//essays//
Spring 2013
An Apology for Moral Education:
The Core and The Society of Senior Scholars
Eric Shapiro
There are many great offices on Columbia’s campus, but there’s nothing quite like 502 Kent Hall, home to legendary Columbian William Theodore de Bary. The spacious room is a maze of bookshelves and filing cabinets stacked high against the walls, containing countless Chinese volumes whose titles, though indecipherable to a humble Philosophy major like myself, seem to ooze with wisdom. If you’ve never seen it, you really must: it will reinvigorate your love of learning.
Professor de Bary’s biography is a metonymy of the history of Columbia College. De Bary was a freshman in 1937, the pilot year of the program we now know as Lit Hum. That year, de Bary took CC-A, a precursor to Literature Humanities, in a section taught by Harry Carman (now of freshman dormitory fame), who would later become Dean of Columbia College. On the first day, Professor Carman remarked to his students that despite the course’s title, the “civilization” reflected in the syllabus was limited to the West; some day, he told them, he hoped his students would consider preparing themselves to bring Asia into the Core as well.
A then-undeclared de Bary, taking his professor’s words to heart, enrolled in Chinese the following year, Columbia being one of the few places that offered such a program at the time. After a brief stint in the Pacific during World War II, and later heading up the Far East Desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington (picking up Japanese along the way), de Bary turned down a cushy position as a Lieutenant Commander with the State Department to put his G.I. Bill sponsorship to good use: he returned to pursue a graduate degree in Chinese intellectual history back at Columbia, where perhaps he might fulfill Professor Carman’s initial suggestion.
De Bary’s long and continuous career at Columbia ever since reflects his tireless work to translate and compile the classics of China, Japan, and India for a general, English-speaking audience for the first time. Three compendia over whose compilation he presided--Sources of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Tradition, seminal and groundbreaking sourcebooks containing Asian classics in English translation—are possibly the best-selling books in the history of Columbia University Press (the royalties now belong to the endowment of the University Committee on Asia and the Middle East). De Bary’s educational philosophy has even extended itself to include the creation of new courses that have been instrumental in expanding the core into what it is. He was the longtime Director of the UCAME, which has developed a number of courses that rigorously expose students to the study of non-Western classics, including (but not limited to) “Introduction to Islamic Civilization”; three “Introduction to East Asian Civilization” courses for Korea, Japan, and China; “Asian Humanities” for art and music; and “Nobility and Civility: East and West”, which de Bary famously co-teaches. More than any other living Columbian—graduate or faculty member—Professor de Bary has shaped the Core Curriculum of Columbia College.
As I sat there, listening to the bowtied nonagenarian before me, I realized that de Bary’s story is one driven by purpose. He explained in soft words the twists and turns of his career, including the prestigious opportunities he declined in spite of promises of financial ease in order to complete his work for the Core at Columbia. Amidst an ever-pervasive paradigm of specialization in the Academy, de Bary has always been and still remains committed to the fundamental ideas of the Liberal Arts, spanning the geographies and eras that bound other scholars. It is a refreshing reminder of a central purpose of education itself: the cultivation of character.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society of Senior Scholars and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, two bodies founded by de Bary in 1988. At that time, de Bary managed to secure a separate endowment of roughly $17 million for the Heyman Center, tucked quietly behind the spirited undergraduate townhouses of the East Campus Dormitory. The Center houses a number of programs, including the Society of Fellows, a prestigious two- to three-year post-doctoral program; various high-profile lectures, attended by public intellectuals such as Amartya Sen, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, and Benedict Anderson; and the offices of many of the aforementioned Senior Scholars.
The Society counts among its ranks around thirty-five professors emeriti, formerly of Columbia and other institutions, who have retired to New York City but commit to teaching at least one course every two years, mostly in the Core Curriculum. Members also teach several evening Colloquia throughout the year through the Friends of the Heyman Center program, headed by Society member and thirty-year Lit Hum veteran James Mirollo, as a way of continuing a discussion of values relevant to the Core and raising money for the Center (a seat costs about $800 for the year, but attendees will frequently write checks for up to $10,000). The colloquia are geared mainly towards alumni, and bear heavy titles like “Philosophy as a Way of Life” (currently taught by legendary CC professor Peter Pazzaglini, the Society’s youngest member). Though primarily intended as a collegial association for post-retirees, the Society of Senior Scholars represents a collection of individuals who continue to teach undergraduates later in life because of their personal investment in a now-unfashionable model of education in old-school values and morals. It is in fact the Society’s confinement to the Old School that is the kernel of their charm: they believe in something.
Largely unnoticed by students, the integrity of Columbia College’s crown jewel, the Core, is year after year withered away by the modernizing forces of Columbia’s broader goals. Underfunded and understaffed, the Core is seen by many as a vestige of a bygone educational program whose importance is swept aside amidst the progressive tendency toward specialization in the arts and sciences. The Core’s founding values are largely forgotten, and—far more insidiously—are incorrectly interpreted by both faculty and students. “Liberal Arts” is now a dirty word for fluffy, unserious dalliances in “intellectualism,” and so has fallen out of vogue in favor of more lucrative areas of scholarship. The Society of Senior Scholars are perhaps the only remaining guardians of the principles that make a Columbia training in enlightened citizenship the most important feature of the College.
Unlike General Education programs at peer institutions, the Columbia Core is not simply a set of distribution requirements that are fulfilled by any combination of accredited introductory courses in required subjects. The trademark courses of the Columbia Core—Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and to a lesser extent Art and Music Humanities—are bound together by a mostly- set curriculum, which ought to provide homogeneity between sections in terms of the material discussed. This, of course, is a reflection of the Core’s essential mission: to use a rich body of materials as context for an exploration of general human values and experiences, informed by the unique backgrounds of the students and instructors that comprise each small section. This model has been exported, as it was always intended to be, to smaller Liberal Arts institutions, such as Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and is shared in other forms, such as that of St. John’s College, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe (their program is more rigidly classics-based, but the philosophies are parallel). The grand irony is that the Core’s unique values are not only superficially cherished, but often essentially misinterpreted by the larger University administration.
Let me begin to define the Core by enumerating what the Core is not. The Core is not a canon. The Core is not “cocktail fodder,” as an admissions officer told me on my first campus tour, now over five years ago. It is not Dead White Men, it is not Harold Bloom, and it is not Western. The Core is a civilized conversation. The Core is a perennial striving toward Truth and self-betterment. The Core is Lionel Trilling. It is about character, eternal virtues, the Good. It is not a set of cultural icons one must be familiar with to be a gentleman or gentlewoman, but rather a series of great debates and questions one must wrestle with to understand the duties global citizenship. The Core is a fundamentally moral education, a preparation for public life, an accumulation of wisdom that teaches one to stand up and act on behalf of what is right. And most of all, the Core is a beginning.
The Core is about teaching “classics,” which is a notion wholly independent of any fanciful precondition for being “well-read,” “cultured,” or “educated,” as so many—faculty and students alike—suppose. A classic is a work that defies corruption through translation, because, though often noted for its style, it contains a treatment of perennial human themes, which survive and allow continual contestation and reception in every age. Core materials are not about pivotal authors or essential time periods, but exist as a rich and running context that is apt for discussing particular issues that are relevant not for this or that profession, but for conscientious existence. It is thus that these works are, or ought to be, disembodied as creations, and instead treated as an object to validate life experiences: the Core’s founding policies emphasized small class sizes and a vehement refusal to mediate the experience through the use of secondary or scholarly literature. What is so often forgotten in Core programs today is that we do not study Vergil for Vergil, but for the arma virumque (a man and his struggle); nor al-Ghazali for his Sufism, but for the archetypal search for eternal truth. As Jacques Barzun, celebrated public intellectual and framer of the Core who passed away last year at 104, liked to say, when we read Dante, we are not concerned with the Florentine poet, but of a man ‘nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita:’ one in the middle of the journey of our life.
The Core’s coming-to-be is really a historical anomaly. Its nascence coincided with the tenure of University President Nicholas Murray Butler, a time when the reigning academic philosophy was that Columbia would only be as strong as its individual graduate departments. Despite the disproportionate focus on graduate priorities and visibility, the College managed to develop a touchstone Core Curriculum focused on broad educational goals that transcend the walls that persist between independent departments in the modern University, ever-geared toward specialty research.
One would think that a program as historic and central as the Core is for Columbia College would be rather popular with the University’s central administration. But this is not so. The odds have always been stacked against the Core and its success, from Butler’s time right down to our own. Core programs face perennial staffing shortages (not to mention classroom space), leading to the same scramble every year for people willing to teach it, which has progressively drawn more adjunct faculty and graduate students, and fewer full professors and senior faculty. There are a number of causes for this. First, the Core lacks any substantial resources for attracting faculty to its programs. Faculty are hired to teach by and in individual departments, most of which have a superior professional and reputational interest in promoting esoteric research and graduate education than they do in expanding undergraduate offerings. Department rankings are determined largely by the placement rates of their graduate students, which are determined almost entirely on the basis of research and with very little regard to teaching. Professors are required to teach a minimum number of hours per semester within the department as the condition on which they are paid, and it is often the case that hours spent teaching the Core do not count, making a Lit Hum section an extraneous and substantial burden on a professor—one for which they are not necessarily compensated. And so teaching the Core becomes an act, in most cases, of charity.
But it is a charity that some faculty members are no longer inclined to give. Teaching a Core class demands twice as many hours teaching every week as an advanced seminar, which comes with fewer papers, no exams, and a set of self-selecting students interested in a professor’s particular specialty. College students are often surprised to learn that the materials of the Core have not been studied by their professors in a prior academic life: it is not necessarily the case that a specialist in Virginia Woolf will have read Homer, or Augustine, or Montaigne—certainly not since their undergraduate days, or in a strong enough capacity to be able to teach them without great exertion. The same problem is perhaps even worse in music and art history, where limited resources have driven the faculty there into isolated niches, of interest to only a handful of people globally. Therefore, to teach Lit Hum or CC, professors are required to actually read the books, many for the first time. Finding this task daunting, and without a proper understanding of what values underlie the Core’s demands, professors are frequently scared away from adding a Core section to the exclusion of their research or higher-level courses more pertinent to their own professional interests.
During the seventeen year assistant deanship of English Professor Michael Rosenthal (now a Senior Scholar), which coincided with the tenure of Dean Peter Pouncey and the period during which de Bary served as Provost, the ideal distribution of faculty in core programs was imagined to contain one-third senior faculty, one-third assistant professors, and one-third graduate students and untenured faculty. This was never achieved, but at the time of its fashioning, this was an ambitious benchmark. Today, precise numbers are unavailable, but the consensus is that the proportion of senior faculty is far below this. Departments have shifted resources away from the employment of dedicated lecturer positions (faculty members who taught but were untenured) toward adjuncts, hired guns who live on the margins of their respective departments. With this came the elimination of a class of educators who would otherwise develop careers at least in part built on leading Core sections. Nevertheless, these younger “preceptors” are entitled to various prizes of not immaterial monetary worth, which incentivize good, enthusiastic teaching. The advantage of Rosenthal’s model would have been a leadership class of senior, experienced professors, who could guide their younger counterparts. Its benefits, though, are only materialized when there both exists a body of senior faculty willing to teach the Core, and when that body has a proper understandings of its historical objectives, and why it is important for the growth of their students. Indeed, that body has shrunk over time.
Lacking political clout of any kind, the Core must fight the strong current of centralization that has siphoned authority from the College deanship to the University President, where the interests of the College are not prioritized. With globalized learning, Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion, and a greater orientation towards professional schools (which produce full-paying tuitions) as the trendy foci of the University administration, the drain on intellectual resources and opportunity costs presented by the Core for an old-fashioned Liberal Arts program make concern for the College’s needs rare and unsympathetic. Once upon a time, the professors who taught in the College were part of a smaller body known as the College Faculty, which would meet monthly to discuss general educational issues, philosophies, and the like. It was a robust forum for debate that preserved the integrity of the College’s intellectual strength and unique character, and dedication to the Core. During the years of the College Faculty, it was not uncommon to have weekly course-wide meetings of Core instructors, engaging each other as much as with their particular twenty or so students. While it is still technically within the powers of the College Faculty to convene, all of incentives to do so were diminished upon its absorption in the early 1990s into a University-wide Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. The priorities of this body are poorly matched to the needs of the undergraduate college, and therefore dissolve any possibility for College faculty to focus on their individual needs or objectives beyond their departments.
The Faculty of the Arts and Sciences now meets about three times each year. Meetings are usually filled with announcements from University President Lee C. Bollinger’s office, leaving little room for the pertinent discussion of Core and undergraduate needs. It is a major loss. In the absence of a centralized body to discuss issues relevant to the College, the philosophy behind the Core has been lost on most of the people in charge of staffing it. Touted often as a crash course in canonical works of philosophy, art, music, and literature, the description of the Core that sticks in most people’s minds reeks of post-colonialism and racial and gender biases—not to mention intellectual frivolity and slapdash scholarship. After a series of “academic culture wars” in the 1980s, during which the Liberal Arts became divided between more traditional academics (like the members of the Society of Senior Scholars) and particularistic ethnic studies departments, who view the Core with great disdain and write it off as anachronistic and backward—a stained relic that they actively invest in undoing. The prevailing sentiment regarding the Core among Columbia’s graduate departments is predicated on an understanding of its values that is sadly and deeply misconceived, because there exists little opportunity for its veteran instructors to put forth a truer (and more palatable) picture.
The Senior Scholars are not the only ones who get it, though: the Committee on the Core is the Core’s main governing body, and is comprised of many highly-regarded educators in the Core’s programs. The problem lies not with the Committee itself, but with its essential lack of actual power: they set the curriculum, but cannot dictate how the syllabus is taught. The Committee on the Core does not possess the ability to choose instructors without submitting staffing requests through the individual departments. Department policies determine the number of instructors that come from each, which leaves little room for the Committee to make any demands about the seniority of the instructors themselves. Moreover, the Committee is not a sufficient replacement for the sorts of frequent curricular meetings that extend the Core’s synthesis beyond the syllabus, since their meetings are infrequent and do not involve a majority of the instructors. What is needed is not simply good governance, but a thorough reorientation of the instructors of Core programs as a group, in which techniques and ideas could be shared, which weekly meetings of the Core staff used to accomplish.
The only forum that the Scholars still have for a serious discussion of Core values exists in the Keys to the Core lecture series, a semesterly cluster of Core-oriented mini-lectures that take place on Friday afternoons in the Heyman Center and Kent Hall. The series, headed up by Professors de Bary and Douglas Chalmers, invites influential Core instructors to speak on topics related to the history and values of the programs they teach. These include discussions about Frontiers of Science, Music, and Art Humanities from the people who run them, and often result in genuine debate about ways to improve the programs. The inaugural Keys season in 2008 produced a booklet of pithy and meaningful histories of the Core Curriculum, paying frequent homage to its early framers, and discussing the principles that guided its inception, which are no less relevant today (for those interested, there are several hundred copies of these lectures available in de Bary’s office in Kent). Unfortunately, these meetings are attended by an almost unvaryingly older audience, with few students present aside from the ones to whom de Bary and his peers convincingly advertise. Without a more diverse attendance from students and preceptors (who already give a great deal of time to the course), the valuable ideologies remain contained within a self-selecting group, a sort of noble echo chamber. The reminiscences shared at these meetings of great names like Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, and Lionel Trilling—some of Columbia’s most noteworthy intellectuals of the last century—are further proof that the College’s earlier years were marked by a dual moral and educational commitment that has become too diffuse in the modern University to take its due hold.
The Society of Senior Scholars has situated itself as the primary protectors of that commitment: not only as former students of the Core, or believers in it, but as its teachers, being among the few tenured faculty still involved in it. Members like de Bary and Pazzaglini—graduates themselves of Columbia College—recall the history and philosophy of the Liberal Arts here at Columbia as an education in character. Pazzaglini’s Heyman Center Colloquium for Spring 2013, “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” cites among its goals the examination of “philosophy as a lived experience, not as an academic discipline or a set of metaphysical systems or abstract interpretations….The aim of these philosophies as a way of life is to develop people as full human beings, not as esoteric specialists or academics.” What they lament, then, is the divorce of academic work from active, public life: that a scholar can write a paper on Kant or Aristotle, without applying those ideas with great force to their non-academic lives.
Speaking to de Bary, Pazzaglini, and other Society members is something of a religious experience: they quote Seneca and Mencius with tremendous facility, fashioning themselves (whether they know it or not) as wise elders, as public intellectuals. Their characteristic profundity is indicative of the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities. “We, Columbia, are one of the great builders of civilization,” Pazzaglini says. “That is the true purpose of the Academy.” Being older, the Senior Scholars are already card-carrying members of the academically initiated, having completed celebrated work in admittedly specialized fields, such as de Bary’s seminal contributions to Confucian and Buddhist scholarship both in the US and in China (his book on Buddhism is the primary textbook for Columbia’s course of the same name, taught in the Religion department). That these decorated thinkers return to the College to preside over the moral development of young men and women into future citizens speaks volumes about the social boons buried in a Core education.
Despite the philosophy of the Core being lost to many of its current faculty, the support and vigilance of the alumni have managed to preserve its keystone courses—Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities—mostly untouched since their inception. A prevailing majority of students in Core, though presented with a skewed picture of its objectives, tend to develop a strong if ineffable affinity to it over the course of their Columbia careers. The same, too, goes for faculty, many of whom become devotees of the Core, but only after they are given incentive enough to teach it for the first time. It is the alumni commitment to those programs that has kept the Core out of budget negotiations, even during the College’s many years of operating deficits in the 1960s and 70s. Even though the College produces a large number of the University’s donors, and has students who actually pay tuition, the University—and even the College, to some extent—grossly neglects the program’s needs, while perversely continuing to laud the Core as the College’s defining feature vis-à-vis its peers in order to attract its over 30,000 annual applications. And so, despite the pretense of an appreciation for Core principles, without alumni support, there would be little else: the broader University has no material investment in the Core, and largely overlooks the intellectual traditions of the College in favor of more hip institutional objectives than cultivating an enlightened citizenry. Were it not for the money that undergraduates provide, or for the fierceness with which the College alumni defend the Core, there is a broad consensus that the administration would get rid of tomorrow.
To ensure the Core’s continued existence, there have been murmurings of the unlikely thought to revive the College Faculty. More plausibly, there has been talk of creating a Core Endowment, which could offer monetary incentives to departments that contribute faculty and graduate students for the Core, which those departments could use for expanding research or graduate programs. But even then, the Senior Scholars are the source of the Core’s central hope. The Society, in its wistful quest for meaning and relevance, and hindered by its institutional impotency, has nevertheless willed itself into continued existence, taking refuge in the hearts of the young men and women who came to understand under its tutelage the inseparability of knowledge and character. The Scholars are few in number, but they are powerful in what they stand for; those rare and fortunate numbers of students who have studied under Society members (myself included) are often proud to report the uplifting and gratifying experiences they had as being uniquely Columbian and profoundly impactful, morally and otherwise.
Whenever Professor de Bary’s name has come up in conversation with his peers, he has variously been referred to as a great spirit, a precious treasure, the man to whom all roads lead back. Far from pallbearers, de Bary and his fellow Senior Scholars are important advocates for the basic idea that the cultivation of virtue is an inherently educational process. Their projects are the living fulfillment of the self-proclaimed raison d’etre of the College, as memorialized on the frontispiece of Low Library: “from Generation to Generation, for the Advancement of the Public Good and the Glory of Almighty God.”
An education is only as good as the active character of the learned. In his Analects, Confucius writes: “Walking along with three people, my teacher is sure to be among them. I choose what is good in them and follow it and what is not good and change it.” That is the essence of the Core; its continuance as such, and in no other form, should be a chief undergraduate priority, lest the College and future society suffer irrevocably in its absence.
Professor de Bary’s biography is a metonymy of the history of Columbia College. De Bary was a freshman in 1937, the pilot year of the program we now know as Lit Hum. That year, de Bary took CC-A, a precursor to Literature Humanities, in a section taught by Harry Carman (now of freshman dormitory fame), who would later become Dean of Columbia College. On the first day, Professor Carman remarked to his students that despite the course’s title, the “civilization” reflected in the syllabus was limited to the West; some day, he told them, he hoped his students would consider preparing themselves to bring Asia into the Core as well.
A then-undeclared de Bary, taking his professor’s words to heart, enrolled in Chinese the following year, Columbia being one of the few places that offered such a program at the time. After a brief stint in the Pacific during World War II, and later heading up the Far East Desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington (picking up Japanese along the way), de Bary turned down a cushy position as a Lieutenant Commander with the State Department to put his G.I. Bill sponsorship to good use: he returned to pursue a graduate degree in Chinese intellectual history back at Columbia, where perhaps he might fulfill Professor Carman’s initial suggestion.
De Bary’s long and continuous career at Columbia ever since reflects his tireless work to translate and compile the classics of China, Japan, and India for a general, English-speaking audience for the first time. Three compendia over whose compilation he presided--Sources of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Tradition, seminal and groundbreaking sourcebooks containing Asian classics in English translation—are possibly the best-selling books in the history of Columbia University Press (the royalties now belong to the endowment of the University Committee on Asia and the Middle East). De Bary’s educational philosophy has even extended itself to include the creation of new courses that have been instrumental in expanding the core into what it is. He was the longtime Director of the UCAME, which has developed a number of courses that rigorously expose students to the study of non-Western classics, including (but not limited to) “Introduction to Islamic Civilization”; three “Introduction to East Asian Civilization” courses for Korea, Japan, and China; “Asian Humanities” for art and music; and “Nobility and Civility: East and West”, which de Bary famously co-teaches. More than any other living Columbian—graduate or faculty member—Professor de Bary has shaped the Core Curriculum of Columbia College.
As I sat there, listening to the bowtied nonagenarian before me, I realized that de Bary’s story is one driven by purpose. He explained in soft words the twists and turns of his career, including the prestigious opportunities he declined in spite of promises of financial ease in order to complete his work for the Core at Columbia. Amidst an ever-pervasive paradigm of specialization in the Academy, de Bary has always been and still remains committed to the fundamental ideas of the Liberal Arts, spanning the geographies and eras that bound other scholars. It is a refreshing reminder of a central purpose of education itself: the cultivation of character.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society of Senior Scholars and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, two bodies founded by de Bary in 1988. At that time, de Bary managed to secure a separate endowment of roughly $17 million for the Heyman Center, tucked quietly behind the spirited undergraduate townhouses of the East Campus Dormitory. The Center houses a number of programs, including the Society of Fellows, a prestigious two- to three-year post-doctoral program; various high-profile lectures, attended by public intellectuals such as Amartya Sen, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, and Benedict Anderson; and the offices of many of the aforementioned Senior Scholars.
The Society counts among its ranks around thirty-five professors emeriti, formerly of Columbia and other institutions, who have retired to New York City but commit to teaching at least one course every two years, mostly in the Core Curriculum. Members also teach several evening Colloquia throughout the year through the Friends of the Heyman Center program, headed by Society member and thirty-year Lit Hum veteran James Mirollo, as a way of continuing a discussion of values relevant to the Core and raising money for the Center (a seat costs about $800 for the year, but attendees will frequently write checks for up to $10,000). The colloquia are geared mainly towards alumni, and bear heavy titles like “Philosophy as a Way of Life” (currently taught by legendary CC professor Peter Pazzaglini, the Society’s youngest member). Though primarily intended as a collegial association for post-retirees, the Society of Senior Scholars represents a collection of individuals who continue to teach undergraduates later in life because of their personal investment in a now-unfashionable model of education in old-school values and morals. It is in fact the Society’s confinement to the Old School that is the kernel of their charm: they believe in something.
Largely unnoticed by students, the integrity of Columbia College’s crown jewel, the Core, is year after year withered away by the modernizing forces of Columbia’s broader goals. Underfunded and understaffed, the Core is seen by many as a vestige of a bygone educational program whose importance is swept aside amidst the progressive tendency toward specialization in the arts and sciences. The Core’s founding values are largely forgotten, and—far more insidiously—are incorrectly interpreted by both faculty and students. “Liberal Arts” is now a dirty word for fluffy, unserious dalliances in “intellectualism,” and so has fallen out of vogue in favor of more lucrative areas of scholarship. The Society of Senior Scholars are perhaps the only remaining guardians of the principles that make a Columbia training in enlightened citizenship the most important feature of the College.
Unlike General Education programs at peer institutions, the Columbia Core is not simply a set of distribution requirements that are fulfilled by any combination of accredited introductory courses in required subjects. The trademark courses of the Columbia Core—Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and to a lesser extent Art and Music Humanities—are bound together by a mostly- set curriculum, which ought to provide homogeneity between sections in terms of the material discussed. This, of course, is a reflection of the Core’s essential mission: to use a rich body of materials as context for an exploration of general human values and experiences, informed by the unique backgrounds of the students and instructors that comprise each small section. This model has been exported, as it was always intended to be, to smaller Liberal Arts institutions, such as Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and is shared in other forms, such as that of St. John’s College, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe (their program is more rigidly classics-based, but the philosophies are parallel). The grand irony is that the Core’s unique values are not only superficially cherished, but often essentially misinterpreted by the larger University administration.
Let me begin to define the Core by enumerating what the Core is not. The Core is not a canon. The Core is not “cocktail fodder,” as an admissions officer told me on my first campus tour, now over five years ago. It is not Dead White Men, it is not Harold Bloom, and it is not Western. The Core is a civilized conversation. The Core is a perennial striving toward Truth and self-betterment. The Core is Lionel Trilling. It is about character, eternal virtues, the Good. It is not a set of cultural icons one must be familiar with to be a gentleman or gentlewoman, but rather a series of great debates and questions one must wrestle with to understand the duties global citizenship. The Core is a fundamentally moral education, a preparation for public life, an accumulation of wisdom that teaches one to stand up and act on behalf of what is right. And most of all, the Core is a beginning.
The Core is about teaching “classics,” which is a notion wholly independent of any fanciful precondition for being “well-read,” “cultured,” or “educated,” as so many—faculty and students alike—suppose. A classic is a work that defies corruption through translation, because, though often noted for its style, it contains a treatment of perennial human themes, which survive and allow continual contestation and reception in every age. Core materials are not about pivotal authors or essential time periods, but exist as a rich and running context that is apt for discussing particular issues that are relevant not for this or that profession, but for conscientious existence. It is thus that these works are, or ought to be, disembodied as creations, and instead treated as an object to validate life experiences: the Core’s founding policies emphasized small class sizes and a vehement refusal to mediate the experience through the use of secondary or scholarly literature. What is so often forgotten in Core programs today is that we do not study Vergil for Vergil, but for the arma virumque (a man and his struggle); nor al-Ghazali for his Sufism, but for the archetypal search for eternal truth. As Jacques Barzun, celebrated public intellectual and framer of the Core who passed away last year at 104, liked to say, when we read Dante, we are not concerned with the Florentine poet, but of a man ‘nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita:’ one in the middle of the journey of our life.
The Core’s coming-to-be is really a historical anomaly. Its nascence coincided with the tenure of University President Nicholas Murray Butler, a time when the reigning academic philosophy was that Columbia would only be as strong as its individual graduate departments. Despite the disproportionate focus on graduate priorities and visibility, the College managed to develop a touchstone Core Curriculum focused on broad educational goals that transcend the walls that persist between independent departments in the modern University, ever-geared toward specialty research.
One would think that a program as historic and central as the Core is for Columbia College would be rather popular with the University’s central administration. But this is not so. The odds have always been stacked against the Core and its success, from Butler’s time right down to our own. Core programs face perennial staffing shortages (not to mention classroom space), leading to the same scramble every year for people willing to teach it, which has progressively drawn more adjunct faculty and graduate students, and fewer full professors and senior faculty. There are a number of causes for this. First, the Core lacks any substantial resources for attracting faculty to its programs. Faculty are hired to teach by and in individual departments, most of which have a superior professional and reputational interest in promoting esoteric research and graduate education than they do in expanding undergraduate offerings. Department rankings are determined largely by the placement rates of their graduate students, which are determined almost entirely on the basis of research and with very little regard to teaching. Professors are required to teach a minimum number of hours per semester within the department as the condition on which they are paid, and it is often the case that hours spent teaching the Core do not count, making a Lit Hum section an extraneous and substantial burden on a professor—one for which they are not necessarily compensated. And so teaching the Core becomes an act, in most cases, of charity.
But it is a charity that some faculty members are no longer inclined to give. Teaching a Core class demands twice as many hours teaching every week as an advanced seminar, which comes with fewer papers, no exams, and a set of self-selecting students interested in a professor’s particular specialty. College students are often surprised to learn that the materials of the Core have not been studied by their professors in a prior academic life: it is not necessarily the case that a specialist in Virginia Woolf will have read Homer, or Augustine, or Montaigne—certainly not since their undergraduate days, or in a strong enough capacity to be able to teach them without great exertion. The same problem is perhaps even worse in music and art history, where limited resources have driven the faculty there into isolated niches, of interest to only a handful of people globally. Therefore, to teach Lit Hum or CC, professors are required to actually read the books, many for the first time. Finding this task daunting, and without a proper understanding of what values underlie the Core’s demands, professors are frequently scared away from adding a Core section to the exclusion of their research or higher-level courses more pertinent to their own professional interests.
During the seventeen year assistant deanship of English Professor Michael Rosenthal (now a Senior Scholar), which coincided with the tenure of Dean Peter Pouncey and the period during which de Bary served as Provost, the ideal distribution of faculty in core programs was imagined to contain one-third senior faculty, one-third assistant professors, and one-third graduate students and untenured faculty. This was never achieved, but at the time of its fashioning, this was an ambitious benchmark. Today, precise numbers are unavailable, but the consensus is that the proportion of senior faculty is far below this. Departments have shifted resources away from the employment of dedicated lecturer positions (faculty members who taught but were untenured) toward adjuncts, hired guns who live on the margins of their respective departments. With this came the elimination of a class of educators who would otherwise develop careers at least in part built on leading Core sections. Nevertheless, these younger “preceptors” are entitled to various prizes of not immaterial monetary worth, which incentivize good, enthusiastic teaching. The advantage of Rosenthal’s model would have been a leadership class of senior, experienced professors, who could guide their younger counterparts. Its benefits, though, are only materialized when there both exists a body of senior faculty willing to teach the Core, and when that body has a proper understandings of its historical objectives, and why it is important for the growth of their students. Indeed, that body has shrunk over time.
Lacking political clout of any kind, the Core must fight the strong current of centralization that has siphoned authority from the College deanship to the University President, where the interests of the College are not prioritized. With globalized learning, Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion, and a greater orientation towards professional schools (which produce full-paying tuitions) as the trendy foci of the University administration, the drain on intellectual resources and opportunity costs presented by the Core for an old-fashioned Liberal Arts program make concern for the College’s needs rare and unsympathetic. Once upon a time, the professors who taught in the College were part of a smaller body known as the College Faculty, which would meet monthly to discuss general educational issues, philosophies, and the like. It was a robust forum for debate that preserved the integrity of the College’s intellectual strength and unique character, and dedication to the Core. During the years of the College Faculty, it was not uncommon to have weekly course-wide meetings of Core instructors, engaging each other as much as with their particular twenty or so students. While it is still technically within the powers of the College Faculty to convene, all of incentives to do so were diminished upon its absorption in the early 1990s into a University-wide Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. The priorities of this body are poorly matched to the needs of the undergraduate college, and therefore dissolve any possibility for College faculty to focus on their individual needs or objectives beyond their departments.
The Faculty of the Arts and Sciences now meets about three times each year. Meetings are usually filled with announcements from University President Lee C. Bollinger’s office, leaving little room for the pertinent discussion of Core and undergraduate needs. It is a major loss. In the absence of a centralized body to discuss issues relevant to the College, the philosophy behind the Core has been lost on most of the people in charge of staffing it. Touted often as a crash course in canonical works of philosophy, art, music, and literature, the description of the Core that sticks in most people’s minds reeks of post-colonialism and racial and gender biases—not to mention intellectual frivolity and slapdash scholarship. After a series of “academic culture wars” in the 1980s, during which the Liberal Arts became divided between more traditional academics (like the members of the Society of Senior Scholars) and particularistic ethnic studies departments, who view the Core with great disdain and write it off as anachronistic and backward—a stained relic that they actively invest in undoing. The prevailing sentiment regarding the Core among Columbia’s graduate departments is predicated on an understanding of its values that is sadly and deeply misconceived, because there exists little opportunity for its veteran instructors to put forth a truer (and more palatable) picture.
The Senior Scholars are not the only ones who get it, though: the Committee on the Core is the Core’s main governing body, and is comprised of many highly-regarded educators in the Core’s programs. The problem lies not with the Committee itself, but with its essential lack of actual power: they set the curriculum, but cannot dictate how the syllabus is taught. The Committee on the Core does not possess the ability to choose instructors without submitting staffing requests through the individual departments. Department policies determine the number of instructors that come from each, which leaves little room for the Committee to make any demands about the seniority of the instructors themselves. Moreover, the Committee is not a sufficient replacement for the sorts of frequent curricular meetings that extend the Core’s synthesis beyond the syllabus, since their meetings are infrequent and do not involve a majority of the instructors. What is needed is not simply good governance, but a thorough reorientation of the instructors of Core programs as a group, in which techniques and ideas could be shared, which weekly meetings of the Core staff used to accomplish.
The only forum that the Scholars still have for a serious discussion of Core values exists in the Keys to the Core lecture series, a semesterly cluster of Core-oriented mini-lectures that take place on Friday afternoons in the Heyman Center and Kent Hall. The series, headed up by Professors de Bary and Douglas Chalmers, invites influential Core instructors to speak on topics related to the history and values of the programs they teach. These include discussions about Frontiers of Science, Music, and Art Humanities from the people who run them, and often result in genuine debate about ways to improve the programs. The inaugural Keys season in 2008 produced a booklet of pithy and meaningful histories of the Core Curriculum, paying frequent homage to its early framers, and discussing the principles that guided its inception, which are no less relevant today (for those interested, there are several hundred copies of these lectures available in de Bary’s office in Kent). Unfortunately, these meetings are attended by an almost unvaryingly older audience, with few students present aside from the ones to whom de Bary and his peers convincingly advertise. Without a more diverse attendance from students and preceptors (who already give a great deal of time to the course), the valuable ideologies remain contained within a self-selecting group, a sort of noble echo chamber. The reminiscences shared at these meetings of great names like Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, and Lionel Trilling—some of Columbia’s most noteworthy intellectuals of the last century—are further proof that the College’s earlier years were marked by a dual moral and educational commitment that has become too diffuse in the modern University to take its due hold.
The Society of Senior Scholars has situated itself as the primary protectors of that commitment: not only as former students of the Core, or believers in it, but as its teachers, being among the few tenured faculty still involved in it. Members like de Bary and Pazzaglini—graduates themselves of Columbia College—recall the history and philosophy of the Liberal Arts here at Columbia as an education in character. Pazzaglini’s Heyman Center Colloquium for Spring 2013, “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” cites among its goals the examination of “philosophy as a lived experience, not as an academic discipline or a set of metaphysical systems or abstract interpretations….The aim of these philosophies as a way of life is to develop people as full human beings, not as esoteric specialists or academics.” What they lament, then, is the divorce of academic work from active, public life: that a scholar can write a paper on Kant or Aristotle, without applying those ideas with great force to their non-academic lives.
Speaking to de Bary, Pazzaglini, and other Society members is something of a religious experience: they quote Seneca and Mencius with tremendous facility, fashioning themselves (whether they know it or not) as wise elders, as public intellectuals. Their characteristic profundity is indicative of the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities. “We, Columbia, are one of the great builders of civilization,” Pazzaglini says. “That is the true purpose of the Academy.” Being older, the Senior Scholars are already card-carrying members of the academically initiated, having completed celebrated work in admittedly specialized fields, such as de Bary’s seminal contributions to Confucian and Buddhist scholarship both in the US and in China (his book on Buddhism is the primary textbook for Columbia’s course of the same name, taught in the Religion department). That these decorated thinkers return to the College to preside over the moral development of young men and women into future citizens speaks volumes about the social boons buried in a Core education.
Despite the philosophy of the Core being lost to many of its current faculty, the support and vigilance of the alumni have managed to preserve its keystone courses—Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities—mostly untouched since their inception. A prevailing majority of students in Core, though presented with a skewed picture of its objectives, tend to develop a strong if ineffable affinity to it over the course of their Columbia careers. The same, too, goes for faculty, many of whom become devotees of the Core, but only after they are given incentive enough to teach it for the first time. It is the alumni commitment to those programs that has kept the Core out of budget negotiations, even during the College’s many years of operating deficits in the 1960s and 70s. Even though the College produces a large number of the University’s donors, and has students who actually pay tuition, the University—and even the College, to some extent—grossly neglects the program’s needs, while perversely continuing to laud the Core as the College’s defining feature vis-à-vis its peers in order to attract its over 30,000 annual applications. And so, despite the pretense of an appreciation for Core principles, without alumni support, there would be little else: the broader University has no material investment in the Core, and largely overlooks the intellectual traditions of the College in favor of more hip institutional objectives than cultivating an enlightened citizenry. Were it not for the money that undergraduates provide, or for the fierceness with which the College alumni defend the Core, there is a broad consensus that the administration would get rid of tomorrow.
To ensure the Core’s continued existence, there have been murmurings of the unlikely thought to revive the College Faculty. More plausibly, there has been talk of creating a Core Endowment, which could offer monetary incentives to departments that contribute faculty and graduate students for the Core, which those departments could use for expanding research or graduate programs. But even then, the Senior Scholars are the source of the Core’s central hope. The Society, in its wistful quest for meaning and relevance, and hindered by its institutional impotency, has nevertheless willed itself into continued existence, taking refuge in the hearts of the young men and women who came to understand under its tutelage the inseparability of knowledge and character. The Scholars are few in number, but they are powerful in what they stand for; those rare and fortunate numbers of students who have studied under Society members (myself included) are often proud to report the uplifting and gratifying experiences they had as being uniquely Columbian and profoundly impactful, morally and otherwise.
Whenever Professor de Bary’s name has come up in conversation with his peers, he has variously been referred to as a great spirit, a precious treasure, the man to whom all roads lead back. Far from pallbearers, de Bary and his fellow Senior Scholars are important advocates for the basic idea that the cultivation of virtue is an inherently educational process. Their projects are the living fulfillment of the self-proclaimed raison d’etre of the College, as memorialized on the frontispiece of Low Library: “from Generation to Generation, for the Advancement of the Public Good and the Glory of Almighty God.”
An education is only as good as the active character of the learned. In his Analects, Confucius writes: “Walking along with three people, my teacher is sure to be among them. I choose what is good in them and follow it and what is not good and change it.” That is the essence of the Core; its continuance as such, and in no other form, should be a chief undergraduate priority, lest the College and future society suffer irrevocably in its absence.