Axon - Great Books in Military Education - Ep11 Published June 15, 2023 Air University Teaching and Learning Center The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency. Dr. Megan Hennessey Welcome to the Axon podcast. This is the official podcast of the Air University Teaching and Learning Center, and I'm your host Dr. Megan Hennessey. I'm here today with an old colleague from the Army War College, Dr. Abram Trosky. Dr. Trosky holds a master’s degree in Western Classics from St. John's College and a PhD in Political Science from Boston University. He is a former lecturer at the US Coast Guard Academy and now serves as Professor of Communicative Arts at the US Army War College. Hey, Abram! Dr. Abram Trosky Hey, Megan. Thanks for having me. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yeah, of course. We're here today to talk about something that you are a subject matter expert in considering your master’s degree in classics and that is a Great Books curriculum. So, can you start off just telling us a little bit about what that actually is for those who don't know? Dr. Abram Trosky Sure. So, the great books was the go-to for liberal arts education in this country, the UK, and beyond for a good long time. And it’s sort of ebbed and flowed since, the idea being that the cannon of largely western texts are taught — there's not agreement about that cannon, but the general idea is that there's sort of a greatest hits from the Greeks to the 20th century, and that crosses disciplinary boundaries from poetry, literature, into philosophy, theology, and science and mathematics, if you’re at a place like St. John's, but not always in the humanities- based programs where you find it and there are pockets doing this all over the country and the world. But as far as I know, not in professional military education. So, that's part of the impetus for bringing it to the War College. Dr. Megan Hennessey In a time when many civilian higher education organizations are scaling back on the liberal arts, why do you think it's important for military education to make the space for this type of curriculum? Dr. Abram Trosky Well, part of the reason is the joint learning outcomes and learning areas that dictate our curricula, that's down to the course level. But even the institutional learning objectives and outcomes for the Army War College include strategic and critical thinking and communication. So, there's a first good, right there — that in discussing these texts, the students are demonstrating critical analytical and synthetic skills in their discussion and writing. But there's also an ante up on the Socratic inquiry and dialogue that characterizes most seminars of the Carlisle experience at the War College. And then there's the application piece, which is not unique necessarily to the liberal arts, but the ability to take these texts, and the themes therefrom, and apply them to contemporary challenges of democratic governance, national security, strategy, policy, and the profession of arms is really core to what we say we do. Dr. Megan Hennessey Is that a hard sell for the students and maybe also for decision-makers and even your pure faculty members at the War College? Is it a hard sell to get people interested in this sort of class? Dr. Abram Trosky Not in my experience, but the class does predate my experience, so I'll share what I do know: there was a great books course before I came in 2019 that Dr. Andrew Hill had introduced and taught with Dr. Jackie Whitt, now US State Department. I had “taken notes” off their FY20 curriculum and so it's something of—there's some continuity there; about half the texts are the same. I know their enrollment was double digits, which for electives like that in our institution, is good (they run with six or more, and are often capped at 15, and sometimes fewer). And so, in my experience, that's kind of a magic number for discussion. You don't want too many more than 15, even with two facilitators. But the demand signal, if you like, since I took the reins, has been similarly strong: we had double digits. We've had a few turn into audits and, maybe that was something they signaled might happen because of the reading load, but in addition to those eight now enrollees, there's faculty—interested faculty and staff who attend, which is encouraging. You know that the diversity of the interest—from the PAO office to the library to the chaplaincy—is really strong, and that says something about, I think, the durability, the continuing relevance of great books. Dr. Megan Hennessey Do you think it's also helpful that it's something different from what the students usually read in terms of policy documents or theory? Is it just the novelty that also is appealing? Dr. Abram Trosky Maybe, yeah; I think in some ways the type the student, speaking from my own group this year, they seem somewhat self-selecting in that they're in it for more: they're in—they were selected to attend a senior service college and they're getting all of the things they were promised that checked the necessary boxes for their advancement in the profession. But for some of these folks who have been teachers themselves, in some cases, or high-level civilians, or just wanted something more like a traditional master’s program, or what they thought of as a, say, humanities-based master’s program at a civilian institution, there is a certain draw there, and that's novel within PME. I think in some ways, to your earlier point, it's novel to gravitate towards the liberal arts in an era in which STEM education and professional education and applied and occupational forms of education have really gotten the spotlight— everywhere from the State of the Union Address down to S.T.E.A.M. classes in K –12, there's a lot of talk about—and important talk—about science and engineering and the arts, sometimes making into that conversation. But only rarely do I hear advocacy for the humanities as just as important, especially in an era of partisan polarization, where there's an acknowledgement that the training you get in liberal arts is what feeds into good citizenship—specifically, a kind of civic fluency and understanding of how deliberation happens, but also a knowledge of the historical context in which our legal system emerged and a lot of the ethical dilemmas that we have to navigate have already been thought through in various contexts and navigated. Dr. Megan Hennessey I think you're making a very strong case. So, as you know, this is a a research-based podcast. What does the research say? You filled us in a little bit on what the public discourse is all about. What do… is there any research do we know of that lets us defend the argument that this sort of curriculum belongs in professional military education? Dr. Abram Trosky Well, I'll show my weakness then as a humanity-centric teacher and scholar at the moment by not having the data you probably seek ready at hand. What I can point to is scholarship from Colombia by the head of a similar program there, and a product of the program there, Roosevelt Montas, who's an academic in his own right, an administrator, and a great books champion. He’s made the point that part of the reason for the decline has been a misperception that the Western cannon, The Great Books, is a sort of whig history, you know, that it doesn't represent the changing demographics of higher education and I sort of agree with his opinion. This is just a data point, but it is born of many years of experience in his work in the Higher Ed Opportunity Program, HEOP at Columbia. He sees this as something of a condescension—the idea that students of color can only learn from authors of color may not give them enough credit. The liberal arts actually, for him anyway, were transformative. They were what allowed him to join the community of letters and that's why he has passionately carried that torch ever since. So there, in that book that's one half autobiographical, and it may seem anecdotal, but he again and again in that book attest to the success of the program in his lived experience of turning these HEOP students who feel like somewhat outsiders when they come in, into just Columbia students—graduates who have all of the high-level, Ivy League skills and and competencies and confidence that he himself gained. And he attributes some, but not all of that to the program—to the point where he actually forgets who was even in that program and not. So as far as success of these not uncommon programs goes—that is, programs like the Posse Foundation that are geared towards student retention, retention of groups from underrepresented and historically marginalized communities in higher ed—that's a really great track record that that program, which is a continuation of a program that started in 1919 for largely for Eastern European Jewish students, and is still going strong. Dr. Megan Hennessey What you just said reminds me of some great work that Dr. Elizabeth Samet has done at West Point in terms of how liberal arts curriculum can help influence leadership, skills development, and communication skills development, which I know is your area of forte, and her argument is that you need to cast your net widely, especially as a military officer to have, you know, this heuristic framework that helps you make decisions that even if you haven't lived that experience yourself before you've read about it, you've experienced it through someone else. Is that something that you've seen in terms of teaching your elective? Dr. Abram Trosky Yes, I think so and I'll share one way in which this is borne out. So, frequently in offering a class in our unique environment of professional military education, you're required to say that your square peg fits in the round hole of strategic leadership, even if that's not exactly what you came into it thinking you're teaching. And this is partly statutory, partly perhaps accreditation, partly just institutional inertia, but it actually turns out, in my experience, that if you're making the case that reading about figures, say a military officer navigating their turbulent time and trying to understand class, and how he fits into his society, that a lot of the challenges, a lot of the decisions are certainly relevant to parts of the curriculum you would encounter elsewhere, say in the Department of Command Leadership and Management’s Strategic Leadership Course. There's also the ethical part—the fact that we have two lessons devoted to ethics at present count, one of them the profession of arms, one of them, Law of War, sometimes they're taught together, but there isn't really a lot of curricula that I've seen—and now I'm speaking in the plural, but I should limit my observation to the War College in my time here in the past five years—there isn't a lot about moral judgment, about ethical decision making in context. And so I made the case in pitching the course that two recent authors, including Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, have argued that, reading a text and writing a text, it's almost like the characters are an artificial intelligence. They're an entity we can bounce these scenarios off of and see what happens in a way that does inform our lived experience. I think what he actually did, with a recent book about an AI nanny, but he was speaking more broadly about what it's like to use the medium as a place to test ideas. So, maybe that's a reach for an empirical dimension of a non-empirical discipline, but he's not the only great recent author to make that analogy. Characters take on their own life, authors will tell you, but for readers, there's also a way in which this is a safe way to test your own propositions. That's not just fiction either; think of Thucydides—the way that he writes history puts you front row to these years of decisions that led to a war that everybody wanted to avoid, but you are really in the room listening to the arguments. I mean, that's his style of history as he recounts speeches, as best he can, word for word, so that you're forced as a reader to ask, “Well, what would I do” or “What's likely; what's the probable outcome?” That is a kind of hypothesis-testing and that is useful, I think, for the practical challenges that many of these strategic-level thinkers and staff and future decision-makers will be encountering and will be using. Dr. Megan Hennessey I love that. I would never have thought of that myself in terms of this comparison to the scientific method. Is there, you know, bearing this out a little bit further, is there any criticism, then, because the end is known, there is a conclusion for each of these works, does that sort of harm your analogy in any way? Dr. Abram Trosky Not really, because even in studying history, of course, we know how these end, but there is the facticity of counterfactuals, meaning they don't exist, and they never will, so we can't test them empirically. But it's in the very asking that we're in a way, doing a kind of philosophy—the hypothetical, “if this would have happened, then this would have been likely,” is still a data point for contemporary decision-makers and that's irrespective of outcome. But the quality of those analogies and the arguments made, I would argue, is still dependent on the rudiments of the education that we're reinvigorating at the senior service level. Specifically, in a Socratic seminar, you’re forced to make evidence-based arguments, you're forced to disagree civilly, and back up your points with data and respectfully disagree and make counter arguments. And that “habit of mind”, if you like, is at play very much in the Great Book seminar. So, it's almost like, medium agnostic, material agnostic. It's a place to test those same skills. It just so happens that the media, if you like these texts, are entertaining in a way that you're kind of doing the “both/and” that people may not necessarily know that they're taking the medicine of having yet a second seminar where they're being forced to do hypothesis-testing or asked to do hypothesis testing; it just kind of happens naturally because arguably, the reason the books endure is there isn't a settled interpretation of the conclusion you mentioned. Meaning, “OK, we know how it ends,” but what does it mean? Dr. Megan Hennessey I love that. I love it so much. You mentioned these studies. What are some of the other titles that you read in the class? Dr. Abram Trosky Oh, so I should clarify, that's a great reference point that comes from the core curriculum. But, I actually start with Homer's Iliad, and this was maybe a big selling point because it's the oldest written text in the in the cannon in the Western Cannon. But it was resurrected by Dr. Jonathan Shay in the context of understanding moral injury in his landmark book, Achilles in Vietnam and then again in his sequel, Odysseus in America, which are not works of fiction but are ways of understanding how talking through texts like these can be therapeutic for people who are asking those same big questions about the meaning of their service, so that was a logical place to start and a “sustain” from past years and what I would have chosen anyway. But I was adamant about including Plato's Republic as well, which was a sustain and a book that was hugely formative for me. So we go from poetry to philosophy proper, a book so relevant because its main theme, justice, takes the form of a debate about the role of the guardian class in a democracy and other regime types, and really tries to understand the same kind of challenges that are present in our contemporary balancing of civilian leadership and military. So, we do have females represented in the the cannon, which is not always the case. We read Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Women as well to represent the medieval period. And what I've done in each of these cases, I should add, is choose a complementary text for each of these, so I'm naming the main thing we read, but in the case of Pizan for example, the theme “Art, Science and Equality in Utopia”, means assigning these early utopian authors. I chose Francis Bacon this year, but it could as easily be Sir Thomas Moore's book of the same name, Utopia as a way of contrasting books even 100 years apart, but saying something similar—making, inviting similar observations about the era in which they emerged and applying them to today, as well as themes that were in previous texts of the Republic—flirtation with perfection in governance is one example of how utopia can be a garden path, if you like, to unforeseen consequences. In the case of Homer’s Iliad, we also read a comic, a comedy. This is the Lysistrata, which has been parodied recently in the the the movie Chi-Raq, a sex strike by women forces fighters to reevaluate the necessity of conflict. So, you can see in maybe both of these cases, the idea was to create a foil or have a second text to make the discussion a little bit, perhaps more relevant to the contemporary debates. There's a gendered component in two of the last four classes I mentioned, but there's also an explicit grappling with the significance of development, ethnicity, and race in service in the last two selections, which are Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks—stories of those who are serving who find themselves in an environment in which they have to ask the meaning of their service as it relates to the civilizing mission, if you like, especially in Conrad's case. So that pairing is with the Apocalypse Now Redux the rerelease of Coppola's masterpiece, which is really just like Conrad in Vietnam. I mean, that is Heart of Darkness. Dr. Megan Hennessey Abram, where is the Shakespeare? Dr. Abram Trosky OK, so I'm glad you asked. I just wanted to take a beat cause I know I’ve been rambling. I'm so excited about this lineup. So, we do—I didn't mention Lucretius; that was a skip; had to have a Roman in the mix—and of course yeah, we had to have a Shakespeare piece. So, rather than teaching The Tempest, which is something I had benefited from before but wanted to do something different, I chose the last in the Henriad, the Henry the Fifth, the place of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech that many people are familiar, but they might be less familiar with the account of the Battle of Agincourt there, which is a seminal moment in the discussion about law of war—specifically, immunity and the jus in bello component of what's permissible. And so that class has actually been postponed; it's now the capstone of the whole course, it's the last one we're going to discuss because of the persistence of COVID, but yes, we couldn't, I agree, it wouldn't be complete without Willie Shakes. We're ambitious in reading Don Quixote, no slouch; long text. But I thought that was really necessary to transition us to the modern era after Shakespeare— specifically, the quixotic nature of some imperial adventures. And to really drive that home, I paired Cervantes with Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote the tragedy of the Spanish Indies—the account of Columbus's expeditions there that is somewhat controversial. But this was more than a, you know, “person of color perspective” check box. This is actually trying to get into some of the difficult history of Western expansion and colonization that isn't really in the conversation anywhere, as far as I can tell, in the institution otherwise. I don't know about yours… Dr. Megan Hennessey Not that I know of, no. It it sounds like you have a full complement, but let me make an appeal: Richard III. Dr. Abram Trosky OK, you're not the first to mention and I would heartily entertain. Yeah, I mean, I like changing it up a little every year. So, our librarian who attends each time also said you should either read all of the Henrys or do Richard. Dr. Megan Hennessey Love it! So, I know, Abram because you're a friend, you're an old time colleague, that you have young children. Let me dive a little bit into the personal, if I can, because I, too, have very young kids. If you are a faculty member trying to undertake a Great Books course, you've got a lot on your plate. You’re trying to do teaching, service, and scholarship, how do you make the time? Do you have any life hacks for us in terms of keeping up with the reading? Dr. Abram Trosky Yeah, if there were only a hack, I tried like many, the speed-reading angle as an undergrad, which had diminishing returns and it may be worth mentioning since many people returning to the academic world, especially after time away in the professional world are wondering, “How am I supposed to pull this off?”—like, even the core curriculum, without loading on a Great Books elective. It's a lot of pages and you might be interested to know that the War College previously did recommend—in fact, my office facilitated, Communicative Arts facilitated a speed-reading course. It was voluntary, but they were making the case that everyone should take this, and I think that the fact that it has diminishing returns—specifically, when you're reading texts like Thucydides or any of the ones that I've mentioned. So, what I hear is the next best thing to reading it fast is reading it smart and we sometimes call this “predatory reading” in my corner. I don't know if that phrase is common there, but you can tell from the billing that you're–; it doesn't mean read everything, let alone anything, carefully. My argument when I teach a different course, The Art and Science of Effective Communication, is the judgment call of “What kind of text am I reading?” Is this written with the kind of thought that demands I digest it as if it's a conversation—I'm in conversation with the text? I can't read that, I shouldn't read that, predatorily because I won't get what I need from the text. The predatory approach assumes that there's a utilitarian relationship with the text; that may be true of a given article, or perhaps a book. But even the category of an essay, somebody who's put thought into a sustained argument, it usually means you're gonna miss something and usually it’s something important. You can get by in class. You can demonstrate “I read” with an asterisk, but you can't really get into the deep work of interrogating a text. And understanding the quality of the argument right down to the footnotes. If you just don't have time, back to your question; we're all in that position of not having time. I'm afraid that the tradeoff between sleep and reading for me, especially being a relatively slow reader, it just usually ends up being somewhat zero sum. I protect the three hours in the morning. Either from 4:00 to 7:00 or, less often, 5:00 to 8:00 to try to do some reading or writing. And that's the advice I got from my thesis advisor. And the only way I was able to complete a dissertation was venturing into parts of the day that I heard of but didn’t even know existed. Right? We don't even see a sunrise until we have kids, in some cases. I guess it's not a hack, but I'm fortunate to have a partner who's supportive of that professional obligation, and I’ve found ways to to give back in the evenings when I'm just not really going to retain the stuff anyway, if I'm going real late. So, that's me, but the listeners can write in. I'm still looking for that. Dr. Megan Hennessey That's hardcore for you. Get up at 4 AM and read. Dr. Abram Trosky I was up before 5:00 today, yeah, reading Montas, Roosevelt Montas, in preparation for our conversation. Dr. Megan Hennessey Ohh goodness. Well, good for you. Is there anything other than just blocking the time, being dedicated to the time to reading? Anything else that you want to share that you do to prepare for this course or things you would recommend for others thinking of a similar curriculum? Dr. Abram Trosky So, this is a heresy, but I'm going to share. What about audiobooks? This is nothing that a purist would have entertained, not least because it's only recently that we've had access to many of these books in that form, but if you think about it as: I was forced into asking these men and women who were taking my elective to read even more than they were already feeling burdened in reading; I offered, you know, Homer was spoken before he was written, and if you find a good translation and a good narrator, there's an argument that you're getting a more authentic experience of the Iliad than any reading. And I don't see why that argument ought to be restricted to that particular great book. So, the translator passes the check, and the narrator is not monotone—it's not a function where you load text into a robot reader. There's is an actor, essentially, on the other end—a voice actor delivering you the same text in a different way. To me, even though I'm a hardcore partisan of the relationship that I have with books, and I am besotted with books, I have to say my mind has been opened this year—somewhat forced open by the necessities of digesting a Don Quixote. Right? This is a 900-page book if, you're reading both parts. It's a 40-something hour listen, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe 39? But that's still no slouch, right? Still, putting in the work; the difference is there may be activities during the day, like maybe working out, where you can be doing both sides of the brain, right? It's not as if you're not engaging with the text. It just happens to be making it into your brain through your ears rather than through your eyes. Dr. Megan Hennessey Have you found that influences your recall? That's my problem. I can't remember as well. Dr. Abram Trosky Yeah, I'm the kind of reader who has a hard time not reading with a pen because it's the engagement with the text, even that highlighting that some academics say is useless, right? If you underline everything, it's like you underline nothing. But there's something about tracking with the eye and importantly, adding your own observations in the margin that is lost upon listening, but I haven't done it long enough to know whether there are other advantages of using the ear—you can hit pause and ruminate on something that deserves it, and maybe that would lead to the same: that is, effectively, a cognitive highlight. You know that I did it this morning in reading Montas—in fact that very passage that I related to you, not word for word, but I read it twice. So, I'm able to paraphrase the idea that thinking that students of color can only learn from authors of color is something of a condescension—that's Montas’ position. I thought that was important. I hadn't heard that before. So, I took a beat, and I don't see the difference, actually, whether I heard it, take a beat, internalize it, because it's the words that are affecting me. I'll give you another example: I read the words that Montas’ aunt gave him $80.00 she had collected from the family on the night before his matriculation and at the time he didn't realize how important this was, but he cried, thinking back on it, when he found the envelope, and I almost cried. I'm a little vulnerable in the mornings, I guess. But it's the words—it's just words on the page. It's just ink making these emotions happen, and I don't see the difference. Like, it's not just retention, right, it's the impact that it has on you that influences recall, and I think that's just as effective—arguably, in some cases, more effective— if it's not ink on a page, but an actor relating, with all the emotion the text deserves, that same episode. That would be my hypothesis. Dr. Megan Hennessey I think I'd have to agree with you and what you're saying reminds me of that Billy Collins poem “Marginalia. “Sometimes the notes are furious or ferocious skirmishes against the author.” He wrote the entire poem about notes in the margins, and I have never forgotten that because that is exactly what I do, too. Dr. Abram Trosky Yeah, Billy Collins is a national treasure. If you're listening, Billy, reach out. Dr. Megan Hennessey Exactly right. We have a fan club going. Dr. Trosky, thanks so much for spending time with us today. Is there anything else you want to share about great books? Dr. Abram Trosky Oh no, my pleasure. And I hope you can edit out the few “dings” of the messages that continue to come in during this very pleasant hiatus from the work day, so thanks for asking. Dr. Megan Hennessey Absolutely.