RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York City

‘I knew I was going to drop a grenade in the meeting,” says Roosevelt Montás, with a smile, during a conversation in his office in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 7. He’s referring to an address he gave four years ago in Aspen, Colo., to a gathering of presidents and provosts from colleges and universities. He delivered a message that they probably didn’t want to hear.

“Our students often seem ill informed about the implications of their own political positions and are drawn, unthinkingly, into illiberal and bigoted stances,” said Montás in Aspen. “Our undergraduate curricula have not been educating our students for the life of free citizenship.” He excoriated his audience of left-leaning academics for their abandonment of the old-fashioned liberal arts.

Montás made his remarks behind closed doors. (He prepared a text, but apparently there’s no recording.) Word of his performance nevertheless spread. Eventually he came to the attention of a top editor at Princeton University Press. “I kept hearing his name,” says Peter Dougherty, now editor at large there.

The two men met for lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, where they hatched a plan for Montás to write about his beliefs in a book that is one part autobiography and one part polemic — and whose recent publication marks the rise of a powerful and unexpected voice on behalf of liberal-arts learning. At a time when many of the loudest voices in higher education condemn everything traditional as a manifestation of systemic racism and regard the canon of great books as the polluted products of dead white men, Montás offers a simple but disarming counterclaim: “I’m not the face of white supremacy.”

The 48-year-old Montás was born in the Dominican Republic. He was named after his father, who in turn was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The moniker is unusual for a Dominican, and hard to pronounce in Spanish, sounding like “Rusbel.” Yet it pointed to the boy’s future in the United States. Shortly before his twelfth birthday, Montás left his rural home in the Caribbean and moved to New York City, joining his mother in Queens. When he arrived, he spoke no English.

Nearly four years later, something remarkable happened. Montás described the moment in his new memoir: “Next door to us lived a friendly elderly couple who didn’t speak Spanish and with whom, therefore, we hardly had any interaction. One evening that winter, on a garbage night, those cordial Americans rid themselves of a big pile of books, putting them out on the curb for the sanitation truck to pick up early the next morning.”

These were “Harvard Classics” — hardcovers with shiny golden edges, and part of a series that sought to embody the best of Western literature and philosophy. Stunned that anyone would throw away such handsome books, Montás went outside for a closer look. He recognized a name: Plato. He grabbed the volume and returned to the warmth of his apartment. The moment became a metaphor: “In ways that I could not have understood, before me was the treasure I had come to America to find.” The scene provided a title for his book, Rescuing Socrates.

From there, his story unfolds like a Horatio Alger story, if Horatio Alger were a public intellectual. Shortly after Montás retrieved Plato from the trash, a teacher spotted him reading the book in the hallways of John Bowne High School. They formed a bond, and the teacher encouraged Montás to think about pursuing an education beyond high school. The young man’s test scores didn’t suggest the Ivy League, but a program for promising low- income students helped Montás win admission to Columbia University, which is one of the few schools to have maintained a core curriculum based on the great books. He wasn’t seeking that variety of education, but that’s what he received. “My experience was transformative,” he says.

As he read Homer, Dante, and others, Montás awakened to a world of ideas and decided to major in comparative literature. Rather than earning his diploma and moving into the workforce, however, he stayed on at Columbia for a master’s degree and then a doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on conceptions of a creedal nationhood in the 19th century. As he worked on it, he became an American citizen. “The personal question behind that study was: How is it that I am American? What kind of nation is this? I used to be Dominican and now I’m American without stopping being Dominican.”

These are the types of questions that a liberal-arts education is supposed to encourage — and in Rescuing Socrates, Montás takes readers on a tour of the books and authors who have shaped him. Plato lies at the heart of his story, and he also describes in detail his encounters with Saint Augustine, Sigmund Freud, and Mahatma Gandhi.

His dissertation won the Bancroft Award in 2004. This was an excellent start for a budding scholar, but Montás had misgivings. “I felt I was being railroaded into a career I wasn’t sure I wanted to have,” he says. “I didn’t know what kind of career I wanted to have, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to have a standard academic career in which I specialized and spent my time writing for other specialists and pursuing narrow questions.”

The one thing he knew was that he wanted to teach. And that’s what he did, never leaving Columbia. He’s never worked full time anywhere else. By 2008, he was both teaching in Columbia’s core-curriculum program and running the program as an administrator. Today, he’s a “senior lecturer” but not a “professor.” He doesn’t have tenure, nor is he eligible for it. “This is a tension in the research university,” he says. “There isn’t a good career for a person who wants to be a teacher.”

His career choice is a paradox: In avoiding specialization, he has specialized in the broad category of general education. Now he’s an evangelist for it. “I’m out to persuade colleges to organize curricula in which every student gets the liberal arts,” says Montás.

He has chosen a hard time for this, as education increasingly focuses on the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. Yet to pit STEM courses against the liberal arts is to miss the point, according to Montás. “Often the debate is framed as either you study the liberal arts or you study something that is practical,” says Montás. “My argument and vision of education is that studying the liberal arts is the basis for a more effective practical training. Doctors, engineers, and computer programmers should have a liberal education and perform their specialized function with a broader conception of what they are doing in society, in history, and in the world.”

A common complaint contends that a liberal-arts education is a luxury good for a privileged class. “The critiques that I began to hear — the canon as somehow retrograde, morally tainted, and unrepresentative of the diversity that we value — those critiques were so at odds with my experience,” says Montás, who insists that the liberal arts belong even in trade schools. Imagine a mechanic who studies to fix fuel-injection systems and transmissions. “There is a role for liberal education in there,” says Montás. “You should understand something about what the automobile has done to society. You should think about fossil fuels, the oil industry, and the environment. People who are training in those fields have the intellectual tools and capacities to engage in this kind of reflection.”

A related allegation involves race and ethnicity — and the conviction that non-white students can’t relate to the classics of Western civilization. Montás scoffs at this: “It’s the same kind of thinking that says Shakespeare somehow will be more suitable for my wife, a white woman, than for me.” I say that the charge sounds like what George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Montás nods in approval: “I often use that phrase.”

Montás doesn’t make a habit of quoting Republicans. He regards himself as a political progressive, even though his allies on curricular questions tend to be conservatives. “The academic Left has ceded the canon to the Right, to its great detriment,” he says. He points to the example of Martin Luther King Jr., who in the early 1960s took a break from his civil-rights activism to teach a philosophy course at Morehouse College, a historically black school in Atlanta and his alma mater. “What does he teach them?” asks Montás. “He teaches them a great-books course, starting with Plato and Aristotle.” The syllabus also included Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. “King understands his own struggle for freedom, civil rights, and equality as emerging out of this tradition,” says Montás. “Progressive academic ideology, which has in practice cut off students from this tradition of political reflection and debate, has not left students with a viable humanistic alternative. What you get instead is identity-based, what sometimes is called ‘grievance studies.’”

When given a real choice, most students prefer the traditional route, says Montás. He ought to know, as he teaches not only Columbia’s undergrads during the academic year but also low-income high-school students during the summer. With the high schoolers, he always starts with Plato: “It sets up the life of the mind, the philosophic life, the pursuit of virtue, and the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living.” Then he moves through a familiar syllabus, including a famous passage from Leviathan in which Thomas Hobbes describes life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This is often their favorite text, says Montás. “Hobbes is real to them. His dark view of the realities of power, this dark sense of human beings as lusting for power and driven by self-interest — the one hypothesis I have is that this resonates with their experiences in the streets where the realities of power are nakedly in view.”

Students are fully capable of reading and understanding such works, says Montás. They even yearn for them: “In addition to the skills to get a good job, young people want an education in the arts of freedom. They want an education that takes their condition as free individuals who have to organize a life, an education that engages with the deeper questions of society and human existence. They want an education that allows them to think about what kind of life is most worth living. They crave that. It is not extraneous or frivolous work. It is quite compelling and interesting to them.”

One of the challenges of making the case for liberal-arts education, writes Montás in Rescuing Socrates, is that it has a branding problem because it combines “the political baggage of the word ‘liberal’ with the reputed uselessness of studying art.” Moreover, the people who understand it best are the ones who need it least: “People who haven’t had the experience don’t know what they’re missing.” Yet everyone stands to gain, he says in our interview: “Liberal education shakes you from your certainties. It encourages intellectual humility, a tentativeness and skepticism about simple truths and absolute certainties.”

He even sees the great books as a solution to the problem of political division in today’s United States. The great books are “a site for conversation and debate,” he says. “Forget about Supreme Court nominations and the Build Back Better bill, and let’s talk about fundamental ideas about the meaning of government and society, the great questions that we face together as human beings. It seems to me that there is a potential for the great books to have a bridging function in society, to restore the connective tissue of society.”

That sounds like it would require a massive salvage operation — but perhaps Montás already has gotten the relief effort under way.