Podcast appearances and mentions of roosevelt mont

Is the ideal of a liberal education still achievable in the modern era? Roosevelt Montás, celebrated author and scholar at Columbia University, joins Greg and Alex to examine both its enduring virtues and its shortcomings. Together, the group discuss how a liberal education fosters critical thinking and civic engagement, why it faces resistance, and how it might grow to better serve today's learners.   Check out ACTC's upcoming events in 2025! If you want to meet all three of this episode's personalities in person, they'll all be at the upcoming ACTC Conference in April. Greg might buy you a coffee if you find him there!

This hour, we look at the idea of the Western canon and those books that are considered “classics.” We talk about what's in the canon, what isn't and what should be, and how it evolves. Plus, we talk about The Atlantic's recent list of “The Great American Novels.” And we learn about a publishing company that is experimenting with artificial intelligence to bring classic books alive for a new audience. GUESTS: Gal Beckerman: Senior editor for books at The Atlantic Laura Kipnis: Cultural critic, essayist, and the author of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, among other books Roosevelt Montás: Senior lecturer in American studies and English at Columbia University and the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation James Mustich: Author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Eugene Amatruda, and Jonathan McNicol contributed to this show, which originally aired July 24, 2024.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This hour, we look at the idea of the Western canon, and those books that are considered "classics." We'll talk about what's in the canon, what isn't and what should be, and how it evolves. Plus, we'll talk about The Atlantic's recent list of “The Great American Novels.” And, we'll learn about a publishing company that is experimenting with artificial intelligence to bring classic books alive for a new audience. GUESTS:  Roosevelt Montás: Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation James Mustich: Author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die Gal Beckerman: Senior editor for books at The Atlantic Laura Kipnis: Cultural critic, essayist, and the author of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, among other books  Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode.  Colin McEnroe and Eugene Amatruda contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Winston Brady speaks with Heather Bakogiannias, Brittney Massey, and Katherine Greco-Fortney about their recent trip to the National Symposium for Classical Education held in March of 2024 in Phoenix Arizona. The National Symposium for Classical Education is hosted by the Great Hearts Institute and this year, focused on the theme of "Renewing the Great Conversation." For these classical educators, their highlights from the trip included leadership insights from former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott, the need for more Socrates and more classical wisdom from Roosevelt Montás, and wisdom on how to deal with (or avoid) social media usage from Jane Austen. For classical educators, stay tuned to the Great Hearts Institute for more information about next year's conference: https://classicaleducationsymposium.org/

In this episode, Winston Brady speaks with Heather Bakogiannias, Brittney Massey, and Katherine Greco-Fortney about their recent trip to the National Symposium for Classical Education held in March of 2024 in Phoenix Arizona. The National Symposium for Classical Education is hosted by the Great Hearts Institute and this year, focused on the theme of "Renewing the Great Conversation." For these classical educators, their highlights from the trip included leadership insights from former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott, the need for more Socrates and more classical wisdom from Roosevelt Montás, and wisdom on how to deal with (or avoid) social media usage from Jane Austen. For classical educators, stay tuned to the Great Hearts Institute for more information about next year's conference: https://classicaleducationsymposium.org/

What is the point of a good education? Do we need it to learn a narrow set of skills ro help us get ahead in the workplace, or should knowledge and learning to be used over a lifetime to acquire wisdom that enables us to think more deeply about our place in the world?This question has profound resonance at a time of angry divides over American politics and moral confusion at elite American universities. The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, resigned after months of campus unrest and controversy. In December, Gay and two other university presidents faced widespread criticism for their testimony at Congressional hearings about antisemitism on their campuses.In this episode, we hear from an university educator who makes the case for liberal education that gives students the tools needed to have a deeper sense of purpose. Roosevelt Montás is the author of "Rescuing Socrates: How The Great Books Changed My Life And Why They Matter For a New Generation".He believes that the ideas and writings of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, Ghandi and many others aren't just for a few privileged students. They're for everybody, and that encountering these thinkers as a poor immigrant teenager changed his life.Montás is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, and director of the Center for American Studies Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum."There is a prevailing cultural attitude that liberal education— the study of literature and philosophy — is appropriate only to the elite," Roosevelt tells us. "That is a really pernicious idea." He argues that the students who benefit the most from the foundational wisdom in the "great books" come from poor and marginalized backgrounds.Recommendation: Richard watched and greatly enjoyed the Anglo-Japanese Netflix TV series, "Giri / Haji", — duty/shame in Japanese— a thriller about a Tokyo detective scouring the London underworld to find his allegedly deceased brother. The series was filmed in Tokyo and London. Additional InformationThe Democracy Group listener surveyHow Do We Fix It? PodcastMore shows from The Democracy Group

What is the point of a good education? Do we need it to learn a narrow set of skills ro help us get ahead in the workplace, or should knowledge and learning to be used over a lifetime to acquire wisdom that enables us to think more deeply about our place in the world?This question has profound resonance at a time of angry divides over American politics and moral confusion at elite American universities. The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, resigned after months of campus unrest and controversy. In December, Gay and two other university presidents faced widespread criticism for their testimony at Congressional hearings about antisemitism on their campuses.In this episode, we hear from an university educator who makes the case for liberal education that gives students the tools needed to have a deeper sense of purpose. Roosevelt Montás is the author of "Rescuing Socrates: How The Great Books Changed My Life And Why They Matter For a New Generation".He believes that the ideas and writings of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, Ghandi and many others aren't just for a few privileged students. They're for everybody, and that encountering these thinkers as a poor immigrant teenager changed his life.Montás is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, and director of the Center for American Studies Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum."There is a prevailing cultural attitude that liberal education— the study of literature and philosophy — is appropriate only to the elite," Roosevelt tells us. "That is a really pernicious idea." He argues that the students who benefit the most from the foundational wisdom in the "great books" come from poor and marginalized backgrounds.Recommendation: Richard watched and greatly enjoyed the Anglo-Japanese Netflix TV series, "Giri / Haji", — duty/shame in Japanese— a thriller about a Tokyo detective scouring the London underworld to find his allegedly deceased brother. The series was filmed in Tokyo and London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education.  We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month we are pleased to bring you a special episode that departs from our normal path. For the past several months, we've been looking at forgotten or neglected books and essays on liberal education. We're very excited to bring you this conversation with three authors who've all written recently published books on liberal education. We have Zena Hitz, author of LOST IN THOUGHT: THE HIDDEN PLEASURES OF AN INTELLECTUAL LIFE; Jonathan Marks, author of LET'S BE REASONABLE: A CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION; and Roosevelt Montás, author of RESCUING SOCRATES: HOW THE GREAT BOOKS CHANGED MY LIFE AND WHY THEY MATTER FOR A NEW GENERATION. All three books provide a defense of liberal education rooted in the great books, but they do so in strikingly different ways. We discuss desire, shame, and the how the encounter with great authors can shape your soul. Each author talks about the importance and difficulties of the teacher-student relationship. And we discuss the various threats and challenges to liberal education today. Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John's College and the founder of the Catherine Project. Jonathan Marks in Professor of Politics and chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Ursinus College. Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is the Director of the American Studies' Freedom and Citizenship Program. Here are some links to reviews: Zena on Jonathan Jonathan on Zena Jonathan on Roosevelt Roosevelt on Zena Flagg on Zena

This very exciting episode on liberal education with Professor Roosevelt Montás makes a come back this week! In this episode, I am joined by Professor Roosevelt Montás to discuss his new book, ⁠Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed my Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.⁠ Montás, a Dominican-born American academic, makes the compelling case that study of the Great Books is potentially transformative, especially for students from working-class communities or who are members of historically marginalized communities. Montás further argues that the future of the Humanities in this country does not lay primarily in specialized research but in undergraduate education–particularly in general undergrad education. We talk about arguments that Great Books courses are racist, sexist, or otherwise somehow oppressive, and why we think they are dead wrong.
 This episode is especially close to my heart and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
 Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University.  He holds an A.B. (1995), an M.A. (1996), and a Ph.D. (2004) in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  He was Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018.  Roosevelt specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American citizenship.  His dissertation, Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity, won Columbia University's 2004 Bancroft Award.  In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student.  Roosevelt teaches ⁠“Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,”⁠ a year-long course on primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” He is Director of the Center for American Studies' ⁠Freedom and Citizenship Program⁠ in collaboration with the ⁠Double Discovery Center⁠.  He speaks and writes on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education and is the author of ⁠Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation ⁠ (Princeton University Press, 2021). You can follow him on Twitter ⁠@ rooseveltmontas⁠ ⁠Jennifer Frey⁠ is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. Through Spring of 2023, she served as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and as a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She also previously served as a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. Frey holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. from Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, ⁠Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology⁠ (Routledge, 2018). You can follow her on Twitter ⁠@j ennfrey⁠. Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.

This very exciting episode on liberal education with Professor Roosevelt Montás makes a come back this week! In this episode, I am joined by Professor Roosevelt Montás to discuss his new book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed my Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Montás, a Dominican-born American academic, makes the compelling case that study of the Great Books is potentially transformative, especially for students from working-class communities or who are members of historically marginalized communities. Montás further argues that the future of the Humanities in this country does not lay primarily in specialized research but in undergraduate education–particularly in general undergrad education. We talk about arguments that Great Books courses are racist, sexist, or otherwise somehow oppressive, and why we think they are dead wrong.
 This episode is especially close to my heart and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
 Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University.  He holds an A.B. (1995), an M.A. (1996), and a Ph.D. (2004) in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  He was Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018.  Roosevelt specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American citizenship.  His dissertation, Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity, won Columbia University's 2004 Bancroft Award.  In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student.  Roosevelt teaches “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” a year-long course on primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” He is Director of the Center for American Studies' Freedom and Citizenship Program in collaboration with the Double Discovery Center.  He speaks and writes on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education and is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation  (Princeton University Press, 2021). You can follow him on Twitter @rooseveltmontas Jennifer Frey is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. Through Spring of 2023, she served as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and as a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She also previously served as a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. Frey holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. from Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Routledge, 2018). You can follow her on Twitter @jennfrey. Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.

This week, Zohar sits down with Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, and former Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018, to talk about the contrarian promise of a liberal arts education, how to read religious texts, the importance of quieting the mind, the challenges of self-discovery in an age of politicization and social media.

This week, Zohar sits down with Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, and former Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018, to talk about the contrarian promise of a liberal arts education, how to read religious texts, the importance of quieting the mind, the challenges of self-discovery in an age of politicization and social media.

The Jepson School of Leadership Studies Gary L. McDowell Institute presents Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, for a discussion on "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation." March 16, 2023

Are some books “great” in a way others are not? Can a core curriculum represent all the members of a university community? What should students get out of their classes in the Core? How should we justify liberal education today? These questions shaped many universities' curricula, including Columbia's Core, and today are at the center of debates about the purpose of education and the university.On Friday, February 3, 2023, the Morningside Institute hosted a conversation between Roosevelt Montás (Columbia) and Zena Hitz (St. John's College), moderated by Emmanuelle Saada (Columbia). Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John's College and the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Roosevelt Montás directed Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum for ten years and is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self.

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Professor Roosevelt Montás, Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University, and author of the book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Professor Montás shares his background as an […]

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Professor Roosevelt Montás, Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University, and author of the book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Professor Montás shares his background as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who... Source

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Professor Roosevelt Montás, Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University, and author of the book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Professor Montás shares his background as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who... Source

In episode three of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes Columbia University's renowned Core Curriculum and how four authors had a profound impact on Montás's life.

Its no surprise to anyone in academia that the liberal arts and humanities are in crisis. Liberal arts colleges are closing down, departments are closing down, and students are fleeing from majoring in the social sciences. So what happened to this once essential element of higher education?Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. There, he teaches “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” a year-long course on primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” He also speaks and writes on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education and is author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” He and Greg dive deep into the vanishing practice of reading great books, focusing on the history of liberal arts and the humanities in US universities, embracing liberal education in k-12 public schools, the destructive reliance on standardized testing, and normativity in academics. Episode Quotes:Fighting for the humanitiesWe are in a moment in human history where the questions that preoccupy the humanities and liberal education have a unique urgency. That facility with the kind of introspection and rootedness in human values, that the humanities foster are absolutely essential to navigate the landscape in front of us.I pray and I not only pray, but work towards that kind of education that equips an individual to engage the reality rooted in human values and self reflectively that that be not something that is rare and for the few, but that is as widely accessible to everyone as is absolutely possible.On losing the humanities in real timeLiberal arts colleges are closing down. Departments are closing down. Students are fleeing from majoring in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Those are real empirical factors that point to us being in a moment of particular crisis in the institutional instantiation of liberal education.On teaching humanities to high schoolersI always say, think about what it means for a 17 year old to disagree with Aristotle. That's extraordinary that introducing them to that kind of dimension of their own mind and of their own status as intellectuals and thinkers. It's my favorite thing I do as a teacher.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile on Columbia University in the City of New YorkRoosevelt Montás on LinkedInRoosevelt Montás on TwitterHis Work:Roosevelt Montás on AeonRescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

For this Fourth of July, enjoy some of our favorite recent conversations: Justin Gest, associate professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University and the author of Majority Minority (Oxford University Press, 2022), talks about the demographic trends in the U.S. to 'majority minority' and puts efforts to resist it (like Pres. Trump's attempts to interfere with the 2020 Census) in context. Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University's Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Programs, and author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press November 16, 2021), argues in favor of a collegiate core curriculum and talks about how the 'Great Books' influenced his life. Curtis Deutsch, professor of Geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, discusses the dire consequences of unchecked, human-driven emissions for ocean life as laid out in a new report he's co-authored, "Avoiding ocean mass extinction from climate warming." A. J. Jacobs, NPR contributor, contributing editor at Esquire, and the author of The Year of Living Biblically, The Know-It-All, It's All Relative and his latest The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life (Crown, 2022), talks about his new book that tries to puzzle out why we like puzzles and what they do for us. These interviews were lightly edited for time and clarity; the original web versions are available here: America's 'Majority Minority' Demographic Future (Apr 11, 2022) An Ode to The Core Curriculum (Feb 18, 2022) Unchecked Emissions and the Threat of Mass Marine Extinction (May 6, 2022) A. J. Jacobs Puzzles It Out (Apr 25, 2022)

How do books change our lives? Educator and author Roosevelt Montás of Columbia University talks about his book Rescuing Socrates with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Drawing on his own educational and life journey, Montás shows how great books don't just teach us stuff--they get inside us and make us who we are.

David Goodhart is a British journalist. In 1995 he founded Prospect, the center-left political magazine, where he served as editor for 15 years, and then became the director of Demos, the cross-party think tank. His book The Road to Somewhere coined the terms “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” to help us understand populism in the contemporary West. We also discuss his latest book, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). For two clips of our convo — on why elites favor open borders, and why smart people are overvalued — head over to our YouTube page. Early in the episode, David discusses how his adolescent schooling in Marxism was “a bit like how people sometimes talk about the classics as a sort of intellectual gymnasium — learning how to argue.” Which brings to mind the following note from a listener:I feel compelled to tell you how much I enjoyed listening to your episode with Roosevelt Montás. I’m a retired lawyer in my 60s, and although I had a decent education growing up, my experience did not involve a full immersion in the classics. Hearing you two talk was like sitting in a dorm room in college — except the people talking are older, wiser, actually know what they were talking about. What a treat. I’m a pretty regular listener of the Dishcast, and this was the best yet in my opinion.Much of this week’s episode with David centers on how our capitalist society ascribes too much social and moral value to cognitive ability. That theme was also central to our episode last year with Charles Murray, who emphasizes in the following clip the “unearned gift” of high IQ:The following listener was a big fan of the episode (which we transcribed last week):I must tell you that your conversation with Charles Murray was the single best podcast I’ve ever heard. So deep, broad, and thought provoking. Thank you both for your willingness to explore “unacceptable” ideas so thoughtfully and carefully.I have read two of Charles’ books — Human Diversity and Facing Reality — and, among other things, I am stunned by how ordinary a person he seems to be. That sounds odd. What I mean to say is that, while few people could analyze and assemble so much data and present it so compellingly, his conclusions are what the average person “already knows.” I suspect that most people couldn’t plow through Human Diversity, but given a brief synopsis, they would say “duh.”When you mentioned your deep respect for black culture in America, you touched on something I wish had been more developed in Charles’ books: the option we have of celebrating human diversity rather than resigning ourselves to it or denying it. I would like to develop that idea a bit further:Conservation biologists understand (celebrate) the value of genetic diversity in nonhuman species, because each population potentially brings to the species genes that will allow it to flourish under some future environmental challenge, whether that be disease outbreak, climate change, competition from invasive species, etc. Humans too, as living organisms, have faced and will undoubtedly continue to face many unforeseen challenges, whether environmental, cultural, economic, etc. Hopefully, we will continue to rise to these challenges, but we have no way of knowing which genes from which populations will carry the critical traits that will allow us to do so. So, all the better that races DO differ and ARE diverse — in the aggregate, on average. Population differences are GOOD for a species because they confer resilience!Oh, and for the record, I tend to be center-left, with most of my friends leaning further to the left, so the ideas you presented are forbidden fruits. I cannot discuss them with anyone other than my husband, who can hardly bear to listen because they are so taboo in our circle.Here’s another clip with Charles, bringing Christianity into the mix:This next listener strongly dissents:Charles Murray, and you as well, seem to believe that you can magically separate out the effects of culture and poverty, and determine the effect of “race” on intelligence, which you define as IQ. The problem is, everything you’ve discussed here is nonsense.First, you assume that the term “race” describes a shorthand for people who share a common genetic background, and I suspect this is garbage. Most American Blacks have multi-ethnic backgrounds, with skin melanin being the main shared genetic feature. So, there’s little reason to believe that there’s a correlation between melanin content and other genetic features.Second, you assume that IQ describes general intelligence, that G factor Murray talks about. But intelligence is clearly multi-dimensional. My wife and youngest daughter have a facility with Scrabble, and general word enumeration games, that is way beyond me, and they’re better writers than I am. On the other hand, I have a general facility with mathematics that they can’t match (though my oldest daughter might be able to). And that’s just two dimensions; I’d bet there are many more, encompassing things like artistic talent, architectural design and talents in other arenas. You yourself are an excellent writer and interviewer, but I’ve read your writings for years, and I’d bet your understanding of statistics is elementary at best.Finally, you have no answer to the remarkable changes in IQ in Ashkenazi Jews over the past century. Supposedly IQ is supposed to represent an innate and unchangeable measurement of intelligence. And if you believe that average IQ of an ethnic group is a meaningful measurement, then you have to explain the changes in average IQ among American Jews over the past century. Goddard in the early 20th century claimed that 83% of tested Jews were feebleminded, while today, the great grandchildren of those feebleminded Jews now have IQs 1/2 to a full standard deviation above their co-nationalists. There’s an obvious answer here: IQ tests simply don’t test anything fundamental, but instead test how integrated into American culture the tested subjects were at the time.These are serious challenges to the idea that specific ethnic groups have unchangeable intellectual talents: some of your ethnic groups are non-homogeneous genetically, your definition of intelligence is simplistic, and there’s clear evidence that social integration greatly overwhelms any inter-group average differences. It is obvious that some people are more talented in one area than another, and that a significant amount of these differences are determined genetically. But when you move from the case of individuals to trying to correlate American racial groups with intelligence, I truly believe you’re just making a big mistake. Many Blacks in this country have grown up with the expectations that they simply can’t succeed on their own. I find it impossible to believe that we can filter out the effect of being raised with the expectation of failure. I work in tech, and it seems that a seriously disproportionate number of Blacks at my Gang of Five company come from the Caribbean — where, of course, Blacks are a majority and don’t face the same expectations of failure. We had a panel discussion on race and all the panelists came from the Caribbean, and all had stories of parental expectations that you’d expect from a stereotypical Asian-American family today.That said, right now, the Woke are acting more patronizing (and in my view, racist) than anything since the ‘60s. At this point, the Woke (I refuse to apply this label to the whole Left) treat Blacks as incredibly fragile beings who can’t handle any discussions of problems that aren’t laid at the feet of white people’s racism. It’s pretty disgusting.Instead of going point for point with my reader, here’s a comprehensive list of Dish coverage on the subject from the blog days. Another listener recommends a related guest for the Dishcast:After ruminating on some of your recent podcasts, I’d like to suggest a future guest: Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality and professor of behavioral psychology at the University of Texas-Austin. I imagine you’ve read her profile in The New Yorker. Since your conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, the tension between matters of structure and personal agency have been echoing in my head.When I listen to other guests of yours, other podcast hosts, other conservatives, I see everywhere the tension between structure and personal agency. And having read Harden’s book this fall, I’ve been thinking of her work more and more as a bridge between these seemingly divergent world views. She swims in the same research waters as Charles Murray and Robert Plomin — but she (a) is explicitly clear that this research has, as of yet, no value in studying ethnic groups and (b) treats environmental factors differently than they do. On the latter, Harden makes some compelling arguments about the interplay between environment and expression of individuals’ genes (and thus abilities). It’s easy to see the corollaries in personal ability and responsibility (both with strong roots in genetics) versus the leftist tendency to dismiss people’s actions vis a vis blaming structural inequalities.Harden sometimes trades in some language verging on woke, for lack of a better term, but her more nuanced philosophical references are to John Rawls, not neo-Marxists. She’s really quite convincing. Also, I’ve always appreciated that you ask your guests to reflect on their upbringing and how they got where they are. Having read that New Yorker piece and her book, I think hers is an interesting story in and of itself.It is indeed. Harden is a great idea for a guest. I’ll confess that I felt I needed to read her book thoroughly to engage her, and didn’t have the time so put it off. Thanks for the reminder.A reader responds to a quote we posted last week praising Mike Pence for standing up to Trump after the assault on the Capitol:Pence had innumerable chances over years to expose Trump for exactly what he was. Besides one forceful speech since, there hasn’t been much else from the MAGA-excommunicated, nearly-executed veep. How about a live appearance before the Jan 6 Commission, Mr Vice President? Probably not. While I agree that Mike Pence may have saved the republic on Jan 6, he only did so with a gun to his head — with an actual gallows erected for him, while the Capitol was being stormed and people were dying. Better late than never, but he really cut it close, no?Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the profiles in courage here, along with all those Capitol police. Pence doesn’t deserve this lionization … at least not yet.Points taken. But to be honest, any mainstream Republican who opposed the attempted coup is a hero in my book. Another reader quotes me and dissents:The early Biden assurance that inflation was only a blip has become ridiculous, as Janet Yellen herself has conceded. No, Biden isn’t responsible for most of it. But some of it? Yep. A massive boost to demand when supply is crippled is dumb policy making. And imagine how worse it would be if Biden had gotten his entire package. Larry Summers was right — again.European countries did not have stimulus like we did, yet they are experiencing similar levels of inflation. This would indicate that inflation is a world-wide phenomenon and not tied to our particular stimulus packages. Also, Larry Summers has been pretty much wrong on everything — here’s a synopsis from 2013 (or just google “larry summers wrong on everything” and see the articles that pop up). Money quote:And Summers has made a lot of errors in the past 20 years, despite the eminence of his research. As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms. All of this has left the economy still in the doldrums, five years after Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, and hurt the middle class. Yet in no instance has Summers ever been known to publicly acknowledge a mistake.Sorry, but the EU provided a Covid stimulus of $2.2 trillion. And Summers was clearly right in this case, and Janet Yellen wrong. Another reader also pushes back on the passage I wrote above:I have a bone to pick with you when you discuss the Biden economic policy. Your contention is that the American Rescue Plan was “dumb policy making” because it exacerbated inflation. Fair enough — but if we are going to discuss the economy, then we need to have a full exploration of the policy choices and their implications. Yes, we have had six months of multi-decade high inflation, but we also have had about a year of near-record lows in unemployment and record-high job creation. Before you dismiss that as simply due to the reopening of the economy post-COVID, it’s worth noting that the American economic recovery has vastly outperformed all prognostications, as well as other Western economies. So in sum, the result of Biden’s policy is high inflation, high growth, high job creation, low unemployment. Let’s be clear then: when you criticize the ARP as too big and thus causing inflation, you are advocating for stable prices at the cost of a low growth, high unemployment environment. It’s a fair argument, I suppose. But after having lived through the weak economic recovery engineered by Larry Summers during the Obama administration, one that choked the early careers of many millennials, I’m not sure Biden’s choice was particularly egregious. But what we may well be about to get is stagflation — as interest rates go up even as inflation continues. It’s possible we fucked up both times: in 2009 with too little stimulus and in 2020 too much. I understand why those decisions were taken and the reasons were sane. But they were still wrong. Tim Noah has been doing great work lately on these questions of inflation and recession, including an interview with Summers. This next reader defends Biden’s record on the economy and beyond:The pragmatic counter-argument to your criticism of Biden is this: his economic program, while inflationary, produced unprecedented job growth after a recession, reductions by 50% in child poverty, more than five new business startups, and increases in business investment and personal bank balances of more than 20%. It’s among the reasons the American economy is outperforming China’s for the first time in two generations.Biden’s signature foreign policy achievements in Central Europe have led to the enlargement of NATO and awakened Europe to its responsibilities to its own security, all of which will contain Russia over the long term. This precedent, coupled with the Aussie-Brit nuclear deal, opens real possibilities for containing China’s potential regional expansion in Asia. At home, Biden’s Justice Department, like Gerald Ford’s, is fumigating the fetid stench of politics it inherited. The Biden White House has re-opened the doors to governors and mayors who need help from Washington in a disaster, regardless of partisan affiliation or views of Dear Leader; and it is laying the groundwork for a much-needed affordable-housing boom in our cities. Your hopes for a politics of dynamic centrism, which I share, does not take into account that as many as 10 million of our fellow citizens are prone to political violence due to the real-world influence of Great Replacement Theory, according to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. There is no comparable threat from the illiberalism on the left — which is a problem, nonetheless. In the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, leading Republicans, including the governors of Florida and Texas, are competing for those constituents. That’s a movement my fellow classical liberals and I — stretching from the center-left to the center-right — can and should live without. Bill Buckley wouldn’t have sucked up to them. In the real world, the GOP wooing of the violent right poses an existential threat to our quality of life. It’s why I am voting straight Democratic in 2022. And it is why I would gladly vote for Biden, again in 2024, if he sought re-election.Happy to air your perspective. This next reader is bracing himself for Trump 2024:I know it gives you a warm feeling all over to write a column about the revolt against the woke, but it won’t be wokism that propels Republicans into office in 2022 and returns Trump to power in 2024 — something I agree will be a disaster for the republic. Trump’s return to power feels inevitable to me today. The January 6th hearings will make no difference to Trump supporters.Don’t get me wrong; I think wokism is annoying and stupid, but it is not the threat to the nation that you believe it is, and it never was. Wokism has destroyed the left and that is the real tragedy. Instead of a populist left railing against the rich, we have a bourgeois left railing against heterosexual white men, leaving the working class in the thrall of an American Orban. The working class now feels that the left and Democrats have failed them; and they are right, they have.Americans will vote for Republican for one reason: inflation. It should be no surprise that inflation is out of control, but both Biden and Trump spent billions helping people who were unable to work during Covid (the right policy) without raising taxes (the wrong policy). Now, to fight inflation we need to raise taxes and that is impossible; there aren’t the votes in the Senate. American tax policy is insane. You can have low taxes, or you can solve social problems like helping people who can’t work because of a pandemic, an inadequate public health system still unprepared for the next pandemic, homelessness and addiction, and crime. But you can’t have both. It really isn’t that complicated.Grateful as always for the counterpoints, and you can always send your own to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Another dissenter gets historical:I agree wholeheartedly with your clarion condemnation of the odious Trump. But you are wide of the historical mark when you state that Trump is “the first real tyrannical spirit to inhabit the office since Andrew Jackson.” Jackson was authoritarian in character. He was a product of the trauma of the Revolution and he brought his military identity to the White House. But he was not a tyrant or dictator. (There is more historical evidence for Lincoln as dictatorial than Jackson.) More appropriate — if non-American — comparisons for Trump would be Henry VIII, Wilhelm II, Mussolini and Nixon.Mind you, an interesting Dishcast guest would be Jon Meacham to discuss US presidents with authoritarian tendencies: Adams Sr., Polk, Andrew Johnson, Teddy R and Wilson. All expressed some form of authoritarianism, but sometimes the presidency and the nation derived benefitAnother digs deeper into the Jackson comparison:I suggest you interview W.H. Brands, who wrote a biography of Andrew Jackson. There are many ways to judge a history book, but to me an important criterion is, did I learn anything I did not already know?  Reading this book I did.I am only going to mention one of a good number events in Jackson’s life that Brands brings to the forefront. After the Battle of New Orleans, Gen. Jackson had ordered that a curfew remain in effect and that the city was to remain under martial law. For good reason: while the British offensive on one flank was a disaster, they had relative success on the other flank, and their remaining commander could have ended the truce and ordered another attack. But the British never did a follow-up attack. One New Orleans business man then took Andrew Jackson to court, claiming he endured an unnecessary economic loss on account of the military curfew. The court ruled in the businessman’s favor. AND, incredibly, Andrew Jackson paid the fine! Now stop and think, what must have been on Old Hickory’s mind. Here he risks life and limb to save the city from British domination, and he’s fined. Andrew could think, why should I pay?  I’ve got the Army in my control, I’m not just a commander whom soldiers fear, but also one that has the adulation and respect of my soldiers and the populace at large.   To me, that episode reveals that Jackson was hardly the tyrant he is portrayed to be by most modernists steeped in presentism. He should never be placed in the same sentence as Trump unless the word “contrast” or “opposite” is used. Let's keep Old Hickory away from any such comparisons and let his image remain on that $20 bill!Well I learned something from that email — so many thanks. Meacham is a good idea too. Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Roosevelt Montás, Author of  Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Roosevelt discusses immigrating to the United States, studying at public schools, and attending Columbia University. He states that although he was academically driven and successful, as a teacher he has realized that public schools fail by design. Roosevelt explains that the inspiration behind his book was the work of the various thinkers he read during his lifetime that addressed him as a human being. 

The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy by: Taylor Dotson Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by: Mark Fisher  The Age of AI and Our Human Future by: Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher A Confederacy of Dunces by: John Kennedy Toole Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation by: Roosevelt Montás Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen by: Steve Sims The Thursday Murder Club by: Richard Osman The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands by: John Michael Greer Homefront (Expeditionary Force, #7.5) by: Craig Alanson Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force, #9) by: Craig Alanson

Douglas Murray is a British writer and commentator, primarily for The Spectator, and his latest book is The War on the West. It’s a powerful narrative of the past couple of decades, in which a small minority waged ideological war on the underpinnings of Western civilization: reason, toleration, free speech, color-blind racial politics. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of our conversation — on the seductive power of ressentiment and the case for gratitude, and on many Americans’ ignorance of history outside the US — head over to our YouTube page.My convo with Murray complements the one I had with Roosevelt Montás, the great defender of the humanities at Columbia University and beyond — his episode is now available as a full transcript.As far as last week’s episode with Bari Weiss, an addendum: she used our conversation for her own podcast, “Honestly,” and her version includes at least a half hour of conversation you won’t find in the Dishcast version — namely on the early marriage movement and my role in it. Here’s a snippet from that section:This listener liked the episode:You and Bari addressed the (increasingly popular) argument that if the illiberal left has taken the gloves off, then its opponents should do the same. I thought your response was commendable, and it reminded me of something Hitch said during a debate on free speech many years ago. He referred to the scene from A Man for All Seasons in which Sir Thomas More argues with Roper over whether a man should be arrested for breaking God’s law. It’s a marvellous exchange that I have often reflected upon in recent years:Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.Someone at Reason — Peter Suderman, I think — observed last year that politics is becoming outcomes-based rather than process-based, which expresses much the same point, I think. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I’m glad you and Bari are willing to stand up for liberalism when so many of your peers have come to view it with disdain.I love that section from A Man For All Seasons. It’s why I chose Thomas More as my confirmation saint. But it’s difficult to know the best way to stand up for liberalism when it comes to gender ideology in schools, as Bari and I discuss in this clip:Another fan of the Bari episode gets more personal:I am the mother of a trans-identifying child — now 23 years old. (I can’t give my name for fear of alienating her.) You captured the rollercoaster of emotions many parents going through this feel — the fear that she has adopted this ideology as a coping mechanism to deal with underlying mental health issues and that she will do irreparable harm to her body. And that we are politically homeless. I can’t vote for anyone who would support Trump. But Biden and his team have it wrong when they quote the lie of “better a trans son than dead daughter.” I agree with DeSantis on many aspects of the so-called “don’t say gay” bill. I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss sexual orientation and gender ideology with young children. I also don’t think it’s appropriate to review the periodic table with them. That doesn’t mean I'm anti-chemistry. What I wish for my daughter is that she not be beholden to gender stereotypes, that she be comfortable in her own body and that she avoid a lifetime of medical intervention with life-long negative consequences (including infertility) which cannot ultimately transform her into a man. If she were anorexic, we’d have support and options to return her to health. Because her coping mechanism is trans ideology, we get no support from medical or psychiatric professionals, from schools or from most liberals.You captured all that in the podcast. Thanks for getting the word out.Another listener points to another trans story:I saw this interview with an ex-transgender woman and thought you might find it interesting:I found particularly interesting the parts where he indicates that he found a group of “activists” that encouraged him to transition when what he really needed was therapy and sobriety. It’s also interesting that young men/woman fleeing the labels and baggage of “gay” or “lesbian“ may pursue gender reassignment, rather than unwrapping their trauma and accepting themselves for who they are.I just wish all the nuances of this were better aired. Another fan of the Dish anticipated our coverage this week with a “pre-emptive email”:I wonder whether the Supreme Court leak has caused you to reconsider your stance on the culture wars and whether it was the woke who are really the big enemy here. After all, while certain elements on the far left do much damage to themselves and to their own cause, their biggest achievements seem to be about gender-neutral toilets and pronouns, while it is the reactionary right that actively tries to curtail hard-won rights such as the right to vote, or the right to legal and safe abortion. Is it only a culture war when the left does it? Even when you have admitted that both sides are guilty, there seems to be a grudging reluctance to accept that one side is significantly more dangerous than the other, or to pretend as if it was the left’s fault all along and the right was merely reacting to it. Following on from January 6th and the wave of right-wingers across the globe currently dominating our news agenda (Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Le Pen, et al), it seems evident that there is a radical asymmetry in the scale of the threat that each side poses. Yes, there is much on the left that deserves to be called out, but it is nothing like as dangerous or as damaging as the very real risk that our liberal democratic norms are overturned by reactionaries in the name of a kind of Theocratic Nationalism. An approach that says “A plague on both your houses” seems to me the height of fatuity. Who is the bigger threat here, Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders? There seems to be a skewed kind of moral equivalency going on. It reminds me of those US conservatives who used to say “Yes the Tea Party is terrible and there is real racism, but Obama is just as guilty for stirring them up.” This simply will not do. From the Tories and Brexit, to Putin and Ukraine, Republicans and abortion, is it not clear that everywhere you look at the moment, it is the right — the conservative, reactionary, radical right — that poses a greater and more urgent threat to our democratic way of life? There’s a balance to be struck here — and I’m not saying it’s easy. But the way in which the far left empowers the far right and vice-versa is an important part of the toxic dynamic. I’ll just note that, when push came to shove, I voted for Biden. There is no conceivable scenario in which I would vote for a deranged wannabe-tyrant like Trump. Next up, “a looong-time reader who discovered you in the early aughts”:After a discussion this evening with my housemate I was inspired to look for your It's So Personal threads.  I don't seem to see them in the Substack, and it looks like your dish.andrewsullivan.com site is no longer active. Can you make this thread available to revisit? The whole thread is compiled here. How I framed it at the time:Perhaps the best posts of 2009 were penned by readers, and the most illuminating, gripping and emotional posts were related to late-term abortion, in the wake of the assassination of the abortion doctor George Tiller. I’ve never seen the power of this blog medium so clearly and up-close: one personal account caused a stream of others. How could old-school reporting have found all these women? How could any third-person account compete with the rawness and honesty and pain of these testimonials? It was a revelation to me about what this medium could do.Another listener looks ahead:David French just wrote the op-ed, “A conservative Christian quietly battles against right-wing hysteria,” and he would be an excellent podcast guest.”David is actually scheduled to record a Dishcast later this month, so stay tuned. Another suggestion:Hope you are weathering Covid ok and are feeling better. Suggestion: check out the staggeringly brilliant new essay by N.S. Lyons, “The World Order Reset: China’s Ukraine Catastrophe, the Rise of Trans-Atlantis, and a New Age of Power.” You’ve linked to one of his essays previously, saying it depressed you for a week. You should try to interview this mystery person. Everybody is wondering who Lyons really is. It would be a real coup for your podcast/Substack.Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve actually been in touch. You can send your own guest idea here: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

On today's episode of the podcast Ryan talks to author Roosevelt Montas about how to make philosophy and the classics accessible to young children, how the classics connect to something in our humanity, how the ancient texts connect children and adults the same, and more.Roosevelt Montás is Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program.  He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager.  Roosevelt specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American national identity. He regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in the Columbia Core Curriculum as well seminars in American Studies. Roosevelt is the author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.”Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailydad to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases.Grab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/dailydad to get a huge discount off your Nord VPN plan+ Free threat protection + 1 additional month for free. It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee.Every week StoryWorth emails your loved one a different story prompt – questions you've never thought to ask. Get started right away with no shipping required by going to StoryWorth.com/dailydad. You'll get $10 off your first purchase.Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.comFollow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, where he was Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum from 2008 to 2018. He is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. In this week's conversation, Roosevelt Montás and Yascha Mounk discuss how a copy of Plato he found atop a pile of trash as a child unlocked his future, the drawbacks of exclusively teaching material that is "culturally responsive," and how to put the ideals of liberal education into practice. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John Taylor Williams, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan talks to Roosevelt Montás about his new book "Rescuing Socrates," how his life changed at 16 when he discovered a copy of Socrates in his neighbors trash, how the universality of the ancient texts blur the lines between our conceptions of race and class, and more.Roosevelt Montás is Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program.  He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager.  He attended public schools in Queens and was admitted to Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. In 2003, he completed a Ph.D. in English, also at Columbia. From 2008 to 2018, he served as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia College. Roosevelt is the author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.”Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That's $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

This month we are pleased to bring you a special episode that departs from our normal path. For the past several months, we've been looking at forgotten or neglected books and essays on liberal education. We're very excited to bring you this conversation with three authors who've all written recently published books on liberal education. We have Zena Hitz, author of LOST IN THOUGHT: THE HIDDEN PLEASURES OF AN INTELLECTUAL LIFE; Jonathan Marks, author of LET'S BE REASONABLE: A CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION; and Roosevelt Montás, author of RESCUING SOCRATES: HOW THE GREAT BOOKS CHANGED MY LIFE AND WHY THEY MATTER FOR A NEW GENERATION. All three books provide a defense of liberal education rooted in the great books, but they do so in strikingly different ways. We discuss desire, shame, and the how the encounter with great authors can shape your soul. Each author talks about the importance and difficulties of the teacher-student relationship. And we discuss the various threats and challenges to liberal education today. Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John's College and the founder of the Catherine Project. Jonathan Marks in Professor of Politics and chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Ursinus College. Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is the Director of the American Studies' Freedom and Citizenship Program. Here are some links to reviews: Zena on Jonathan Jonathan on Zena Jonathan on Roosevelt Roosevelt on Zena Flagg on Zena

“In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens,” scholar Roosevelt Montás writes at the beginning of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained a set of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates' life. This first encounter with Socrates was a fortuitous as it was decisive. There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates' defense of his philosophic activity in these dialogues.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Roosevelt Montás, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” about what came after Montás read Plato for the first time and why he considers access to a liberal education so vital. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University's Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Programs, and author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press November 16, 2021), argues in favor of teaching the classics to everyone—especially marginalized students—and talks about how the "Great Books" influenced his life.

Brothers-in-law Amit and Tony get educated by Roosevelt Montás on why reading some old books--very old books--might be just what our society needs right now. He's got a great new book about Great Books and a lot of people are upset about it.

In this conversation, hosted by RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Roosevelt Montás* discusses his recent book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation; why liberal education for citizens is vital in today's world; how he moved on from his youthful crush on deconstruction and postmodernism and discovered the enduring importance of self-reflections by Plato, Saint Augustine, Sigmund Freud and Mahatma Gandhi; the key concepts behind Columbia University's Core Curriculum; and how the Columbia's liberal arts program may be adapted to different cultures around the world.

Roosevelt, who led the humanities-rich Core Curriculum at Columbia for a decade and still teaches there, has a new book out, Rescuing Socrates. We talk of Augustine and Socrates and Freud and Gandhi and the timelessness of the great texts. His book is a kind of response to the notion that these ideas and texts are somehow blighted by “whiteness” — a topic the Dish tackled last year. I loved this conversation — and the relief it gave from contemporary political and cultural obsessions. Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

What is the point of an education? Is it to learn skills that will help you get ahead in the workplace, or is it to acquire knowledge and to think more deeply about your place in the world?In this episode we hear from an educator who thinks that the great books— Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare for example— aren't just for a few well-off students at elite colleges, but for everybody. And he says encountering these thinkers when he was a poor immigrant teenager from the Dominican Republic literally changed his life.Roosevelt Montás is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is director of the Center for American Studies Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum. "There is a prevailing cultural attitude that liberal education— the study of literature and philosophy — is appropriate only to the elite," Roosevelt tells us. "That is a really pernicious idea." He argues that the students who benefit the most from the foundational wisdom in the "great books" come from poor and marginalized backgrounds.But liberal education is under assault today in academia. We find out why.Recommendation: Richard is watching the Anglo-Japanese Netflix TV series, "Giri / Haji", — duty/shame in Japanese— a thriller about a Tokyo detective scouring the London underworld to find his allegedly deceased brother. The series was filmed in Tokyo and London. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“[The human] condition of freedom, which is the condition that makes ethical life possible, is the question to which liberal education addresses itself.” So says Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, in conversation with Brendan Boyle about the aims of liberal education. Their discussion explores the use of texts as a means to help students shape their own lives, the compatibility of liberal education's positive and negative ends, and the role of the teacher, among other topics. Links: Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Change My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021) “What Should Students Learn?” The Point, August 2021 Columbia College's core curriculum The St. John's College academic program

Roosevelt Montás (mohn-TAHS) came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1985 at the age of twelve. He couldn't speak a word of English. He eventually went on get a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where he currently teaches. Prof. Montás joined us to talk about his latest book, "Rescuing Socrates," in which he chronicles his journey and explains how books by St. Augustine, Socrates, Freud and Gandhi changed his life.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the second in our occasional series on Rethinking the Canon. Is there value in reading the classics at a time when they are increasingly viewed as unrepresentative texts that don’t speak to the diverse experiences of modern students? This week Amna talks with Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. FULL TRANSCRIPTAMNA KHALID: A liberal education is one that takes the complicated condition of human freedom seriously, and addresses itself to its dilemmas and to the urgency of its lived experience. To think and reason through these kinds of questions is to learn to live with them in an honest and ongoing way.That was an excerpt from Roosevelt Montás’s book, “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” Roosevelt Montás, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teenager, is now a senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He specializes in antebellum American literature and intellectual history. He’s also spent 10 years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia, teaching and running what is often called the “Great Books” program.I started our conversation by asking him if he could give our listeners a sense of what motivated him to write so passionately about Great Books.ROOSEVELT MONTÁS: The book is a meditation on my experience of liberal education and an argument about why liberal education based on the study of Great Books matters today. I draw on my own biographical, personal experience of encountering the Great Books as an undergraduate, but also on my experience teaching them and encountering the kind of struggles and challenges of organizing undergraduate, general education around the study of books that are often old and often don't speak directly to the issues that are most salient in people's daily, lived experience. So, the book tries to take in my personal, intellectual, institutional experience and put it all together into an argument about why reading these books seriously with undergraduates matters today.KHALID: Let's peel back what this term “Western canon” means. One of the things that I have found a little disturbing of late is how quickly people will jump to calling something “white supremacy” or just “white” for that matter. And if we look at the Greco-Roman tradition, how in the Mediterranean region these ideas were coming from different places. Once you start looking to the historical roots of these ideas, my understanding as a historian is that it complicates the notion of even what is considered white. Can you speak a little bit about what is loosely referred to as the Western tradition and Western canon and where the roots of some of the key traditions lie?MONTÁS: So, you know, “Western” — I remember when I first began to encounter that term, “Western,” when I went to college — I would always say, you know, west of what? KHALID: (Laughs)MONTÁS: When you name a direction, it only makes sense from a particular point of view. So, west of what? But often people use “Western” synonymously with “European.” When you think about the Western canon, you're not thinking about a European canon. Obviously, some very, very important roots of what came to be the texts that we associate with the Western canon lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the — what we now call the Middle East, biblical texts in North Africa. One of the central figures I deal with in my book and one of the thinkers that has been most influential in modern development is St. Augustine. You might hear the name St. Augustine and not realize that we're talking about a North African, Berber man, who turns out to be the towering intellect in the Christian tradition and in Western philosophy, a major major figure. And of course, you have the biblical texts that originate in a matrix of oral traditions that are not by any stretch European, although they do end up having a very powerful influence in Europe. So when we think about the West, we should not be thinking narrowly, geographically. I like to think about it as including the lands and peoples and cultures and traditions around the Mediterranean Sea. That loose tradition ends up, first of all, leaving a textual record, leaving a genealogy of text and debates that we can trace today. And we're very fortunate and lucky that we can have access to those texts. Then there's a second term about “canon.” Again, you can understand why people resist the idea of canon, why people resist the idea that there is a set of text that is handed down to you from on high by some intellectual or traditional cultural authority that says these are the essential texts, this is what matters. But if I can quote an old friend of mine, who said about the Literature Humanities syllabus at Columbia's first year requirement — this is this kind of a Great Books course that all first years take, and it's been around for over 80 years now, this course. Every year you read about 25 books in it, but over the course of the history of the course, there have been like 150 or so books that have, at one time or another, been in the list. So he says that if Literature Humanities teachers teach us a canon, it's a loose canon. KHALID: (Laughs)MONTÁS: So, I think we should think of the canon as a loose canon. That is, it's not a fixed, unalterable list, but rather a pretty large and permeable collection of text and conversations. And sometimes we discover new text. Sometimes we reinterpret text. Sometimes texts that we have ignored for a while regain a new prominence and a new relevance. So it's always something that's under revision. It's always under construction. You know, even if what you want to do is understand the roots of male domination, or if you want to understand the roots of elite exploitation of the proletariat, if you want to understand the root of racial subjugation, that's the place to look, both for the traditions that have sustained those morally objectionable practices, but also for the discourses that have challenged those — you know, human rights and justice and liberation. All of those also find their roots in that tradition of contestation, that tradition of debate. You know, the reason why we read Aristotle is not because he was the student of Plato and he celebrates Plato. The reason we read Aristotle is because he disagreed and refuted Plato so profoundly. It is a tradition of debate and dispute, contestation, it is not a tradition of parroting an orthodoxy.KHALID: It makes me reflect on my own experience growing up in Pakistan and much of what I read was what is seen as the Western canon. And like you said, it is a lightning rod when you're first introduced to it and the idea of how central that was in the process of colonization. It can elicit a response, which is almost a rejection. But upon further exploration, what stood out to me was that, embodied within the canon, is this tension, right? This tension of what constitutes an orthodoxy and what then overturns it and how this relationship is dynamic, that it's constantly moving. You know, I like to think of the canon as like an organism. It's alive. MONTÁS: Yeah.KHALID: It's constantly dynamic and it's developing. It's got several limbs which jut out, and some get chopped off and then get reattached. And it's kind of an octopus of sorts. And you talk about that in your book, you talk about how you worked in the Great Books course to include Gandhi and how you worked with students on Gandhi. Can you reflect a little bit on that process of including what would count as non-Western writers within the canon?MONTÁS: Yeah, Gandhi is a great example, and I've argued that Gandhi belonged in a course that's ostensibly a Western course, and that Gandhi holds a special place in that because Gandhi is kind of a bridge figure. Gandhi is someone who is rooted in an ancient, venerable, profound, philosophical, ethical, spiritual tradition that is quite alien to the premises that organized the Western philosophical, ethical approach. Yet, Gandhi is deeply versed, deeply influenced, and a masterful deployer of lots of things that you find in the Western tradition. And you know, he was the first to acknowledge the influence of people like Ruskin and Thoreau and Tolstoy and Jesus. Gandhi is this great, voracious intellect and ethical thinker. So, I began to read Gandhi on my own kind of after graduate school as part of my own curiosity and my own sense of what is there in other ancient traditions? What light on the contemporary world can those ancient texts throw? So, Gandhi was really special in this way because he was a kind of hinge between something I knew and understood quite well and this other thing. Then I began teaching it. I said, I wonder how this would work in the classroom, how we would work with students who have now spent two years reading the so-called “Western classics.” How would it work for us to think about Gandhi, both in the context of that tradition we have seen, but also for the ways in which he is coming at questions we have been dealing with for a long time from an entirely different perspective? And it worked really, really well in the classroom. Students often felt like I did when I read them on my own, that Gandhi enriched their understanding of their own tradition in a powerful way, and that it opened up this other way of thinking, this other ethical universe. Enough people had good experiences with it that we made a proposal — let's make this a mandatory part of the curriculum. So Gandhi's been there maybe 10 years now. And it's an example of this thing where we don't read the Western canon because it's Western. You know, we don't read these texts because they're somehow ours and therefore better than others. No, we read these texts because they matter. We read these texts because they're genuinely useful in our understanding of the contemporary world. It's a trite thing to say, but often overlooked that the present emerges from the past. That's just the way it works. The present comes from, is organically linked with, the past. The past is therefore very much worth our attention.KHALID: So Roosevelt, let me ask you this question, which is, what makes a classic text? When does a text become something that is worthy of being called a classic?MONTÁS: That is such a good question, and one that has inspired a lot of thought and writing, and I know several books that are dedicated to answering this question, and I've been part of many faculty conversations on this question. And I even know of one instance in which a school that wanted to put together a course on classics came up with a set of criteria  in which every book got a score. Criteria 1 from 1 to 5  and then criteria 2  from 1 to 5. And then when you tally them up and you get a raw score of the class — and this is how they decided and — KHALID: —  the height of neoliberalism.MONTÁS: Exactly. Fine, if that's what you're going to do, fine. But one thing you can say about a classic book is that it's a book that has the capacity to speak to many different kinds of people in many different kinds of historical circumstances. Generation after generation have found them to be illuminating, have found  them to be relevant, have found them to be meaningful. That speaks to a quality in the book, or could be a statue, could be a painting, could be any kind of human expression, but it speaks to some quality that transcends the historical conditions of its creation. Plato is meaningful to me, not because he was like an Athenian aristocrat in a turbulent period in Greece. I don't care about that, doesn't mean anything to me. There's something else that Plato gets at that does mean something to me as a Dominican immigrant in New York in the 21st century, a kind of gesture towards universality, connecting and illuminating something that is fundamental to the human experience that I have and the human experience that Plato had. That empirically proven capacity to speak to many people across different time periods, across differing historical circumstances is one of the characteristics of a classic. It does mean that it's much easier to tell if an old book meets this criterion than a new book, right? And I don't think we are good at figuring out what will be the texts from today that are going to continue to be relevant and speak to people in that unimaginable future. There is also their complexity. They’re multivocal. They have this ideological and human complexity to them that makes them resistant to ideological takeover. You can't just deploy them as tools of indoctrination. They also tend to be demanding and to reward effort. That is, they are rich in a way that you can chew them, you can discuss them, you can think about them and they keep giving. Having said all that, you could not come up with a list of, these are it, these are the classics. I think that category is one that one is always reassessing, one is always rethinking. And that's OK. I don't think we need to have an investment in a particular set of texts as being the ones.KHALID: So, there are a couple of things that are coming to my mind, actually, as you're speaking about this, which is, the conversation about what makes a classic, the ability to speak to several generations and across identity markers in a particular time. Somehow, as you're talking about it (and I don't know why I haven't thought about this before), but it's kind of a no-brainer that these are texts that are produced out of moments of cultural contact, cultural clashes, cultural exchange, right? You talk about Gandhi. Even Gandhi — people like to think about him as this Hindu, ascetic figure, but his intellectual development is deeply informed, like you said, by the Western tradition and a deep reading of key Western thinkers, while also incorporating Eastern philosophy. What stands out in terms of classics is that they're often born out of this need to contend with different cultural influences. Can you speak more to that?MONTÁS: The way that the human mind works is by pollination and cross-pollination, and great moments of cultural transformation are always the product of incorporating the new, incorporating what is alien, incorporating what challenges preconceived paradigms. You know, you might add that as another characteristic of classics, right? That they're often texts that are produced in the crux of large conflicts. The writer couldn't sleep well, and you may not be able to sleep well after you read them. They're somehow contending with and incorporating newness into a new way of seeing the world. You can’t have great literature without conflict, and you can't have great philosophy without argument. One thinks of Hegel's notion that history and thought proceeds through this agonistic context between one proposition and its opposite and then finding a synthesis, finding a way — a larger understanding that incorporates without negating, incorporates both, incorporates the opposition. There may be an instructive lesson there in the so-called “Canon Wars,” and I wouldn't be the first one to point out that one way to approach it is to teach the war, is to teach the conflict. You know, people are fighting over what should we teach? That itself becoming an object of instruction. Let's look at why we fight over these texts. What is it in them? And that, of course, means that we have to read the texts, but it also means that sometimes we read the texts in order to refute them. We certainly cannot refute Plato if we don't read Plato. Though I have read many an undergraduate paper that tries to do that.KHALID: Well, you know the crunch of time and the deadline can produce great genius. So we're right now getting to the heart of what troubles me these days. I find so much of the push for diversity — which I'm in favor of. I think contending with difference, engaging with difference is a useful exercise and one that we should push our students to do. But then we're in this moment where I find that the push for diversity is simultaneously pushing out these texts that are produced out of precisely that kind of deep conflict and deep contention with difference. And so it's doing a disservice to these students to not read them. But how do we talk to people when they fundamentally disagree with the very basis of what we consider knowledge?MONTÁS: This worries me a lot too: this, I think, facile rejection of the tradition because it's not representative because, you know, it doesn't have my voices in it, it doesn't have any Dominicans in it. The facile rejection of the tradition simply on identitarian grounds. And along with that comes this intellectually condescending attitude that says that, say, young people today who come from a diversity of backgrounds can only relate to texts in which they find these particular aspects of their identity that in our cultural moment are marginalized. Only through those can they connect authentically with a text. It is such an epistemologically reductive, almost violent, assumption to make. Sure, those aspects will speak very powerfully to them. But those aspects are not the only ones in their identity that matter and that matter to them. And in fact, those aspects only gain significance in the context of a broader humanity, in the context of a broader commonality. There is a kind of pernicious logic that says in order to acknowledge and honor and recognize our diversity, we have to reject the canon, we have to not read that and instead read this other thing. In fact, what we need to do is to read both. What we need to understand is that the canon now incorporates diversity. The canon now reflects a different set of voices, a different set of concerns, a different historical consciousness. And that has to be part of what we study. And we then study the canon because it is the antecedent. It is the ground from which this new thing emerges. It is the ground from which our concern and valuing of diversity emerges. It is the ground from which our tools with which we fight for social justice and equality emerge. The idea that we all deserve a voice in the conversation, that idea itself emerges from this tradition. When people are arguing for a diversification of the canon, they're often actually arguing for a presentist view of the canon. That is, they're actually arguing for us to merely read or study a material that has been produced in the last 60 or 70 years, and it's just not sufficient for a full education.KHALID: Well, I mean, I couldn't agree more. As an historian, I feel like, in part, we are at this moment where we have an inability to appreciate these texts precisely because we've stopped valuing history and engaging with history. And then you also lose the ability to appreciate what you can gain from it, from studying it. MONTÁS: Yeah. Yeah.KHALID: And so, you do get into a very present-focused way of interpreting the world, which also becomes more and more literal-minded because you lose the appreciation of context for understanding something. All you know is the present context, and you evaluate everything by it. Roosevelt, what are some of the books that have spoken to you, perhaps even early on in your experience of coming to the U.S.? What were the texts that spoke to you and why?MONTÁS: When I came to the United States, it was into the seventh grade and I didn't speak English. So I went into the New York City public school system and did two years in bilingual education with a heavy focus on English as a second language, but taking my subjects in Spanish.  History and science and math were in Spanish. By the time I was a sophomore, my English was barely good enough to read a grown up book in English. And I found, outside of my house in Queens, next door neighbors were throwing away a bunch of books. Among them, I picked up a collection called The Last Days of Socrates. It had Socratic dialogues: “The Apology,” the “Phaedo,” the “Crito.” Dialogues that deal with the last days of Socrates’ life, including his defense before an Athenian jury. That book was really profoundly transformative for me. And one of the things that it opened for me was a way of understanding myself in this broader context. See, I was aware of the kind of cultural deprivation — that I was poor. We didn't speak English. We didn't have education. They don't understand the world, the grown-ups around me. So I was conscious of this kind of poverty that extended beyond material poverty, which I absolutely was experiencing as well. Reading Socrates and Plato just gave me this window into a kind of wealth, a kind of dignity, a kind of identity that was not dependent on my material resources, a kind of value. Another text that I discuss at some length is St. Augustine, and in particular, the text that I read as a first year at Columbia, The Confessions, which is a spiritual autobiography where Augustine tells the story of how he became a Christian — of how he, through philosophy, came to a kind of higher conception of life and of the ultimate good that for him led him to Christianity. And I encountered that book at a time where I was myself grappling with questions of faith, with meaning, with: Is there a God? Is there evil? Why is there evil? What am I? Am I a Christian, am I what? And St. Augustine was the first believer I had met who was also a serious intellectual. And those two things in my mind could not coexist before. You were either a rational materialist or you were a blind-faith believer. So, he was the first time where I saw an intellectual inquiry with integrity into questions of faith. Interestingly, you know, I didn't walk away from Augustine converted to Christianity like he did, but I walked away from Augustine converted to the life of the mind. These are texts that were utterly meaningful to me, that in some ways set the course of my life. And they were not texts that dealt with the particularity of my experience. On the contrary, they were texts that dealt with the universality of my experience. The texts that really made the difference were these texts that allowed me to connect to something bigger, deeper, longer, older than my own experience and that in some way cut my experience down to size rather than enlarge it.KHALID: I love the way you spoke about how it kind of cut you down to size. So much of the discourse today is about navel gazing and making us bigger than who we are. But so much of our meaning making is, I think, generative when we see ourselves as part of a tradition or part of a bigger whole, as opposed to seeing ourself as the whole. I can imagine a sophomore in high school who is not very comfortable with English finding this text of Socrates’ last days. That could not have been an easy or a comfortable read. I assume it would be difficult. It took you a while to engage and contend with, and it probably also produced lots of moments of discomfort. And one of the things you said earlier about what qualifies as a classic is that the text is rewarding. MONTÁS: Yeah.KHALID: Perhaps, if I'm not mistaken, you're referring to persisting through the discomfort it makes you feel at various levels and then finding it to be worthwhile.MONTÁS: One of the revelations was that as hard as it was — as hard as it was to read it in English — it was not beyond me. There were ideas there that made sense to me. And even as a sophomore in high school, I felt the miracle of that. I felt the extraordinariness of that: that this thing that is high culture and complex philosophy and stands as some kind of pinnacle of cultural prestige, this is no big deal. I can read this. This is not beyond me. So this is a text that I teach every summer. I teach high school students who come from low income families and hope to be the first one in their families to attend college. Every summer, I teach a course for students in that demographic, and this is one of the texts I teach them. And it's something I see happening to them every single year where they are awakened to the fact that these ancient texts actually speak to them. These ancient texts are actually accessible to them. They actually have things to tell them, and they have things to respond. They are not beyond them. Another thing that it did for me was open a set of inquiries, made me ask questions, made me look things up. The things that were impenetrable to me turned out to actually be doors and windows through which I would travel. I've experienced it and I see it happening every year when I teach these high school students this text and texts like it.KHALID: Thank you so much. It was wonderful to have this conversation with you. Thank you for joining us.MONTÁS: Thank you, Amna. KHALID: If you like what you heard today and want more thought provoking content, please become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get transcripts, full interviews, and bonus segments. And before I sign off, I have a request: Please comment, rate, and share what you've heard here today. Our success here at Booksmart depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And I am Amna Khalid. Bye now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe