Harvey Shulman: R.I.P
J. Scott Lee, Association for Core Texts and Courses


Harvey Shulman passed away on 12 December 2006. He is survived by wife Celia and sister Barbara, but, as friend of 34 years, Fred Krantz, commented in his eulogy: Harvey’s family extended well beyond his immediate kin. For over 27 years, Harvey and Fred built the Liberal Arts College (LAC) of Concordia University in Montreal. In recent years, Harvey’s work on behalf of the liberal arts had included extending his College’s support to the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) and building a Canadian chapter of the National Association of Scholars. For many years, Harvey and Fred exchanged the College principalship. Recently, Harvey had increasingly taken the helm. Across the continent those who most understand the difficulty of constructing sound, liberal arts educations came to admire deeply Harvey’s fruitful and careful work in developing the LAC into one of the premier great-books, liberal-arts departments in Canada and on the continent.

In 1977, during a period that had seen the decline of liberal-arts, great-books programs, Harvey and Fred decided to build an education for students that was simply unavailable on the then-Sir George Williams University campus. This major in the liberal arts was to draw on the traditions of Greek paideia, Latin humanitas, and the Italian Renaissance studia humanitatis, continue on through the Enlightenment, and culminate with major twentieth-century works. Every course for this major was to be required. It was to be grounded in the great works of the Western tradition of learning, be taught in small seminars, and it was to emphasize the exploration of and connections between moral philosophy, literature, science, religion, and history as they affected the vita active, the life one gives to one’s community. Many years later, a version of the program was offered to Concordia students for fulfillment of their general education requirements.

Students of Harvey’s program found themselves by works such as Plato’s Republic, Kant’s Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, or Voltaire’s Candide. One morning, in one of the College’s classrooms housed in a two-story brownstone in Montreal, I had the privilege of watching two young women in a lengthy exchange of completely different views on this latter work. Graciously and inventively for about twenty minutes, they exchanged interpretations without ego and with solid evidence from the texts. This was a spontaneous discussion, not a planned assignment, and it was liberal arts education at its very best. Not surprisingly, the College’s graduates have included at least two university valedictorians, one Rhodes Scholar, and a significant number who have continued study at some of North America’s leading graduate schools.

Harvey’s spirit of cooperation, respect for others, and encouragement, particularly of young faculty, informed the community that is the College. Familiar to many supporters of the liberal arts is the problem of staffing programs. Within the last decade Harvey expanded the program from three to six full-time faculty -- from widely different disciplines, all of the new hires being young. He protected this young faculty as it sought to fit into the program’s rigorous teaching demands while meeting the rising standards of outside scholarship demanded by the University. In this light, the program is all the more remarkable, because as Harvey wrote once, “Our primary concern in designing and developing the curriculum was and is to focus not on what we [faculty] wish to teach, but on what we agree students should study.” That agreement is a sign of the accomplishment of the College, for all courses are the cooperative work of all faculty; no one “owns” a course.

In recent years, Harvey’s wisdom and generous spirit reached out to the wider liberal arts community. He was a participant in the founding of ACTC. In 2002, Harvey approached ACTC to sponsor its annual conference in Montreal, our first Canadian-based conference. He transformed, almost single-handedly, the sponsorship by institutions of ACTC conferences. He helped both to build the underwriting of the conference and, more importantly, helped to establish the volunteer calling pattern which ACTC now employs. During the conference, he, Fred, and Geoff Fidler, another long-time friend and colleague, gave a panel on “How to Create, Sustain and Understand a Core Curriculum: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Spinozist Perspectives” -- a pluralistic interpretation of their own program. Academic Questions subsequently published their papers.

This contact ultimately led to Harvey’s establishing the Montreal chapter of the National Association of Scholars. Beside that, he was a committed scholar of both Jewish Talmudic traditions and of the birth and growth of America. His Liberal Arts College, in its hiring practices, reflected his belief that what mattered most was teaching ability and scholarship, not ethnic identity. Hence, women, Canadians, Americans, Jews, and Christians are among those hired in new positions.

Harvey was a committed and staunch friend of liberal-arts, great-books education. We miss him very much. Donations may be made in his memory to the Scholarship Fund, c/o The Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8.

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