Harpham

In his Nov. 13 campus lecture, Geoffrey Harpham, the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor and director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, spoke to an audience that included M.H. Abrams, Cornell’s Class of 1916 Professor of English Literature Emeritus.

The lecture was based on material from Harpham’s upcoming book, “The Humanities and the American Difference,” which explains how the modern humanities reflect American self-understanding.

Harpham made a distinction between the curricula of the post-World War II American education system and the curricula of other countries. Whereas many countries base their system of higher education on the needs of professions, he said, the modern American system is based on political and moral commitments.

According to Harpham, this distinction can be traced back to the traditions of early colonial settlers such as the Puritans, whose Protestant beliefs emphasized an individual relationship with God and variant interpretations of the Bible. These beliefs, though soon to give way to more secular sensibilities, created a high demand for literacy, which gave rise to widespread printing.

“Readers were invited to form their own opinions,” Harpham said. “The leading revolutionaries were men of letters. They received an education that prepared them for insurrection.”

Quoting 18th-century author and political theorist Edmund Burke, Harpham noted that the settlers, through their history of persecution under the British monarchy and clergy, were hostile to government and had a “violent devotion to freedom.”

The colonists were intelligent and sophisticated about British law and recognized that waves of opinion could only be turned by counter-waves, he said. England, which was known to value free thought, would have fought their own heritage if they opposed the colonists.

“Colonial education gave rise to a ‘lawyered-up’ people,” said Harpham, who characterized the Revolutionary War as a war over “legitimacy of dissenting opinion” and the “right to one’s own view.”

Harpham went on to describe the U.S. Constitution as a “malleable” document open to interpretation and rejected the notion that the meaning of the Constitution was determined by the intentions of the framers, an idea James Madison himself rejected.

“The framers embraced infinite interpretability,” he said.

However, Harpham said interpretation requires an alert, informed and interpretively competent public.

“Democratic society is knit together by a collective commitment to argumentation and persuasion,” he said.

Harpham concluded by characterizing humanities education as instrumental in informing students of these rules and assumptions through a curriculum that emphasizes evaluation, judgment and argument for one’s views; skills necessary to be a “responsible private spirit.”

Harpham’s lecture, “The Pryvat Spyrit of America, from Dissent to Interpretation,” was presented by the Cornell Department of English. The M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss ’57 in honor of M.H. Abrams.

Mark Kasvin '16 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.