Harvard's President Charles Norton Eliot introduced "the elective system" in the undergraduate curriculum in the late 19th century. Taking non-required non-sequential courses! Take courses you want! Explore topics freely! It was a revolution.In 1952 (yes that many years later - but of course it was the politically paranoid 50s) George Boas was writing in the AAUP Bulletin* that the elective system was "devised for a society of free men who knew what they wanted to study and who could be tested for the aptitude in making their choices."
But, he adds - and here comes a particular kind of conservative backlash - but... "it did not take long for some people to point out that this might lead to a hodgepodge of learning which would omit the greatest that had been thought and said." Great Books, in other words - the very practice of Great Books, following from the conservative argument Boas cites against academic liberalism. But not the Great Books curriculum fully deployed.
For if we really did Great Books fully, we'd notice that "each later author has been a rebel against the dominant traditions of his time. But of course such lists usually stop at a date well before our own times and we are not usually aware of precisely what harm to tradition was done by the men who figure on them." And finally, to clinch this argument: "If you were living in the early days of Christianity, you would have seen the same kind of confusion and intellectual anarchy as you hear about today. But what is called confusion is the outspokenness of recalcitrant individuals. When they are dead, they are spoken of as heroes and prophets. But while they are alive, they are noncooperative, radical, and heretical."
The Elective System did not create the confusion and anarchy that conservative arguments against it feared. The true study of "required" Great Books discloses the same confusion and radicalism. Finally this is not about radicalism and heresy. It's about apparent control. Boas' essay for AAUP was called "The New Authoritarianism."
The image above and at right is taken from a defense of the Elective System that President Eliot wrote for the 'New York Times' in 1885.
* vol 38, no 3; Autumn 1952.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
