New Course to Be Based On Faculty Consensus On "Top 10 Books"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Kenneth Dauber, professor and chair of the University at Buffalo Department of English, surveyed more than 2,100 of his fellow faculty members at the University at Buffalo this past summer.

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, Shakespeare'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 seven 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 incorporates 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.

Civic religion, forsooth? Works by Shakespeare were listed three times more often than the Bible. When individual Shakespearean plays were counted as separates works, however, the Bible was cited more frequently than any other book.

• The only female author who showed up on the lists consistently was Jane Austen.
• The faculties whose choice of authors demonstrated the most similar values were those from the humanities, medicine and natural sciences. Social-sciences faculty members were the odd profs out.
• 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."
• The UB Department of English historically has been a hotbed of radicalism, but Clemens Hall may be a nest of crypto-Whiggery as well. Laissez-faire economist Adam Smith turned up twice as frequently as Karl Marx on lists returned by English professors. In every department but English, Marx beat Adam Smith two to one.
• Besides Freud and Darwin, the most popular science texts cited were Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" and Watson and Crick's "The Double Helix."
• The most commonly cited African-American author was Ralph Ellison, followed by W.E.B. Dubois.
• In the area of modern foreign literature, faculty members from virtually all departments most frequently listed Dosteovsky, Tolstoy, Marquez and Cervantes among their top-10 authors. The favorite choice of faculty members from the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, however, was Go‘the.
• In a similar vein, the Shakespearean play cited most frequently by non-English department faculty was "Hamlet." The English department faculty members most frequently listed "King Lear." A promise is a promise, said Dauber. It is the young Dane who made the list.
• The most popular philosophers listed after Plato were Aristotle and Descartes. "This surprised me, given UB's reputation as a seat of postmodernist thought," Dauber said. "There was no consensus on Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell, Lyotard -- actually on no one born after 1596.

"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 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 also were 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."