For the past three years, I've taught two small text seminars every spring semester at a picturesque American liberal arts college nestled along the banks of the Hudson River, a two-hour drive north of Manhattan.
One course is a tour of black American thought and autobiographical writing spanning the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass to the present-day polemics of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The other is a pet project of mine, an in-depth survey of the key texts of the French writer who means the most to me: Albert Camus. That second class is conducted in English and open to all students, even non-philosophy majors. We begin softly enough with The Stranger and proceed through The Myth of Sisyphus and The Plague before spending the final stretch wrestling with The Rebel, an extremely challenging text for a generation of students almost entirely unfamiliar with not just the murderous 20th-century movements of fascism and communism Camus is concerned with, but also the literary, biblical and classical references he assumes his readers will bring to the endeavor.
This problem is not unique to my institution. Today, even the most prestigious universities in the United States, which once required students to read and write in Latin and Greek, have drastically lowered their standards. At Columbia University, one of the optional application prompts asks students what podcasts they listen to. Whereas in the last century W.E.B. Du Bois could write that he "walked arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas," one could now enter the Ivy League saying the same of Joe Rogan.
