From the old guard to the vanguard; three venerable departments at CU

Over five weeks, the Cornell Chronicle is examining the place of humanities studies at Cornell. In this week's edition, we look at three of the university's oldest departments in the humanities and discuss their continuing vitality.

By Franklin Crawford

Cornell University co-founder Andrew Dickson White's prescient "Plan of Organization" called for the "the close union of liberal and practical instruction" and served as the template for the first truly "American" university. What made the humanities at Cornell especially American was White's philosophy that gave humanities equal educational measure beside science and technology. The following three departments, Classics, English and Philosophy, have appeared in Cornell's Courses of Study since the late 19th century. Here in the 21st century, these stalwart departments continue to attract new students eager to learn and inspired faculty eager to instruct.

Danuta Shanzer, professor of classics, leads a discussion in her morning Goths, Vandals, Franks and Romans class. Robert Barker/University Photography

Classics

"Many of my students took Latin before in high school and are here because they want to be here," she says. "It's not a required course for any of them."

That's the way White, Cornell's first president, wanted it to be. White had been force-fed the classics at Yale University, and it did not sit well with him. In his "Plan of Organization" for Cornell, White eschewed academic ancestor worship and championed freedom of choice for students. He regarded the study of modern history and literature equal to, if not more important than, the study of the classics. At Cornell, Latin and Greek were offered for those who desired it. White's position is explained partly in the following excerpt from The Classics at Cornell: The First Century (2000) by Gordon Kirkwood, professor of classics emeritus:

"What White deplored in traditional education was that too many students pursued the classics 'listlessly and perfunctorily.' He considered that they would be better educated if other courses of study were available."

But it was White who made the first significant hires upon which the venerable Department of Classics at Cornell was founded in 1868. In his foreword to Kirkwood's book, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings states: "Classical studies have thrived at Cornell thanks to vigorous leadership, excellent scholarship and a firm commitment to teaching ..."

In spring 2002, Rawlings, a classicist by training, will again co-teach the course Periclean Athens.

Today, with 14 full-time faculty members, the Department of Classics is not only one of the oldest but one of the largest of its kind in the country. Classics instruction is cross-listed with courses from nearly every field in the humanities. The department also sponsors field projects, most notably the archaeological digs at Halai and Lokris in Greece -- a literal training ground for undergraduates as well as graduate students.

"Classics is the original interdisciplinary program," says Barry Strauss, a professor of classics and history who specializes in ancient history and military history. "It requires philology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, archaeology and art history. Anyone who studies classics gets a wonderful grounding in poetry, prose style and rhetoric as well."

Hayden Pelliccia, chair of the department, says the classics could be described as Western civilization's "area studies program."

"But it's an area studies that takes on the extra burden of claiming and/or accepting responsibility for certain key features and tendencies of European culture and thought," he says. "So the study of classics usually ends up being a study of 'us,' if you identify yourself as part of the Western civ 'us' in the world today, or the study of 'them' if you don't."

Strauss adds that the "Greco-Roman classics, along with the Bible, still today provide a wonderful introduction to the Western tradition. They force us to think about big questions, questions that remain with a student for life. What is the good life? What is a good society? What can we learn from the past? From literature? These are the questions that the classical humanities ask us."

For those seeking a non-Western orientation, there are varieties of courses within and outside the classics.

Ayele Bekerie is not a classics professor, but he is an expert in ancient African history, with particular focus on the history of writing systems in Africa. Bekerie's work seeks to give equal voice to a perspective lacking in many traditional Western civilization studies.

"In my courses, apart from reading some historical narratives, students are encouraged to look into approaches and interpretive strategies in the making of historical narratives," says Bekerie. "Silenced histories, such as ancient African history, particularly, become relevant in the cultivation of critical and thinking minds. Students are usually able to dispel the often-repeated stereotypes regarding African peoples. They also learn the critical importance of oral traditions in the understanding of African histories and cultures."

Apart from teaching, Bekerie, with help from undergraduate students, also is involved with the development of African Writing Systems, a web site created in collaboration with Cornell's Olin and Africana libraries, he says.

While Bekerie's courses and research expand ancient history into exciting nontraditional scholarly landscapes, Shanzer's work follows the perennially fertile contours of classical study.

This semester, Shanzer is teaching Goths, Vandals, Franks and Romans to students with a wide range of academic interests and backgrounds. She is trained as a classical philologist, literary historian and textual critic. Her specialty is Latin. She also works on various ancient geographical areas, time periods and genres, as well as on topics such as obscenity and humor. She also writes commentaries and translates and edits texts.

Of her classroom work, particularly in Latin, Shanzer says she's a stickler: "Details matter, and I'm precise and rigorous about them. ... Latin is an unforgiving language [but] it is a wonderful medium through which to teach the linguistic precision that illuminates English and, indeed, any sort of thinking in all sorts of ways. Once we get out of beginning language, I'm teaching vital, fascinating and controversial material: how pagans and Christians, Jews and Christians, and Romans and barbarians interacted."

She also sees classical study in a modern light. Her freshman course called Voyages to Strange Worlds has a reading list that includes Dante, Homer's Odyssey and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Voyages offers Shanzer the chance to show "the continuity of the great classical works, problems and themes from antiquity to the modern period," she says. ... "I also teach sexual and humorous material that is risqué and sensitive. I try to do this in an open and unafraid manner, while also keeping students' minds on why this sort of thing was indeed funny then -- though often not now. To make matters more difficult, we medievalists often have to handle sexuality and humor in tandem with religion."

Charles Brittain, an assistant professor of classics who also teaches philosophy, says: "The great advantage of my fields is that they are very clearly not ordinarily matters of concern to anyone. But they are also fields that are vital for understanding what we take to be ordinary and to be of value; they provide historical and theoretical insight into the social and intellectual contexts that tacitly structure most of our ordinary concerns. In my classes, in particular, I think that students get frank criticism with an English accent."

Strauss, Shanzer and Brittain share similar views of the mission of the importance of the humanities in general. At a time when some lament the decline of the liberal arts, especially at a research university like Cornell, Brittain and Shanzer hold their ground.

"Are the humanities really as irrelevant and dispensable to 'the man in the street' as some would suggest?" asks Shanzer. "Well, most of most peoples' leisure is the humanities. Leave aside the delivery medium -- radio, personal computer, film, video, television -- all the business of engineering -- what is left for most human beings in the United States for their discretionary time? The humanities."

Says Brittain: "I think that the function of an education in the humanities is to help encourage or, if necessary, force students to think carefully and critically about something in a way that is not limited by their ordinary concerns. This requires learning how to read texts seriously and how to argue."

Strauss says current events, unfortunate as they are, keep the classics alive.

"As for war, despite all the revolutions in technology, the main principles of strategy and tactics have remained remarkably constant in human history. If you want to understand contemporary warfare, begin with the classics: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and, above all, with Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. And the pain and waste and loss of warfare, everything that we've had a bitter taste of since 9/11, can all be found in Homer. The heroism, too, but without any punches pulled about what heroism costs."

Graduate student in English Marc Malandra reads Walt Whitman with his students in the class Poetic Play, Artful Prose, a freshman writing seminar. The class met on the Arts Quad in front of Lincoln Hall, taking advantage of the beautiful fall weather, Nov. 2. Robert Barker/University Photography

English

Sawyer is professor of English and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English, one of the largest and most respected English departments in the country. Last May 104 graduating seniors were English majors. That's about average, according to Harry Shaw, chair of the department, which has 47 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.

One of the attractions of an English major is its flexibility. Courses do not have to be taken in sequence, and it is common for students outside the field to pair English with psychology or biology or art history, for example. The department offers a wide range of courses in English, American and Anglophone literature as well as in creative and expository writing. It is the home of the Creative Writing Program and Epoch magazine, Cornell's highly respected literary journal, which helped launch the careers of novelists Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates. The department also sponsors an array of visiting lectures and major readings that draw the top names in the field.

Sawyer is a Victorianist by training, but he also teaches The History and Culture of the '60s, one of the most popular courses in the department. His '60s syllabus and reading list includes manifestos, newspaper articles and films, as well as books. Current English literature courses still focus variously on the close reading of texts that are both canonical and noncanonical. Students study particular authors and genres, questions of critical theory and method, and the relationship of literary works to their historical contexts, to contemporary culture and to other academic disciplines.

But Sawyer's passion for cultural studies reflects demographic and interdisciplinary trends in the humanities effecting change in the department today. The English department has grown substantially in the area of "Third World" minority and other non-Western noncanonical literatures, women's writing and 20th century American literature. And the notion of what constitutes literature itself is changing.

Shaw points out that this change is not at the expense of the traditional canon. But a course of study in English today would hardly resemble the same course a quarter century ago.

Once upon a time, the typical English survey course defined the field: a chronological march of genres and centuries, starting with British authors, moving into American authors. Not these days.

"The traditional canon is still important; it hasn't disappeared," says Shaw. "But important as it is, it no longer defines literary studies. A student might take Asian-American fiction one semester, Scottish literature the next, add a creative writing class, an intro to cultural studies course and a course in African-American literature," he says. "All of those could be part of an English major, and only one or two of those courses would have existed 25 years ago."

The shift toward ethnic and transnational studies and the department's efforts toward "redefining the contours of American literary studies" are what drew Shelley Wong to Cornell. Wong is professor of English, director of the Asian American Studies Program and a member of the American Studies steering committee.

"In the classroom this new focus introduces students to the ways in which their lives are implicated with those of others in a broader geographical network than that of the U.S. proper," Wong says. "At the same time, it also gives students another way to think about their own situation vis-a-vis others at home in the U.S. In the case of studying Asian American literature, students are asked to think about how a population often thought of as 'perpetual foreigners' (despite the native-born status of much of that population) could be seen as belonging within the American nation-state."

Wong says that Asian-American literature, through the interplay of symbolic fictions, lets students see the complicated and conflicted ways in which claims to belonging to this country are made or denied.

"The literature also shows us that in looking beyond the borders of the U.S. to account for the presence of Asians in the U.S. (that is, to take into consideration the Asian diaspora in the Americas), we can more readily see how the model of incorporation based on European immigration to the U.S. doesn't fit the situation of Asian-Americans," she says. "If students have a clearer understanding of a long history of international linkages and of how those linkages produced the present moment of the nation-state, they'll be better able to understand the intensifying globalizing processes of our own time and the role of the U.S. within it."

The traditional survey course is still a big draw, says Andrew Galloway, professor of English and faculty member in the Medieval Studies Program. He is now teaching 80 students enrolled in English 201, which spans from the earliest English writings to Milton.

"Students also flourish in smaller seminars in such subjects as Old English, Icelandic sagas, Middle English and Chaucer and in the more specialized seminars for graduates and undergraduates," says Galloway, who said he sees a resurgence of interest in medieval literature at Cornell. "In my experience, undergraduates at Cornell have always responded far more eagerly to early literature in all its extraordinary variety than they themselves or anyone might suppose likely and have been among the first to benefit from the intellectual and curricular experimentation, and sheer scholarly and critical power, that early literatures here have been notably good at."

Creative writing courses typically make use of a workshop method in which participants develop their skills in response to critiques of their work by classmates, but they also incorporate study of established writers. Roughly 550 to 600 students enroll in undergraduate creative writing courses, says Stephanie Vaughn, professor of English.

"Because writing is thinking, students in creative writing courses are engaged in the kind of imaginative work that might produce a very small number of practicing artists but will certainly produce a very large number of creative thinkers in other fields," says Vaughn, author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories titled Sweet Talk. "Whatever quality of mind makes a good poet or fiction writer also makes a good physicist, engineer, economist, architect, historian or literary theorist. No one assigned Einstein the problem of coming up with a theory of relativity, and no one told M.H. Abrams [professor emeritus in the Department of English] to write The Mirror and the Lamp, a study of Romanticism so groundbreaking that it has remained in print since 1953. From time to time, a writer of exceptional talent, like Thomas Pynchon, fetches up in one creative writing course or another. [Pynchon came to Goldwin Smith Hall and the Arts Quad by way of engineering and physics.] But more often the creative writing students will be taking their good and adventurous minds back to another department, where what they have practiced as fiction writers or poets will be put to work in a different kind of creative endeavor."

The English department, like any academic unit, is subject to flux and, nowadays, to more "mobility" in the profession, as Shaw says. After a relatively stable period, numerous retirements loom. And last February the department lost one of its greatest figures when the celebrated poet A.R. Ammons died.

But there's plenty of good news, too. Alice Fulton, a major American poet, will arrive in January from the University of Michigan. The American wing of the department is further strengthened by the arrival of Kate McCullough in 19th century American literature and Nicole Waligora-Davis, who specializes in African-American literature.

Philosophy

While the name is not a boast about its faculty, nor does it represent a particular course of study, the Sage School does offer undergraduates the tools by which wisdom may be achieved.

"Philosophy at Cornell offers an excellent preparation for a wide variety of careers," says Jennifer Whiting, an associate professor of philosophy, "especially given the emphasis that we tend to place both on independent thought and on effective writing. There are also relatively few requirements in philosophy, so one can easily double-major in philosophy and another area, and studying philosophy often leads to a kind of methodological self-consciousness that is useful in other areas of study, including both scientific and humanistic ones."

Housed in the southern wing of Goldwin Smith Hall, the Sage School of Philosophy is composed of 13 faculty members, two of whom are new hires as of this year: Delia Graff and Michael Fara. Last year Michele Moody-Adams, professor of philosophy, was hired as director of the Ethics and Public Life program, which serves the entire campus.

Philosophy faculty are affiliated with other departments across the disciplines. For instance, Richard Boyd teaches philosophy of science and has co-taught courses with scientists; Professor Zoltan Szabo specializes in philosophy of language and has co-taught courses with linguists; Professor Richard Miller regularlay teaches courses that are cross-listed with sociology and government. Other faculty also have connections to that departments and programs, including Women's Studies, Classics, Mathematics, Religious Studies, Medieval Studies and Cognitive Studies.

Harold Hodes, professor of philosophy, says the Sage School is a "good place to study logic."

"Logic is my main beat," Hodes says. "We now regularly offer courses in logic that start at the beginning and that, together with what the mathematics and computer science departments offer, can carry an interested student to advanced levels."

The Sage School also is home to the quarterly The Philosophical Review, one of the most highly respected philosophical journals in print. In publication since 1892, The Philosophical Review was the first journal of its kind, and it continues to publish original, scholarly work in all areas of philosophy, with an emphasis on material of interest to generalists.

Gail Fine, chair of the department, specializes in ancient philosophy, and her work, along with that of other faculty members in ancient philosophy, is part of the reason why the Sage School continues to rank among top programs in the country. Fine's passion for the field dates back to her days in secondary school.

"I fell in love with Plato in high school, both for the beauty of his prose and the depth of his thought," she says. "I still think that reading him is one of the best introductions to philosophy. I liked the challenge of trying to think clearly and critically. And I think the central issues in philosophy -- issues about the nature of knowledge, reality and morality -- are of vital importance."

Fine says one of the significant trends in philosophy today is an increased attention paid to Hellenistic philosophy -- Stoics, Skeptics and Epicureans.

"When I was a graduate student, courses in these areas were few and far between. Now anyone working in the field has to know about them, and the field is better for it, both because all three schools are intrinsically interesting and important and also because they form a sort of bridge from earlier philosophy to modern philosophy -- 17th century and later," she says.

Increased attention to Hellenistic philosophy has helped philosophers like Fine "achieve a more accurate picture of the history of philosophy as a whole," she says.

Fine, who joined the Sage School faculty in 1975, says: "Cornell is a wonderful place for me to pursue my research and study. The students at all levels are terrific, and I have very productive interactions with a number of my colleagues in both philosophy and classics. I've been able to teach courses I really want to teach, and this has helped me grow as a philosopher. I think it's a good place for undergraduates to study philosophy -- at least we like to think that we offer a number of interesting and important courses and put a lot of work into teaching and commenting on papers."

Michael Fara, assistant professor of philosophy, arrived here in July from Princeton University. Emphasizing the undergraduate experience in the Sage School, Fara says: "Cornell is a fantastic place for students to learn how to 'do' philosophy. As soon as I arrived here, it was apparent to me that our department takes its commitment to undergraduate teaching extremely seriously and expects its faculty to devote a significant portion of their time to undergraduates. So that's one reason why I think it's a good place for students. The second reason comes from the students themselves. ... I have frankly been amazed by the level of commitment and interest that the students have displayed toward the material they're learning in class. In general, most of my students have seemed genuinely excited and eager to learn, and this attitude infects the class as a whole, making for a lively and entertaining learning environment in which everyone stands to gain."