He planned to develop an undergraduate course based on their responses and asked them to list the 10 literary works they would most like their own children to have read by the time they finished college.
When the answers were collated and boiled down to a list of the 10 most frequently cited works, they all turned out to be by dead white men.
Dauber said, "Pace to Aristotle on man being a political animal, my guess is that thinking about what we'd want our children to read turns us back to a response more primal than political.
"On the other hand," he said, "more political types might counter that, after all, our faculty is comprised principally of live white men."
Also surprising: With the exception of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," there are no works authored between the second century A.D. and 1776 and none from this century.
As promised, Dauber will teach an English course that incorporates the list arrived at by faculty consensus in the Spring 1997 semester. The course, English 214, is titled "The Top 10 Books" and will be taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30-11 a.m.
The 10 works on the reading list are Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams"; Darwin's "Origin of the Species"; the Bible, Shake-speare's "Hamlet"; Dickens' "Great Expectations"; Plato's "Republic"; Homer's "Iliad" or "Odyssey"; Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"; a unit combining the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and a yet-to-be-selected Tolstoy novel.
While students will be required to read only 7 of the 10, all of the books will be taught by Dauber, along with faculty members who specialize in various authors or periods.
Dauber added that the responses to his survey indicated an unexpected passion for novels and, "despite all the polemic of the past several years, demonstrated a strong sense of shared culture. These books communicate what it is we want to transmit to our children and-in loco parentis-to our students."
But didn't anything that we value happen between the second century A.D. and the late 1700s? Anything in this century worth relishing?
"Well, as keepers of the sacred flame, I guess that the faculty consider these texts the best vehicles for the ideas they'd like to see passed on," Dauber noted. "It's as if the other centuries didn't exist, especially our own!
"I think we got what we asked for here, though," he added, "and that is a list of books that incorporate the ideas and values that an educated person living in America in the late 20th century would like to be conveyed to the next generation. The choices were somewhat surprising to me in total, but we'll go with the list we came up with here. Students who haven't been introduced to these books will find them good company."
Beyond the "winners" of the survey, faculty members' responses revealed anomalies galore. Odd alliances of taste and values could be discerned among members of the various faculties and professional schools.
Some of the surprises found by Dauber in collating his 10 best:
75 percent of books listed by humanities professors were literary texts
84 percent of those listed by biomedical science professors were literary texts
66.6 percent of the books listed by natural scientists were literary texts.
In comparison, only 25 percent of books listed by social scientists were literary texts. "Social scientists apparently are different animals," said Dauber. "I literally had never heard of the authors on many of their lists."
Were there any criticisms from the faculty about the idea of compiling such a list?
"Oh, well, yes, of course!" Dauber said. "Yes! One serious objection was that the English Department was being imperialistic by proclaiming that it would teach whatever the faculty wanted. I agree and hope that every serious discipline would be similarly imperialistic."
Another critic said that the survey itself promotes the idea that books are central to education.
"This is a legitimate point," Dauber said. "After all, there are many, many ways of educating. In this case we asked only for books."
"There were also objections to the fact that any instructor who undertook to teach this course would have to teach outside the area of his or her area of expertise.
"It's true that professors tend not to be experts on Melville and Tolstoy and Freud and Plato and Darwin and Dickens and Shakespeare. I expect to mitigate the consequences of that by bringing in faculty experts to lecture the class on several of the books discussed," Dauber said.
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