Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 25

Popular Culture and
the Great Debate:
The Canon and The Comics
A specter is haunting faculty debates in colleges and
universities all around the nation. It is the specter of "the Core" or,
as it is sometimes called, "General Education"-- those basic courses
that every college graduate should take. But the debate does not stop
with just the courses; rather, it includes what the student should read
and ponder in those same courses. The extreme positions have been
well defined and publicized. On the one hand stands Allen Bloom,
author of The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom, with eloquence
and passion, argues the case for a narrowly defined "Great Books"
program anchored in Plato’s The Republic. On the other extreme
stand the stalwarts at Stanford whose motto is "Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western Civ. must go." To Bloom the basic truths are to be found in a
narrowly defined set of traditional texts; to the other extreme, those
"basic truths" are a set of ideas, goals, and values designed to insure
that western white males maintain their hegemony over minorities
both around the world and at home. While the typical university
campus will have representatives of both extremes, the real debate is
centered somewhere near the middle.
In the remainder of this space I would like to argue the case for
a fairly traditional core of courses with a reasonably traditional set
of texts. The basic reason for my traditionalism is deep-seated. I
believe that one goal of an American university is to point its
graduates in the direction of living a full life outside the university.
They can achieve this at a minimal level without knowing much
about the non-Western world. I do not think such a situation
desirable, but it is minimally acceptable. They cannot live such a life
without knowing what the American and Western experience is
about. This, I think, is beyond discussion. I also believe that one's
formal education is but a start down the road of learning, and I
believe that this start is best begun by acquiring a solid grounding in
one's own culture.
I received my undergraduate education at one the nation's lesser
bastions of the Liberal Arts, New Mexico A&M, now New Mexico