A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (review)

Every decade or so, for the past few decades, academia has been asked to remember (or to repudiate, or to redeem) the Great Books. Even as the contents and scope of such works continue to change, the concept of culling and collecting the “most important” pieces of literature (from any academic discipline) remains prominent in higher education, from the basis of course readings to the extent of their prominence in advanced study. But the social history of the Great Books, as either a cultural touchstone or a pedagogical tool, has not been explored until Alex Beam’s short and dishy A Great Idea at the Time.

Beam is a storyteller, not a historian or a literary scholar. Consequently, his narrative focuses on the people involved in the development of the Great Books, particularly Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and how they promoted a particular form and format of education. A Great Idea at the Time offers a fast-paced recounting of the development of Western higher education curriculum, from William Frederic Farrar’s initial idea of a Western literary canon to Charles Eliot’s more personalized elective reforms, in three pages. Certainly this is thin historiography, but the light touch effectively positions the Great Books movement within the dueling notions of a basic “liberal” education and the progressive liberalism of the early twentieth century.

“Eliot’s reform casts a long shadow on the events of this book” (p. 11), as does John Dewey. Beam quotes Hutchins as decrying Dewey for denying “that there was content to education,” while Dewey declared Hutchins’s approach as impractical, autocratic, and fascist (p. 44). The two argued publicly for the rest of their careers. Their ongoing conflict is the stuff of academic legend; it is also informative about how scholarly debate and disagreement often become personal and unyielding, a lesson that many who are beginning to study higher education often do not understand.

I am convinced that students of higher education are so often focused on the pressing issues of the day—and the demands for immediately discernable relevance—that they do not appreciate the study of the history of higher education, of what and who formed the landscape of higher education. Beam’s narrative—full of excerpts from diaries, correspondence, and biographies—shows how personal policy and pedagogy are. The transcript of the debate among faculty (pp. 81–84) over which works to include in the Great Books demonstrates how political such decisions and such meetings can be. At the same time, Beam shows, in character-based descriptions, a different era—when university presidents offered faculty jobs unilaterally and on the spot, made deals without constituency consultation, and treated faculty as highly skilled labor.

Adler, Hutchins, Dewey, and others are dramatized through their public and private communications. The reader comes away from this book with a vivid sense of these men’s personalities as well as of their philosophies: Adler, the vain, insecure scholarship student; Hutchins, the dilettante, witty idea and “face” man. While these representations are no doubt incomplete, Beam should be commended for helping the reader understand the personal motivations and inspirations of these two leading (albeit now less well known) figures of American higher education.

Beam conveys his subjects’ passions clearly for the reader. Hutchins decried parceling higher learning into particular skill sets for vocational application. “‘The purpose of higher education,’ Hutchins thundered, ‘is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects’” (pp. 41–42). This philosophy fit nicely into the University of Chicago, a Midwestern vestige of liberal arts whose students eschewed sports and other activities deemed anti-intellectual, where Hutchins was made president at age thirty. When viewed contextually with the social, economic, and political changes of the early twentieth century, Hutchins’s and Adler’s notion of a common curriculum with near-universal...