Gilbert Highet

Gilbert Highet was a Scottish-American classicist, academic, writer, intellectual, critic and literary historian born on 22 June 1906 in Glasgow, Scotland. He died in 1978.

Life

Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States. He graduated from St. John's College of Oxford University in 1932 and was a member of the faculty of St. John's for six years. In 1938 he accepted a permanent position at Columbia University, where he taught from 1937 to 1971, except for a period of military service in the British Army from 1943 to 1946, during which time he rose to the position of lieutenant colonel in British Intelligence. Though not at Columbia when Humanities A was created, he enthusiastically embraced the course and is still identified with it.

Highet devoted most of his energy to teaching, but he also aspired to raise the level of mass culture and achieved broader influence by publishing essays and books, hosting his own radio program, acting as a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and serving on the editorial board of "Horizon" magazine. Prof. Highet was named Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1950. He and his wife, Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), a librarian from Glasgow whom he married in 1932 and who went on to write a number of best-selling popular suspense and espionage novels, became naturalized citizens of the United States in 1951.

On education

Like others teaching at Columbia at this time -- Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Ernest Nagel -- Gilbert Highet conceived of his work as the fostering of a tradition. "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but 'minds' alive on the shelves," Highet wrote. He believed that "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

As a scholar in an era in which democracy, Communism, and fascism vied for supremacy, he believed it was the duty of the intellectual to support freedom and defend pluralism. "The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same," he wrote. "They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."

Above all, he was devoted to learning from the past. "History is a strange experience," he wrote in the introduction to an essay on Byzantium. "The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts." Despite this, as Highet showed above all in his masterpiece "The Classical Tradition", it was possible to discover in the past a great humanizing river of learning which connected the present to the Biblical and especially the Greek and Roman civilizations, and through his marvelously evocative, graceful prose to make one feel at home in that flow of past lives, and to long for it. Highet tended be critical of contemporary literature, attributing to it decadent qualities.

He himself was a great teacher. Robert J. Ball, in an appreciation under the heading Living Legacies published in 2001 in the "Columbia University Alumni Magazine," wrote: "When Gilbert Highet entered the classroom, one felt as though the curtain were going up on a Broadway play, with a living legend in the lead. He reminded students (not surprisingly) of a British Army officer— of the kind portrayed by Jack Hawkins in motion pictures—tall, erect, handsome, clean-shaven, and impeccably dressed. He consistently gave his audience a commanding performance, whether he spoke or sang or stood or walked, with a presence comparable to that of Laurence Olivier or John Houseman. ... With his powerful and speculative mind, he gave his students an extraordinary intellectual experience, capped by a showmanship perhaps unparalleled in the American college classroom."

Works

Highet wrote voluminously. He is remembered today for:

*"The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature" (1949)
*"The Art of Teaching" (1950)
*"Man's Unconquerable Mind" (1954)
*"Juvenal the Satirist: A Study" (1954).

External links

* [http://www.taemag.com/docLib/20030121_book.pdf A Lost Art] by Nicholas Stix, "The American Enterprise", March/April 2001.
* [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2001/Highet.html Gilbert Highet and Classics at Columbia]