English Professor Emeritus and conservative commentator Jeffrey Hart emphasized the review of western classics and diversity of study as necessary components of a liberal arts education in a speech given to about 40 students in Carpenter Hall last night.
The speech, titled "How to Get an Education at Dartmouth," was targeted at freshmen. In the speech, Hart outlined the parallel development of western literature in Greek drama and the Old and New Testaments.
Hart, who retired in 1993, is a senior editor of the National Review, a conservative journal. He taught at Dartmouth for more than 30 years and has been a long-standing adviser to The Dartmouth Review, the off-campus conservative weekly.
Certain canonical texts are critical to higher education, Hart said. He said specialization may be harmful because it deprives students of a true liberal arts education.
An "absence of rationale" in American universities has left the various freshman English class "pretty far afield," Hart said.
Hart reminisced about his days as a student at Dartmouth and Columbia and described the reading he was required to do for class as an undergraduate.
The required reading of classics was helpful, he said, because it provided a foundation for more specific training.
The Western literary tradition began in Athens and Jerusalem with the "heroic," according to Hart. This progressed into the New Testament in Jerusalem and what he called the "internalized heroics," or introspective writings of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece.
The two strains merged with the Epistles of Paul, completing the roots of the Western tradition, he said.
Hart concluded his speech by advising students to "listen to the grapevine" when deciding which classes to take.
And "if the professor shows up looking like a slob for the first class, transfer to another course," he said.
Hart's speech was considerably tamer than a speech he gave to the members of the Class of 1997 during their freshman fall. In that speech, Hart called Dartmouth a "p.c. zoo" and said Dartmouth was changing from a "knowledge-based institution" to a "political-based institution," where faculty appointments are based more on politics than on merit.
