Ten Secrets to Academic Success | Great Debates About Great Books Yield Deep Knowledge, Sharp Minds and Constructive Citizens

Today, when you spy bored kids dragged along by their parents shopping, touring, or visiting relatives, only the tops of their heads are visible. Bent down, as if praying, they stare at their dumb-making “smart” phones. Growing up, when we Troy boys were held parental hostage, we too bowed in supplication – but our heads were buried in books.

Perhaps the only thing worse than Generation TikTok’s disinterest in great books, is so many of their teachers’ “success” in repelling them from reading. Too many – not all! – professors use books as battering rams to shove their politics onto their students, rather than as launching pads for enlightenment, excitement, and engagement with critics – Marx forbid!

In their recent working paper “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik examine 27 million syllabi the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP) amassed worldwide since 2008. They discover “a strong asymmetry” when most professors approached three explosive topics – “racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion.” Most syllabi feature defining, left-leaning texts without offering alternatives.

Characteristically, Edward Said’s anti-Western, anti-Zionist “Orientalism” is “the 16th most assigned text in the OSP database, appearing in nearly 16,000 courses.” It’s “more popular than any work in the old Western canon,” assigned twice as often as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Yet few pair Said’s book with any thoughtful critique.

The authors conclude: “professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies. That is the academic norm …”

Two marvels of civilization are crumbling together: the joy of reading a book and the thrill of sharpening thoughts – and elbows – through critical debate.

There’s nothing like opening a great book, then surrendering to the author’s ability to introduce you to a new world – while expanding your understanding of your own. Sometimes, it comes from encountering a different time or place. Sometimes, it comes from getting new glasses that illuminate where we are right here, right now, differently. Moreover, the discipline required to finish many books generates the same character-building satisfaction experienced by athletes who won’t quit.

There’s nothing like opening a great book, then surrendering to the author’s ability to introduce you to a new world – while expanding your understanding of your own. 

Some books pile on facts. Some books run on images or metaphors. Some are character-driven, others by plot, still others by the sheer power of ideas. But good ones open new horizons.

My brother Dr. Tevi Troy, talented eight-time author and reader extraordinaire, reads over 100 books a year. “To do that,” he explains, “you have to be really excited to jump into each book.” When I asked for his favorite book, he answered, “in some ways, my favorite book is the next one, or the one I haven’t read yet.”

Still, he added: “Two books that really inspired me are J. Anthony Lukas’ ‘Common Ground,’ on the busing fight in Boston, and Allan Bloom‘s ‘The Closing of the American Mind.'” Lukas time-travels readers back to an epic political and social struggle in the 1970s, while Bloom challenges readers to contrast their superficial worldviews with traditional great books and eternal Western values. Tevi continued: “I read both books in my early 20s.  They helped me see how books can open one up to new worlds and new ideas. I have vivid memories of walking down [Washington] D.C. sidewalks while reading ‘Common Ground,’ eager to get to the next page.”

Nevertheless, as entrancing and illuminating as reading adventures can be, like hugs, you can’t do it alone.  From Talmudic sages to constitutional scholars to literary geniuses, the greatest minds are sharpened by debate — in Hebrew, machloket. The root, overlapping with the word, chelek, fragment, means division, dispute, disagreement. The Talmud, Avot 5:17, says great arguments are for the sake of heaven. For our polarized, combative culture, a better word is “parse” –  in Hebrew, lenateach, evoking a surgeon, menateach.

We’re trained to win debates and arguments. Universities should invite students to plunge into great debates, drawing knowledge from them, then parsing the arguments. Confront alternative viewpoints. Then, open the hood, disassembling the book’s logic. Understand how it was built, how to rebuild it, and either reconstruct it exactly – or add your own twist, even a breakthrough or 20.

Decades ago, Yale’s legendary literary critic, Harold Bloom, feared that the “School of Resentment,” filled with grievance-slingers reading everything through hyper-politicized multicultural, feminist, or Marxist lenses would distort the great books – and academy – he cherished. His classic, now politically incorrect, 1994 work, “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages,” proclaimed: “Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favor of much more difficult ones.”

 Then the punchline: “successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.”

Indeed, today’s hyper-anxious students would benefit from such “achieved anxieties.” Tevi Troy notes that healthy democracies need engaged, thoughtful, even anguished, readers. “It’s hard to have a successful representative democracy if you don’t have an informed populace, and it’s hard to get an informed populace if citizens don’t read,” he observes. “One reason the American Revolution was so successful was that the literacy rate of the Colonists was much higher than in Europe at the time. Americans shared ideas through reading. What they read inspired them to fight for their liberty.” More than a century and a half later, during “World War II, American soldiers fought Nazi tyranny with great works of literature in their backpacks.”

While not always trendy or easy, reading should be deep and defining. “If I know what you read, it tells me a lot about who you are,” Troy adds. “When I start teaching a class, I ask each student to tell me their favorite (non-Harry Potter) book.”

Perhaps, all students, young and old, should ask themselves: what’s my favorite (non-Harry Potter) book? With whom would I like to parse its argument? And what anxieties do I hope to achieve this year?

Gil Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist Thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath” were just published.