Great Books at Mercer

The history of Great Books at Mercer has always been a part of the larger history of Great Books Programs (See: "History of Great Books in Higher Education" for more). In 1983, while other schools were discussing innovation and change, Mercer was just beginning to implement a Great Books program similar to the original course offered by Erskine at Columbia. As students and faculty at schools like Stanford were protesting against  the Eurocentric nature of Great Books programs, Mercer was forming its own program.

According to the original 1983 program description, Mercer’s Great Books Program had a “two-fold premise… that a coherent body of important texts has shaped and still describes the western Judaeo-Christian tradition and that by reading, discussing, and writing about these classics, we can best discover our connection with this tradition.” The program’s original description further stated that it was “necessary that educated men and women know for themselves the ideas, the people, and the values that create our civilization and also understand how other traditions may differ from our own.” 

 This original description, and the program itself, remained largely unchanged until the early 2000s. At this point, the program description removed the reference to “Judaeo-Christianity,” but continued to refer to the “western tradition.”  Notably, though the program no longer explicitly mentions Christianity, the texts on the reading list remain largely Christian, as they have been since the program began at Mercer. This indicates that although the program's advertising changed, its substance remained unchanged. In other words, Mercer's Great Books program is just as focused on Christianity as it was when it began in 1983, it simply no longer advertises this Christian emphasis.

Despite the overall programmatic consistency, individual faculty members are given limited freedom within their courses. Mercer’s Great Books Program has some room for creativity built into its structure: professors must teach at least 80% of the assigned reading list for their course, but they are free to include up to 20% noncanonical texts. Unfortunately, there is no record of the movement of books from a professor’s noncanonical course inclusions to the official curriculum, so it is difficult to gauge how the curriculum has changed over time. It would be interesting to see which, if any, of these "20%" books have become part of the official reading list.

As the figures above make clear, the reading list is intentionally localized in its focus on European authors. Mercer’s Great Books Program justifies its limited range of texts by claiming that “students must first master the tradition of the culture in which they participate before they can begin imaginatively to grasp other cultural traditions or before they can critically appropriate contemporary culture and its formative texts.” However, this explanation ignores the wide range of backgrounds Mercer students come from. The limited range of the program implies that Western Europe is the only tradition that influences Mercer students, disregarding the university’s multicultural student body and the global reality of the twenty-first century.

The Great Books Program purports to help students understand how the “ideas of the past have formed our twentieth and twenty-first century selves.” However, the program fails to acknowledge non-Western texts that have played an equally fundamental role in forming our modern, globalized world. As stated, the program description seems to assume that cultures cannot have any interactions and that they advance in isolation. In reality, twenty-first century historians understand that no culture exists in a vacuum and the relationship between different civilizations is far more complex. 

In this way, Mercer’s Great Books program fails to fulfil its stated goals. Rather than giving Great Books students a “good general education,” the program offers them an education in the ideas of male European authors. By leaving out the voices of women and non-European authors, the Great Books program cannot achieve its purpose. Where and how are Great Books students supposed to “imaginatively… grasp other cultural traditions” if they are not being exposed to them in class? And how can students understand their "twenty-first century selves" if they are only being exposed to texts from a small area of the world, as if European men can describe the entire human condition?

Not only does Mercer’s Great Books program fail to achieve its own goals, but the program also fails Mercer’s overall strategic goals. According to Mercer’s 10 Year Strategic Plan, the university wants to create “a diverse community of gifted scholars committed to changing the world.” Though this imperative indicates that Mercer prizes diversity, the Great Books program does not reflect this idea. Furthermore, Mercer is committed to  “being a place of discovery and innovation.” How can the Great Books Program innovate if it is committed to an outdated curriculum that was updated long ago at prestigious universities such as Columbia? 

The next of Mercer’s imperatives is “being a global university.” The current Great Books curriculum directly contradicts this goal by only educating students in Western ideas. Because the Great Books Program is an option for general education and Great Books professors have discretion over up to 20% of the material in their courses, Great Books students can theoretically graduate from Mercer having never read a text written by a woman or Black author. How can Mercer claim to be a “global university” when its Great Books students are only prepared to interact with Europe and the United States?

Mercer’s remaining strategic goals are “being relevant,” “competing with the best,” and “being true to our heritage.” In 2020, when the best universities in the country offer Great Books-inspired courses with diverse reading lists, Mercer cannot afford to fall behind. Mercer has a long tradition of self-reflection and change. For example, we are proud, with good reason, to be the first university in Georgia to voluntarily integrate. We need to uphold this tradition of committing to diversity and innovation by leading the way with a new, global Great Books Program. Not only would this reimagined Global Great Books Program synthesize with the goals of Mercer’s newly created Office of Diversity and Inclusion, but it would also allow Mercer to truly fulfil the university’s stated goals and live up to its proud heritage. 

With a Global Great Books Program, Mercer would become a standard of innovation for other schools struggling with their desire to teach the classics in a way that recognizes the diverse reality of twenty-first century students. Furthermore, as outlined in "Question and Methods" and "Results," this reimagined program would better fulfil the desires of Mercer students.