Great Courses, Great Profits – A Curriculum in Human Thought

> This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck.

Take a look at the Bowdoin course catalog for the 2010-2011 academic year (https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).

We see courses in:

* The Civil War Era (Fall 2011)

* History of the American West (Fall 2011)

* American Society in the New Nation, 1763-1840 (Fall 2010)

* Borderlands and Empires in Early North America (Fall 2010)

* The History of African Americans, 1619-1865 (Fall 2012) (announced in the 2011-2011 catalog)

* American Political Development (Spring 2011)

* American Political Thought (Spring 2011)

* Political Parties in the United States (Fall 2010)

* Introduction to American Government (Fall 2010)

...and many many more that I got tired of copying over to this post.

This is incredibly lazy research by the writer. At the time this article went to press ("Summer 2011"), these courses already existed, and there are countless others already pre-announced in the 2011-2012 course catalog (https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).

-------------------------------------------

> The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want.

> This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves.

> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website.

> The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.

The author spends a good chunk of the article talking about TGC's customer-centric focus as a key reason for the company's success. TGC largely films courses that its customers want!

Yet, the singular piece of evidence she offers that undergrads are having unpopular curriculums pushed upon them is what she herself deems as an "assertion" from a singular professor. It's difficult to square the "excesses" of student protests against what they see as Western-centric canon (a pet topic that the author has written extensively about) with the idea that students actually really do want to learn about a suppressed canon.

Could it possibly be that today's generation might want a greater variety of course offerings beyond the classical Western canon? Could it be that TGC's median customer, who skews older, has different intellectual preferences and tastes from someone who is 30-40 years younger? What happened to respecting the customers' preferences above all else?

> A few professors suggest that the company has pegged the audience as leaning conservative[...] Lerer got an angry e-mail from a customer asking how he could include that “leftist son of a bitch” Noam Chomsky in the course. John McWhorter was told to omit from his linguistics lectures his usual argument that the idea of grammatical “correctness” is an “arbitrary imposition.” Such caveats on the company’s part, however, could simply reflect the desire to avoid alienating any customers.

Where is the outrage from the author that TGC's customers are so close-minded? ;)

------------------------------------------

> Predictably, the Great Courses has come under pressure for not having enough “diversity” in its teaching ranks. Rollins has received angry letters from women complaining about the paucity of female lecturers; his nonstop efforts to recruit them have yielded few results, in part because women lecture less than men. As for the truly big-name female professors, they command speaking fees so high that the Great Courses’ pay scale looks insignificant. The same applies to the black superstars, one of whom told Rollins: “Tom, honestly, I make several thousand dollars a night from Martin Luther King Day through Black History Month; you’re not even on my radar screen.”

As someone who has spent almost $5000 with TGC, indulge me for a second to offer some advice to the company. I would've likely spent even more if they had more courses on the non-Western canon. This is something that has improved in recent years, but until ~5 years ago, there was practically nothing in the catalog on eastern philosophy, histories of India or the Middle East, non-European music, etc.

To this day, there is nothing in the catalog about African-American literature or history, Latin American history, or African history. Given that Latin America and Africa are collectively home to over 1/4 of the planet's population, how about some content development in that area? I'd be among the first customers.

Given that TGC's bestselling western philosophy course is taught by an Oxford professor, how about some more recruitment of professors from international universities who would be experts on these subject areas (when we finally emerge from COVID of course).

> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website.

Quoted in the previous section as well, but I will say that one of the more amusing things about TGC is that the pre-2008 economics content aged extremely poorly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. They had a very popular course (Legacies of Great Economists) that was released in the early 2000's, and has more than a hint of triumphalism around deregulation and the financialization of so many aspects of our modern economy.

Perhaps including some more skeptical voices would've been a good thing.

------------------------------------------

To close, TGC offers great products that I encourage fellow HN readers to try out. They offer a streaming service (The Great Courses Plus) that is likely a better value than purchasing courses outright.

With regards to the author of this piece though, with all due respect she has no idea what she's talking about.

Can you cite the 25K/year number? How long does that last?

At that rate you could make quite a living after having created a dozen course.