing chess would be your entire curriculum because it's very difficult on your brain or puzzles or whatever you wanna say, right? Nothing, no content has any value to it. And I think as I try to explain elsewhere in the book, the humanistic tradition as it was founded in Roman antiquity and revivified and altered to some degree in the Renaissance was founded on the basis of the idea that content matters and that masterworks of Latin and Greek literature are important to read because of the effect they can have on one soul. And so they made a kind of strangely anti-humanistic argument for the humanities or for the classical humanities and to make a bridge between that and what you asked, the issue here with so-called critical thinking is that critical thinking is essentially the 21st century corollary of mental discipline.

So the arguments that people are making for critical thinking, whatever that means. And oftentimes they don't even identify what's the difference between critical thinking and good thinking or thinking like me or what have you does the exact same thing. It out sources claims about the value of the humanities to the opponents of the humanities. And again, it's going to be a losing argument.

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This is something that I found really persuasive in your book and something that I've had some experience with. Your emphasis on this mental gymnastics versus content, I find really important and I find that it's often missed by people who especially if they're not really in the Academy, they haven't done this kind of thing. But you're arguing here in the book, I think, right? That there is a difference between the content of the thing that you're studying.

That you can't actually get out of engineering, out of something else. The same thing you can get out of the classical humanity. So I'm going to read a couple passages, one's from page seven of your book and one's from page 176. This is one of my more beautiful passages.

I found the Valley Classics, you say ably demonstrates that insistence on the intellectual aesthetic and moral value of studying profound works of art, philosophy, religion, and literature remains the strongest rationale for the contemporary humanities. And I just can't tell you, I want to read the other passage here in a second. But for me, one of the things that I find, I have to push back against is the notion that anything can do this, anything can teach us critical thinking, anything can exercise that muscle. And I'm trying to say, no, there actually are profound works of art, philosophy, religion, and literature that can do this in ways that other things can't.

And you mentioned on page 176, this is your chapter, Humanism versus Humanitarianism. And this is, I found this, I laughed out loud because I've actually encountered, I was a professor at a smaller college somewhere else and I came across a professor at a faculty who was just giddy with the fact that he had just got in a comic books class in core. So I laughed out loud when I came across this passage of yours on page 176. Shakespeare comic books, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dredfels, rather than be guided by a thoughtfully crafted curriculum to experience works that most effectively provide models of conduct and suggest answers to life's great questions.

Students are left to pick whatever fits their fancy. And I just couldn't agree more with the idea that I think that too often we focus on the outcome, student learner outcomes by the way, I'm sure you know this abomination. But like the idea that you can do this with comic books, you can do this with movies, you can do this with, as you mentioned, Stephen King movies, right? Like, no, you can't, like Homer is somehow different.

It's profoundly different. The Bhagavad Gita is profoundly different. These are serious intellectual works that somehow are going to change you morally, intellectually, aesthetically. So anyway, just a point, a point in your, a quilt for your feather, I don't know what they're saying, is that how it's trying to jump in?

Greg, I should say that I find it mystifying. I agree to which so many humanities faculty members underestimate the power of great works, shape our imaginations and to shape our souls. And this is something that actually, I think other people recognize, if you look at advertising, these are not great works. But advertising on television, for instance, seldom says here are the benefits of our product.

And it sort of lists it dryly. Instead, you get Matthew McConaughey and a Lincoln driving around as if you somehow will be transformed into Matthew McConaughey if you buy this car, which everyone knows is visible. I mean, that's just not true. And yet it has some sort of power on our imagination.

Well, if a stupid advertisement about a Lincoln can do that, just imagine the work of a magic of mastermind can do. And so it's amazing to me that humanities professors don't seem to recognize the degree to which what you read is profoundly important. And I think the reason behind that is essentially the modern American professionalized research university compels everybody to act like they're scientists. You limit this to America, Eric, or would you say this is a crisis felt across the humanities departments?

Let's say in Europe as well. Well, this started in Germany, I would say more than elsewhere. So but every university system is linked to its own culture and so forth. So there could be differences and so forth.

But I do think that in America, certainly, the idea that you could be moved somehow by particular works. And what you teach really matters is somehow anathema, in essence, because of the priorities of the modern professionalized university that compel us all to pretend to be scientists. And as a result, to think that questions about what you read doesn't matter. What matters is method.

What matters is what you've published and so forth, as opposed to the kinds of works one reads. Where I think you know, if you look at, say, primaries and secondary school and the huge fights people have, about what books should students read? They're unpleasant fights, but they're understandable and necessary fights in some ways. Because what we read has a profound effect on the sorts of people we become, our vision of humanity, our vision of what's possible is profoundly shaped by this.

I'm Charles Elliott, who maybe we'll talk about later on in the podcast, was the president of Harvard and did perhaps more than anything else to end the kind of classical humanities and introduce the elective system in 1869. In his inauguration address, he said, the problem is not what to teach, but how to teach. And that's like saying, as Robert Crocker said in response to this, a great humanist, that's like saying, the problem isn't what you eat. It's the utensils you do.

It's a visible argument. And yet it seems to be what we need to say as humanities faculty members as a result of the system in which we find ourselves. Now, one thing that stuck with me in undergraduate professor of mine with this idea that the content doesn't matter, I mean, this is, I guess, slightly related. He said, look in your heart of hearts.

You know that Beethoven is superior to Eminem and you know that Miles Davis is superior to the bloodhound gang that might date me when I was in college. But the idea that you know that it's not just the method, you know it's the content. And especially in your discipline, classics, I find it, I always pronounce the rising, like I said, is what you get from not learning how to look up pronunciation of words. It's visible that especially in classics, they're like, it doesn't matter the meat.

It doesn't matter the content. It's just the method. It's like, well, why in God's name, what I ever devote years of my life to learning how to read Greek or Latin? I mean, that seems ridiculous at that point.

It's like they're not like completing your own language. Just shooting themselves in the feet with a machine gun, you know, like it's just. Yeah, yeah, there was a tweet that I thought was ill advised, not just one, but I'll talk about one. In which someone who was a classicist said, Dolly Parton could write the Aeneid, but Virgil couldn't write Jolene.

And this was loved by all those guys and so forth. And my response to that is exactly yours, Greg, which is if Dolly Parton's Jolene is as good as the Aeneid, then why do you need to study years and years of Latin in order to read it? You know, you will go with whatever's most accessible. I think that there's a sense in which there is a kind of suspicion of cannons, which to some degree is I think warranted, just because people said something was important, the past doesn't necessarily mean that it's important, but it's gone to a kind of absurd blank in which someone tries to seem hip by suggesting works that are obviously inferior are somehow wonderful, because it sort of makes you seem useful or something like that.

And they don't seem to recognize how much that undercuts their broader arguments for their subject. Nothing is sadder than old professors like us trying to pretend to be hip. I'll turn it over to our hip colleague, Alex Priu. Well, I think it's interesting.

Maybe Virgil couldn't write the Aeneid in the way that the rest of us could not act in hardcore pornography. It would be somehow beneath us. Well, Greg wants to do it with you. What's the only thing you may not be a Aeneid?

You may not be a Aeneid. Aeneid, that's right. I mean, Virgil couldn't write that. Jaleen, no idea.

I guess. I don't know. I want to push back even against this idea. Well, these great books awaken the imagination.

I think there's obviously a difference between awakening the imagination on the one hand and critical thinking, which is like pointing out basic fallacies or something like that. And it's very dry and it's unimaginable, right? It's sort of diagnostic in a sort of sort of, you know, antiseptic way. But when I approach the reason for reading the classics, and I take this argument to be powerful, maybe you can tell me whether this was ever levied, but I think back to Rousseau and then continue all the way up to late modernity and to even the work of Echin Heidegger, the reason you read Plato, the reason you read Aristotle is either because they offer a powerful alternative to the modern world, which for various reasons might be dissatisfied or might not deliver on its promises that with sort of scientific progress, you'll be happier.

Or you might go back there and read it because it's a, it's something that you know, we were right to depart from, yet we don't necessarily understand everything that went on in this sort of Heideggerian approach. And the reason I find this argument powerful is because often I, you see this in classics, right? They say, well, why would you call this classic? It was just like Western classics or Mediterranean classics or something like that.

And the answer would be, well, because they're the classics relative to the moderns and the modern world is, well, it's the world now, it's not just Europe, it's China, it's everywhere, right? And insofar as we're all leading in this world and we're wrestling with certain problems, it makes sense to assess the roots of that world in modern thought, but even go back. And I'm thinking now of, you know, I don't know whether you attend this, but of works like Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books, which we've done in episode on, but this old quarrel of ancient and moderns, this is, I think, no longer a European question, right? This is a global question.

And so the sort of Rousseauian roots of this question, hey, I don't think this is exactly the right direction we're going in with this. And I think critical thinking as humanistic education is a symptom of this issue. I don't think this is the right direction we're going in. Maybe we need to reassess it, reassess our tradition.

And it might be that a byproduct of that is you come to love the classics as beautiful works and as awakening your imagination. But your reasons for going there are quite rational, right? They're not antiquated. They're not romantic.

They are strictly saying, how do I live a good life? Let me assess where my ideas come from and go forward. Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I think that obviously you've spelled out a much more profound rationale for the classics than you would find from a critical thinking argument, which obviously, as you suggested, I think correctly is really nothing, especially because as David had already suggested, I think correctly, you can learn critical thinking from nursing, you can learn critical thinking from engineering and so forth. This is sort of one of the problems.

Everyone thinks they do that. So what do the humanities do that other subjects don't? And if you can't make an argument based on that, well, then you're saying we don't need the humanities because they do something that other disciplines do instead. For me, it seems, though, one of the elements of my book is that I attempted to link this to humanism more specifically.

I don't think that this is necessarily completely a sidebar from the kind of justification you've offered, Alex. But I do think at the same time, I was interested in a kind of historical argument about what these great texts are supposed to be able to do, particularly for someone's inner life. And according to Cicero, and certainly according to Patrick and Bruni and various and Babbitt, who we'll talk about later, presumably, they believe that works of imaginative masterminds give us a sense of what human life really is like and give us a sense of what you could be. And you could answer life's great questions through these works.

And accordingly, you could actually live up to your higher potentialities. To be a better version of yourself is actually possible. Now, that is a more inward-focused approach to education, less historical, I suppose, in some senses than what you've offered, Alex. But I do think that they're not necessarily at loggerheads as rationales.

Eric, I have a cool question for you. During your research of these early debates, at least in the United States, it seemed that, for good reason, the content of what a good humanities curriculum looks like wasn't up for a debate or it didn't seem debatable. Is that accurate? Because I know, and we'll talk about this later, towards the end of the book, you actually are a kind of expansion of what we consider great books, or a more inclusive canon.

And that leads us to questions of how you adjudicate what's in the canon, et cetera. Do they just take for granted that you would have the shelf, let's say, the St. John's curriculum? And it was already delimited?

Or did you hear them talk about the substance of the education? Yeah, so I think it was. That's a great question. I think that it was much narrower, in a sense, than the St.

John's curriculum was. And I think that this tells us about what happened in the Renaissance and how the humanistic tradition changed in some fundamental ways during the course of the Renaissance. But also was a movement toward the kind of education that also was featured during antiquity, and even to some degree in the medieval period. But in the Renaissance, there was a kind of rebirth of European civilization, on the basis of a kind of rediscovery of much classical wisdom from classical authors.

And so accordingly, the Renaissance humanists believed that particular texts were the key to shaping one's soul and perfecting the self. And so they naturally looked to classical Latin and Greek authors alone. And so our whole notion of Shakespeare being a great author and so forth, well, obviously the Renaissance that isn't going to fly for historical reasons. But they weren't interested even in Aquinas.

They didn't want to read that stuff. They only wanted to read the classics, because they believed, well, part of this was, they believed that that that had led to the rejuvenation of European society and could lead to the rejuvenation of Italy. So there was, I think, a kind of understood canon of classical authors. He did shift.

It's not as if there's no shift in it. But it was narrow, even narrower than the great books tradition. In so far, it really focused on Greece and Rome alone. And this is itself partly historical, because our notion of the humanities comes from the Romans who were themselves responding to Greek Pidea as well.

So the curriculum makes a certain amount of sense. But yes, over the course of time, you see certain works that are read over and over and over again as part of an education. And that gets codified in the Renaissance, I think, in a very clear curriculum where there could be some ships. And that ends up lasting all the way, essentially, in America in America higher education until the Civil War, when we have ultimately what leads to the battle of the classics itself.

Sounds like you were already kind of doing this. But one of the parts of your book that I found sort of interesting and learned a great deal from actually was your straightforward account of the history of humanities. I would have naively assumed, I imagine most of the folks at home would have assumed that that meant Greek sort of learning and education. But you make a pretty persuasive case that yes, there's some Greek antecedents, of course, but that really the humanities go back to Rome.

And since Rome, it seems like most of all. So I mean, it was amazing about your chapter. I'm not a kind of doing this just a moment ago, but you traced the history of humanities and from then to now in a very concise, persuasive, but still informed and I thought, so you can highlight some things that you want to stress that maybe you missed in that earlier presentation. Yeah.

Can I jump on the feedback on that? And just first of all, just as a brief aside, so you can catch your breath. I mean, you have brought the wisdom of your grandpa and Mortimer with the rhythm of your cousin's youth. Very well written.

So no, this is really, no, I mean, just in the conversation, even, but I thought maybe also we wanted to touch on Irving Babbitt, right? So maybe two questions there. One, who was he? I don't think a lot of people know that in two, is that is real name, that's a strange name.

Irving Babbitt is a strange name? Alex Irving is a strange, yeah. It seems like a kind of cartoon character, like Irving Babbitt. I think people think of a Sinclair Lewis book, Babbitt.

Which is supposed to be a knock against Babbitt. Yeah, yeah, I remember you telling me that. Yeah, Sinclair Lewis was not a fan of the new humanism and not a fan of Irving Babbitt, and he seems to have written that book with that name in order to take a shot at Irving. He didn't say anything about his name being silly, I guess, was a- Well, I don't want to, this is controversial territory.

I know there's a lot of Sinclair Lewis in Irving Babbitt. Where does Ann C. listen to show? No, but he emerges as a hero, where a great person of interest in your book, I think you're writing a book on him now, right?

Well, I'm going to ultimately, my next book project is actually a correspondence, a discussion of the correspondence and the full correspondence, Irving Babbitt and his best friend and contrary, a guy named Paul Elmer Moore. And who also was, I don't know how silly that name sounds to you. But Elmer was from his mother's family, so his middle name was, it's not like Elmer Fudd or something. P.E.

Moore sounds fine, P. P.E. Moore, yes. It's all fine, P.E.

Moore, yes. Actually, he was made fun of seemingly in a Sinclair Lewis novel, too, that was called Elmer Gantry, which is also supposedly a shot at Paul Elmer Moore. Anyway, those two were the leading lights of the so-called New Humanism. And I think that they're deeply important thinkers, in part for the humanistic tradition in the United States, but for other reasons as well.

And so I guess I can deck and segue into my discussion of Irving Babbitt, so Irving Babbitt lived from 1865 until 1933. He was an academic, he was classically trained, he also was trained in Sanskrit and poly, that's what he had done his graduate work in. But he ended up becoming a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard. And he was the founder of an informal school of thought, a kind of literary and social criticism called the New Humanism.

And I try to argue in my book, The Battle of the Classics, that at the tail end of the Battle of the Classics, Irving Babbitt provided the soundest critique of the university movement in the United States and the soundest defense of the humanities of his own era. And that we can actually learn from Babbitt in attempting to try to offer a kind of defense, a modern defense of the modern humanities today. Before you get into his defense of the humanities and why that's helpful for us today, can you just briefly describe for our audience the Battle of the Classics, the title of your book, what was the Battle of the Classics? Is this something that's widely, this is widely understood of a thing that happened in the study of classical languages?

Is it, anyway, yeah. Yeah, so yes, the title of the Battle of the Classics as a kind of series of events is a name that has long been given by historians of American higher education, to a series of disputes, mostly surrounding elite American college campuses and the role of Latin and Greek on those campuses. And so there were a prominent series of disputes, I talked about a few of them in the book and kind of try to look at what those arguments were, about what the role of Latin and Greek ought to be at those particular schools. As often happens with American higher education because these debates surrounded places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they ended up having wide play in the American media.

And this seems like lots of people were interested in them. In the same way, I suppose that lots of people in America were interested in the 80s and 90s of the 20th century about Alan Bloom and the closing the American mind and the modern humanities, sorry. Same kind of thing, although this time it wasn't surrounding the modern humanities, it was surrounding the classical humanities and the role of Latin and Greek. So I didn't coin the term Battle of the Classics, it's already associated with these series of the series.

But before we get into that, one thing that I remember is while they're talking and giving such flowery defenses of the humanities and how ennobling these books are, like Adams and a number of these Harvard and Yale are presidents, they still retain an incredibly leadism. Like that's a, so they're able to hold these two thoughts in their mind. Well, these books, more people should read them and only these great books because of what it does for your soul, but let's try to keep them from the peasants. Yeah, I do think that in American, in the history of American higher education, it has been typically the case.

I think there's some revisionism now. So people for the last few decades have kind of fought against this, but it used to be thought in the early 20th century among scholars that the loss of the classics in the Battle of the Classics was a victory for democracy, that it was good that they got rid of the old, antiquated European style of social snobbery associated with the curriculum and they opened it up to others. And one thing that's really striking, if you actually look at these debates over the role of Latin and Greek, most of the people attacking Latin and Greek were not populists of any sort. Charles Francis Adams Jr, who was the grandson of a president and the great grandson of a president, now Snob, an unapologetic Snob, who actually was a supporter of a kind of social Darwinism and a racism was actually one of the prominent attackers of required Greek and Harvard for admissions.

So it's very strange to see, if you actually look at these arguments, they don't match our kind of conception, which I think is related more to American pragmatism and a kind of nervousness about a European style of elitism in our own education. So according to the loose syllogism, loose syllogizing of the day, attacking the classes would be racist. Right? You're friends with this Adams fellow, right?

Well, I mean, it is the case, and it is something that I underscore in the book, that those people who were attacking the classics as required elements of a college curriculum and during the course of the battle of the classics were so-called social democrats or scientific democrats who wanted to center the curriculum around the scientific method. These thinkers were deeply influenced by first laissez-faire economics, and they thought that the curriculum should be an embodiment of laissez-faire economics, so there should be a kind of competition. And second, they were social Darwinists who actually believed that there should be a fight to the death among subjects, and those subjects that failed to win sufficient student attention should die. Again, Charles Elliott, the famous supporter of the elective curriculum suggested in 1884, that in education as elsewhere, it is the fittest that survives.

And the idea is that if insufficient number of students shot to your classes, they should cut your discipline. No one wants it. And this was based explicitly on a kind of racism. Elliott was himself an epigone of Herbert Spencer, the guy who coined social Darwinism.

So it's a kind of strange kind of racist argument that sometimes is made against the classics. It doesn't mean that those people supported the classics never offered any kinds of objectionable defenses. But it is the case that the kind of curriculum that we have today that maximizes student choice is actually based on a free market idea and social Darwinism. And it would be valuable, it seems to me, that if we looked back at that, as we're trying to come to terms with, what our higher education is actually what.

Now, just a couple of points. First, I can't tell you how many meetings I've said and where they talk about maximizing efficiency at seats and how many consultants, associate assistant provost and deans have said, if you're a major cancer and survive in the marketplace, then it doesn't serve. But I'm reminded one of our very first episodes, David Alex with Charles Butterworth, about how the dean at the University of Chicago who led Butterworth's class on air but go with one student, Charles Butterworth. And I just thought the vision of that dean to realize the possible academic value of this course for one student, that this is worth keeping alive somehow, even if other students don't realize it.

So I mean, what would I do? What would I do? That's the last one. Charles Butterworth is a student.

That's right. And so he's the guy who comes out, well, there was three students and two that were there. No, no, there was only one in the final one. That's right.

The first class there were three and then one in the final semester. Yeah. But I mean, that's what you get out of that. If you maintain it, you might get the next, you know, greatest.

Well, the very notion that a subject is only as valuable as it is popular. It's a very popular one, right? But this is one that seems like it's no one even questions it. And this is how we should choose our doctors, no doubt in our part.

But it's sort of strange. So that there's a whole literature. I think actually many of the points made by it are profound about the so-called neoliberal university and the problems with the neoliberal university. I share many of these concerns.

But there's a kind of strange reticence among these critics to look at the neoliberal curriculum, which is actually the origin of the neoliberal university. And for some reason, because they hate the idea of great books of any sort, they're totally on board with a kind of curriculum that actually was built off of social Darwinism and free market capitalism, which is exactly the opposite of the politics of these sorts of books. So I don't want to force you to play like, you know, armchair legislator or something like that. But I mean, what do we do?

I mean, it's no, look, we have a very sort of, right, technologically advanced economy, just to start participating in it requires education until you're like 22, right? And, you know, look, I teach engineering majors, they have to take a ton of classes that demand a lot of time, way more rigorous than stuff across campus. They come into my class, they might take it seriously when I have some good conversations, but it's always sort of secondary with such massive political economic pressure. And despite the fact, right, these people are serviceable to the regime.

They're serviceable towards our ends of sort of maximizing technological efficiency. How do you restore the classes? Or what future do you see for the classics against this pressure of which, right, this where we started the whole critical thinking stuff is just the kind of echo, right? It's just, you know, yeah, this is critical thinking, go teach whatever book you want, eventually we'll fade you out of it.

Yeah, and Eric, to ask Alex is a different part of the question, do you think that the a successful response or successful revitalization comes from the bottom up, say in classical primary schools, which seem to be increasing in popularity? Or does it come from the top down when professors get together and said, you know, we've had enough of the zeniness, let's get back to the basics. Yeah, first of all, those are two great questions, it seems to me. First, it seems to me, I could answer this in Alex's question and David's question in a number of different ways, but it seems to me first that I personally am less concerned about what people major, I'm actually really concerned about the fact that people end up having an exposure to the humanities and to great works because they can shape our understanding of the human and can give us a sense of the sorts of people we want to be and what it means to be a good person and answers to life's great question.

So if you want to do that as part of your education and then major in engineering, I really have no problem with that at all. And I don't frankly understand why people are so obsessed about majors as opposed to possibly other things like butts in seats or the intrinsic value of the subject, it seems to me is part of this as well. Now, as far as people only being engineering majors who don't have the chance to study great works, well, that's more of a problem it seems to me because it seems from my perspective, and here I'm influenced by Babbitt, I think who's influenced by Aristotle, Burke and others, but it seems to me that we're foolish if we believe that people's education is going to be strictly vocational and that they somehow are naturally going to use that education in the service of the good. If they've never even studied in any way, shape or form, what it means to be a good person, what it means to live a good life, what is justice and so forth.

So if people have never studied those things and have never had their imaginations tickled by these kinds of great works and instead are given strictly a vocational sort of education, we're fools if we genuinely believe that they're just gonna go out and do good in the world. Well, what we get it seems to me is a kind of world of the sort of tech giants we have now, where they claim they're doing good for the world, but they're actually making themselves really wealthy while they're turning teenagers deeply depressed and causing all kinds of problems and they're fooling themselves or they're fooling us about what sort of people they are. So it does seem to me that that humanism, a kind of humanistic approach to education for everybody who goes to college is really deeply necessary. Whether to answer David's part of this question, whether this starts at the primary level and secondary level and moves up and so forth, I don't know, there's a great disconnect unfortunately between primary and secondary instruction on the one hand and the needs of the university on the other.

And I do think that's one of the problems that classics has moving forward. There is actually a big classical education movement in primary and secondary schools and there's a real disconnect between it. In some ways it's because it means different things and what classical means and so forth is a sort of matter of contestation. But there is a real disconnect between that audience, which is growing and what classics professors do.

So I don't really have a good answer to that. All right folks, today's episode is also brought to you by ISI. Now you probably listened to the new thing because you love thinking deeply about important texts, authors and ideas. Perhaps you're a professor at a university.

If so, I think you need to check out the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or ISI David. What is the ISI? Thanks for asking me, Oz. ISI is built to provide ideas and community for thoughtful, conservative faculty like our listeners.

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Sign up and become a member today. And now, back to the show. Can I just follow up here? You can speak more about Babbitt.

I think maybe that would be the direction to take this and how Babbitt can help us understand how to win this battle. But I'm on board. I'm totally sold. I think that your vision is the correct one.

But what I'm missing is how are we going to win? How is this going to persuade people who aren't sympathetic? How are we going to destroy the strong determinant? How are we going to be victorious over and watch them flee from us and devour their children?

How are we going to defeat the people who are about comfortable thinking? How about skills? How does Babbitt help us to come around to see that it's this emphasis on how these great books, how these primary texts, how these profound works of art, literature, and religion can help us to develop it internally. How are we going to win that battle?

Because that's what I'm interested in. Yeah, so it's a great question. It seems to me that there's no easy answer to that question, unfortunately. And I think that part of it is because we're engaged in a sort of debate of ideas in which some people are going to agree and some people aren't going to agree and so forth.

And there isn't going to be a common consensus about what even the purpose of education actually is. I do hope, however, that defenses like mine to try to demonstrate the value of humanism at least offer some sense of what the humanities do that other subjects don't and therefore why they're actually necessary and, in fact, possibly dangerous to be dropped from American higher education. But I would also add, Greg, that another issue surrounding this is that all the priorities of the modern research university fight against the humanities. The curriculum is anti-humanistic.

The requirement that everyone constantly pump out minute research on arcane matters that don't have any kind of interest in your average educated person doesn't help. The kind of obsession with the CV, as opposed to teaching doesn't help. So everything, I'm sorry, the system that was made by the architects of the American Research University in the late 19th and into the early 20th century, was kind of deviously brilliant in the way that it showed the path forward for humanities faculty. And so one serious problem, it seems, to me, is a kind of collective action problem.

That even if you agree with me, who's going to sacrifice themselves in order ultimately or sacrifice their careers in service of a higher good? A lot of people aren't really willing to do that. So that even if you take this podcast, you guys are taking something of a chance by doing this. Now there's a lot of time.

It's wonderful. I love it. I listen to it every morning at breakfast. But at the same period of time, people probably would tell you why are you spending so much time doing this?

Now, to me, without a podcast like this, this is a kind of perfect example of what the humanities could do, not just for people in your own classes and not just for other professors or graduate students, but for anyone who's interested in the life of the mind. And great question. It's an exceedingly valuable thing. But where does it go on your CV?

It's not going to be very valued when it comes to tenure time or when it comes to promotion time for full. So there's this whole system that is anti-humanistic at its core. And it was by design, as I think Irving Gabbat shows very clearly. And we're fighting against that.

So it's not just the arguments. We're also fighting against that system too. I thought you were going to talk about the list of being permanently associated with David Barr in hours upon hours of conversation. I mean, people say great windfalls from that.

On a serious note, David, do you remember that email we got from that lady from London? Or, you know, I came to him about how she was listening to us while she was doing our chores? Yes. That's one that stuck with me for a while.

And just, you know, like, yeah, you must experience this also. Sometimes it's that you don't realize that you've had such a profound effect on a student. But they drop a comment to you seemingly out of nowhere. And it can really boost your whole month.

We found that too with podcasts, the international listeners. Yeah, I understand. But we never expect that though. That's definitely the case that you don't understand.

And then someone writes you something that's very sweet. I mean, it doesn't happen very often to me. I don't know why. But it happens on occasion.

And you feel like that's why I'm doing this. You know, not because I really wanted to write an article about what happens in line 167 of the Elsestos. You know, as helpful as that is for my career, no one's going to read that. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. I put on my lab coat to write this to show that I'm part of the guild, but it's not humanistic. Whereas it seems to me that what you guys are doing is making much more of an impact. But unfortunately, it's not the sort of thing that the academy actually really...

One funny small point to that is that more people have listened to our podcast than will ever read any of my books. Like, all articles all combined by leaps and bounds. So can I switch gears just a little bit real quick? I'm sorry.

I know we were trying to run a little short on time here, but one of the things I was really impressed by in your talk here in your book, excuse me, was your inclusion of your expansion of the core or whatever and negative to Alex already loses before, but you mentioned a Buddhist and Confucian texts. And you mentioned that this was important for Babbitt, by the way, that Babbitt was actually really interested in Buddha and Confucius. These were two quintessential figures in the humanistic tradition in his view. This is on page 182, 183.

So I guess I'll first, I just want to praise you. I think this is really important. Babbitt was a serious student of Eastern religion and philosophy. But for my, I guess, a challenge and then keep in mind that the challenge is sort of all about praise.

My challenge would be, you know, I was once challenged, I taught in an honors class in a previous institution, then the student challenged me, like, why aren't we doing more Eastern texts? And my answer was like, okay, I mean, they're hard and I have no idea where to start, right? I mean, so there's just sort of some basic limitations that we face. So I guess first, I mean, I don't know if you want to say what, in principle or what's good about the ideal of including, of course, wisdom and these things aren't limited to the West, of course.

But on the other hand, how would one overcome these? What's, do you have any practical advice for people like, how does one do this? If one has no idea, where does one start? We can see that one is human.

So our tongue also, you know, you can't go spunking down every cave. So you have to make choices, even amongst the great books. But I can't even say that like this has been three hours a day on YouTube. Watch ex-keyboarding videos.

Yes, I'll leave that to the side and try to answer Greg's question. First, one of the things that I think is so revolutionary about Babbit as a thinker, even though I'm not, I criticize some aspects of his thought and so forth and don't think we should just go back to his curriculum from 1933 or something like that. There's a, there's a ways in which it's outdated. But he was interested in what he called, although he sort of changed meaning to somebody, what he called a platonic problem of the one in the many.

And this was related to his understanding of dualism as part of the human condition, which he attributed to all people who are humanists, whether they're actually historically part of the humanistic tradition or not. And he believed that people have both higher and lower potentialities, their lower potentialities are related to their own base instincts. And sometimes those base things are good, but oftentimes they're selfish and so forth. But they also have something that he called an inner check or higher will, which he got from Hindu philosophy, and that he thought that this idea of an inner check or it was what makes us human and also what makes it possible for us to live up to our higher potentialities to be selfless, to help others and so forth.

And he believed that this higher will actually brought people together. So he believed therefore that there was a sense in which some of the wisdom about the past could actually be universal and that masterworks, Babbit thought, and here I think he's channeling Aristotle to some degree, masterworks or masterworks in part. Because they spoke both to the particular and to the universal, but there's something universal about their spirit as well about what the human condition is really like. And so he was actually interested in looking through various traditions to try to come up with what he saw as comparable wisdom from different traditions.

And this ended up being the kind of platform for what I call a kind of omnicultural humanities core curriculum that goes beyond the so called Western tradition. And I think that that's actually a very interesting insight and useful insight on his part in essence because the criticisms from the politics of inclusion about the Western canon have been the sort of chief demerit associated with the great books tradition. Going all the way back to the 1960s when they were first really seriously attacked in American higher education. So by broadening this and looking at other traditions as well, it seems to me is essential to countering that notion, which I think is an understandable notion about how inclusive are you going to be now as far as the specifics of how you're actually going to end up teaching these different texts.

It seems to me that there are a number of different possibilities. One, I would point out that this is another problem, pragmatic problem for this kind of core curriculum, which is that humanities faculty because they have to publish so much end up being trained very narrowly, and they don't want to teach a class on the Bhagavad Gita and swift and you know and so forth. And so it makes it very difficult pragmatically. This is one of the strong reasons, I think, that a lot of faculty say they don't like great books.

They claim that it's ideological that they dislike the ideology behind the great books, but in reality, they could come up with their own series of great books that were completely representative and so forth of whatever they wanted. The real reason I think they don't like the great books in many cases is that they want to continue to write their narrow research and they don't want to spend so much time in the classroom learn and also learning about these other texts that were not part of their own graduate education. I think that's part of it. Now, as far as how you solve this, well, one is you hire faculty or experts in various great texts who can help others.

And second, I would point to Columbia University, which has a core. They actually have a kind of regular seminar among the teachers so that someone ends up being an expert in that week's text. Dante delivers a lecture to the other teachers who teach this particular text for that week answers questions tells you about core themes to hit and so forth. And they're for help people teach the class.

What a great idea. We rather peculiar that we want our students to be well rounded and then we put them in the classroom with the world's experts and the most narrow things in the world. And we say, you should be well rounded, even though I'm not. Well, that's never going to pass them off.

Very good point to me. So I think that there are some pragmatic ways to make this more possible. It is true that people are going to be worried about being superficial and people are going to be worried about sometimes misleading students are not giving the best way of introducing things. At the same time, we would say sometimes people or the world's experts on particular topics do a really bad job of demonstrating any sense of excitement about that text.

They know it so well that they actually don't teach it very well in this kind of strange way. So there are upsides and downsides and I don't think that that should be a serious criticism of this way for because I think it's so much more solution. That's all great. I just literally meant like I don't even know what translation to pick sometimes whereas with Greek and Latin, I can serve it like well, at least in the people and I know this.

But yeah, that's great. And I have to those things. I think you're absolutely right. They deserve to be included totally agree.

I think that's a great point to pivot to our mail back questions. I'll just say to quote Plato, this is one solution to the problem of the humanities. Unless the Adler's rulers kings are those now called Kings and Chiefs genuinely adequately adlerize. There is no rest of the ills for humankind.

My brother even will be very happy with that quote. As will the ghost of Green House and Ford. Do you guys have the mail back questions? I got a few.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, why don't we just take turns? I pulled up right here. I'm going to begin with Tom T Cleveland for real. I'm going to go to the show sometimes stand in for David Barr, quite frankly, more than stand in.

His asking prices to either way we replace David with him. So he also can't fail David's shoes. He's not his pants. Yeah, he's pants to.

Is there a date Tom Cleveland for real last following questionnaire? Is there a danger that in focusing on the education of students one loses sight of one's own education? Well, you're thinking about it. I'll give you a second thing about Tom Cleveland for real for the show.

Little science PhDs wrote on Plato's laws works at the Jack Miller Center sometimes supported on the show. So feel free to don't mess this up. We're really trying to get their good graces there. So it's a wonderful question.

I should say to begin with that will butter him up. We all agree how wonderful that question is. I would say that there is I suppose some sort of threat to that that one can be so focused on others that one isn't focused very much on yourself, but at the same time it seems to me that's much less of a threat than the professionalized university and the requirement that we're all constantly publishing. In order to get jobs in order to keep jobs in order to win advancement and so forth to move up the totem pole any of this stuff.

So that we have what Babak called humorously in the early 20th century, the hustling scholar or is so they obviously leisure. This is supposed to be the idea behind a scholar to begin with. And we're all forced through this kind of bureaucratic. What have you published?

Where did it show up and so forth? How many pages is it? You know, how important is the article constantly that it ends up sort of having a solidifying effect on our own education. I say this morning I was talking to my wife who's also an academic and we were kind of preparing a little bit for the lightning round and some of the questions that Greg tends to ask.

What's your favorite work of literature and so forth? And she said something to me in response to this, which was sort of upsetting, but it landed, which was, well, you know, this is a very difficult question, but at the same period of time, it would be easier for me to answer when I spent more time reading literature. And, you know, in some sense, that's kind of what the modern university is about. You constantly have to be publishing and you have to be sort of justifying everything else you're doing in your own life, especially with how bad the job market actually is.

So there's something sort of perverse where the life of a professor is somehow anathema to actually being a kind of well-rounded humanistic individual. But again, that's the system we actually have. I've been actively trying to increase the amount of literature I read the last two or three years with the aid of a colleague of mine in the department English she and I read once a week together. And you're right without consciously intent.

Like I've got to combat this. Otherwise, there's just a little way. Yeah, that's great. David, did you have the next question from the mailbag?

Yeah, I have to. I'll ask the more serious one first. So this is from Adam and Carrington. He's associate professor of politics at Hillsdale, come up with us here at Ashland University last week and we got a chance to eat together.

He taught here for us the course on the Psalms and the Decalogue. So really, really I like Adam a lot. Yeah. So Adam asks, is a particular regime type rule of one fewer many more conducive to preserving slash recovering this kind of education to humanities?

Some question what particular challenges do republics face in pursuing this purpose? That's a great question too. It seems to me, first of all, I should say I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm talking to three political theorists and I am a humble classist. I'll be at one related to the drummer for Guns N' Roses.

So that gives me some cash, it seems to me. But so I don't want to talk too much political theory to actual political theorists and philosophers. I'm cognizant of that. But it does seem to me that if you read a variety of different thinkers ancient and modern, they were very concerned about this particular issue.

One thing that I think Alan Bloom talks about in the closing of the American mind channeling Plato is the way in which in a democracy one needs in some sense is an aristocratic education because it ends up balancing people's souls, students' souls and gives them a very different vision of life. And so this is one of the reasons why he disliked the sort of ending of the great books tradition or the diminution of the great books tradition is he felt like it was a kind of democratizing of education, which was a problem because it ended up giving students unbalanced souls, I think is number one. But number two, it didn't give them an opportunity to offer critique of their regime, but they had no other sense of what was possible other than democracy because their whole lives had been organized by democracy. And as a result, they couldn't do this.

So that seems like one element of it. And I do actually think that that fits with Babbitt as well, who was concerned like Matthew Arnold was before him about the notion of having a kind of aristocracy of Erica and an aristocracy of intelligence that could circumvent the aristocracy of birth and aristocracy of money that were rampant in American society. So there's one reason why they thought this humanism was valuable. It occurs to me also looking at Alex the Tocqueville's Democracy in America that although Tocqueville didn't talk very much about American colleges, he didn't think that they were very valuable when he came to visit America.

And he has a whole chapter called Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature is particularly useful in democratic societies. And his answer to that, it seems to me, is that there's an aristocratic ethos to classical literature, and that this is especially useful to people who live in democracies, because it will kind of ennoble them and give them a sense of the possible and fight against some of the congenital problems that Tocqueville and others have associated with democracy. Well, so last, last mailbag before we turn to lightning round. This is from Professor Alex Priu teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the Herps Program.

Alex in a way is saving the humanities. He's like the Trojan horse nestled in an engineering program, which is great. So he says, and Eric, we really need an honest answer here. This is a question many of our viewers have asked in past, honestly, since since you know Greek and Latin so well.

So on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being Alan Bloom's translation of Plato's Republic, in one being Greg McBrayer's translation of Santa Fean, how do you write Greg McBrayer's translations of Santa Fean? Wow, I feel like that's a trick question, it seems to me. No, it doesn't seem like that was fairly, but I'm just going to give it a little weight. Oh, tell me something in some particular way, and tell me that Alex Priu is no social scientist, because you're not supposed to ask leading questions like that.

If you want to get any kind of knowledge. I understand you want to correct my pronunciation of Santa Fean. I want to hear this. How do you say, X-E-E-N-O-P-H-O-N?

I saw that on the Twitter. I don't know, this is just different ways that you can say it. It's the same thing. No, it's just Zenopin.

I don't know. I don't know. David doesn't pronounce it that way. Alex doesn't pronounce it that way, but you do.

I think the correct way to answer a question about translation, if you're going to be a real snooty classic, is to say, I don't use translations. I just look at the screen. That is true. Everyone, a graduate school in a PhD in low studies, so that is not true.

Everyone looks at the translation. But there is this kind of foolish kind of machismo surrounding one's proficiency in Latin and Greek. I think Greek is the thing that's the Navy SEAL. I actually think that Greek, it depends on the author.

Which one is more much easier than that? Which one is more much easier than that? I think Greek is the thing that's the Navy SEAL. I actually think that Greek, it depends on the author.

Jamothanese is brutal, Pindar is brutal, the speeches of Thucydides are brutal. But I actually think that your average Greek author in some cases is more straightforward to translate than Latin author. Once you get going. But the first year of Greek, with the six principal parts and the middle of the voice, it's just really harder than that.

Before we get to the lightning round, which is next on our run of show, I was just wondering if you could tell us about your own intellectual biography. What got you interested in classics? It's a curious kind of thing, as we've all seen to have some real life. We've got a battle for it.

Everyone in all this emphasis on jobs, you can't go get a job at Google being like, I can do the six principal parts of Luo. Maybe you can't. I don't know actually Google fans are themselves quite over minded. How did you interested?

Who are some of your major mentors? Any major intellectual figures? Yeah, I did about a seed college because at University of Maryland, I attended and Greek received as doctor. We were charmed by Butterworth.

Is the teacher, is schooled in this tradition that we had the great fortune of taking classes with? So it was it before? Yeah, it was high school. It was a teacher very much so.

I had no particular interest in the subject, but I grew up in the suburbs of Boston in a town called Lexington, in which when you went to public school, there was a famous teacher now, unfortunately no longer with us, named a Dr. Michael Fivesch. He was famous. He was a Latin teacher.

He was a sort of famous in the town. And everyone knew, you know, got to take Latin. You have to take Dr. Fiveshes classes.

He's so great. And so I decided to sign up for Latin because of him. I had no interest in the subject particularly. I knew that there was a sort of snootiness associated with it with private schools and so forth, but I was a public school kid.

That didn't really interest me. I probably found that somewhat revolting. But I just knew he was good. And he was so good.

In fact, that when you took your first year of Latin in high school, you normally didn't have him. Most of the first year classes were taught by a French teacher, who frankly, although a very sweet woman and probably a wonderful French teacher, no business teaching Latin at all. And it was really bad. But I stuck with it because I wanted to have Dr.

Fiveshes as a teacher and it was wonderful. So when I went off to college, I actually, and I say this with great embarrassment, who smoked me out, I wanted to be an actor when I originally went to college. That's so obvious. That's very obvious.

It's so cross in this podcast. I was a major in that is such a profound insult, never mind your translation. That I wanted to major in theater, I majored in theater, but the college I went to required you to study a language. And the easiest way out was to take Latin because I'd already taken it.

So I found myself in an advanced Latin class and I turned out really to like it. And so I continued to take it and so forth and I came to my senses and realized that I do not in fact want to be an actor at all. And then that sort of sent me on my course and ultimately taking Greek and then going. You must have been behind that Irving Babbitt one man show I saw.

Was that you? I can't tell beneath the powdered wig. But yeah, it's a sort of a punch and Judy kind of a thing. Irving Babbitt on one side, Sinclair Lewis on the other.

Yeah, that definitely that was definitely me. No, I went to a school called Connecticut College, which you call Connecticut College for Women with Little Liberal Arts College, which actually ultimately taught that before I ended up at the University of Ireland. And it was a very nurturing place. The classics professors there were wonderful and they gave me a sense in some ways that this is probably true of you to Greg and Alex that I had a very distorted sense of what it meant to be a professor.

And so I thought you really start the gig and some ways until you get the graduate school we realized, well, this is actually a lot different from what I did. Yeah, soul crushing. But I did. They sort of gave me a model of what a professor might be and I sort of naively moved from one foolish profession acting to another foolish profession being a professor.

So Alex is a better, a better, a better, a better yourself. And so is there like a major classical influence for you? Like a scholar like are you a Babbitt type? Is that a would that be the way that?

No, I mean, I guess I would say that I'm a humanist. Okay. And I don't know that people say the bibidian or babitsian or what happened to the bibitian. Okay.

That's definitely like a good process. But it seems to me that. So that is one of the leading intellectual influences on you. Yeah, I think so.

I think so. Maybe not as a classicist person, but as far as you know, what the value of the human is, what the value of classics is. I also think that I'm interested in larger, bigger questions. I was always, or oftentimes critical of writing these very narrow pieces.

Right. And I kind of, you know, got interest in some ways in the life of the mind by the academic culture wars and was enthralled. But for me, when I was in college, but especially graduate school, the idea that people were having these fights in which ideas really mattered in this kind of fundamental way meant a lot to me. And so I was always kind of interested in criticism and writing for a broad audience and so forth.

This always struck me as really interesting and valuable. And I knew, however, that I was going to have to write a lot of stuff before I got there. And yet I think that if you look at my work, it's gotten broader and broader over time in some sense, because that's the sort of author I'd like to be so babbitt to some degree. But I also would say, you know, more humanism or general.

Okay. You guys don't know. The little bar knows that he had a coffee with Eric. That Eric has a secret unfinished manuscript on Alan Bloom.

No, I was writing a biography on an intellectual biography on it. I was going to and I and it was ditched. There's stories will tell off air. Yeah.

It's going to be too difficult to do. And so I did. And so I moved in another direction. That's definitely case.

I also should say this is a very minor issue, but it was at a semester abroad called the National Theater Institute that I recognize I did not in fact during college want to be an actor at all. And yet in this small sort of boot camp theater program where I decided, you know what? This is an absurd career. I don't want to do this at all that I was friends with at the time, although she, I'm sure it has no idea who I am any longer.