//essays//
Spring 2018
Columbia's War with Itself
Dore Feith
Columbia, with its Core Curriculum, prides itself as a bastion of liberal arts education. But the University is at war with itself. In classrooms, students are generally urged to broaden their minds. But elsewhere on campus, University offices promote ideas at odds with free expression, open debate, and civil discourse. They tell students they have the right not to be ruffled by exposure to ideas they would disapprove. The result is that the University is suffering from cognitive dissonance on an institutional level. It must decide what its mission is.
A child is the center of his own universe. To be an adult is to realize that the universe does not revolve around oneself and that one must share the planet with other people. Liberal arts education aims to teach us to shed childishness, equipping us to enter a world of adults. Infantilizing students—tolerating their hyper-sensitivity—negates the liberal arts.
Critics of the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses often identify faculty and students as the sources of the problem. At Columbia, it seems to me, faculty have little to do with it. The problem originates with students and is aggravated by administrators responsible for fostering “student life” outside the classroom.
Some students with strong political views demand that the University protect them from being challenged by contrary views. Heven Haile, a Columbia Daily Spectator columnist, for example, resents that Columbia allows a variety of views on campus. “No, we do not have to respect the harmful ideas of conservatives for the sake of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Some conservatives are lucky that we choose to spend precious oxygen on their often ignorant and ill-intentioned comments,” she wrote in a March 2018 column. Dismissing all contrary political ideas as irrational or immoral is as immature as covering one’s ears and yelling “la-la-la I can’t hear you.” That is something less than respectable, respectful, adult behavior. Indeed, as a practical matter that, if sufficiently widespread, would make liberal democratic society impossible to maintain. Of course, that may be the very intention.
Does Columbia foster maturity or immaturity? What is one to make of the school’s student life administrators issuing a “study break” room in Lerner Hall “where you can always enjoy coloring, Play-Doh, board games and Legos”? In the 1960s, campus progressives argued that they were grown-ups and that the university should treat them as such. They wanted universities to abandon their in loco parentis role. Activists today, however, are moving in the opposite direction.
Worse than children’s playrooms is the indulgence of students’ refusal to listen to views they don’t like. A Columbia student group invited a British anti-Muslim thug named Tommy Robinson to speak on campus. Sixteen students disrupted the event and prevented him from talking. Administrators began to investigate the disruption as a violation of university rules, but then dropped the matter. The University might have used the incident as a teaching opportunity to show what liberal arts in action looks like. It might have protected the right of student groups to host speakers with despicable views (Columbia’s pro-Israel students, myself included, did not shut down or disrupt last year’s talk by Omar Barghouti, the anti-Semitic leader of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement against Israel). Instead, administrators gave the disruptors a pass after a number of students and professors petitioned in their favor. The message seemed to be that university principles won’t apply if disruptors can garner a mass of support.
The annual “welcome back” emails from Columbia College Dean James Valentini suggest that senior administrators may be gradually downgrading the importance of intellectual diversity on campus. Valentini dedicated his 2014 message to the value of the Core Curriculum. He wrote that, by means of the Core, the College aims to teach students “to listen to and understand the perspectives of others, to debate and discuss with thoughtfulness and respect, and to value one another.” In 2015 and 2016, Valentini told us that the Core’s essence is to teach us “to question and analyze what we know and how we know it, what we believe and why we believe it, to imagine new knowledge and to entertain new beliefs.”
In 2017, however, the Core disappeared from his message. The dean now chose to pay tribute not to intellect but to feelings. “Think about what you liked and what you didn’t” about the previous three months of summer vacation, Valentini advised. Meanwhile the University would focus on improving “wellness efforts.” The dean’s message deemphasized intellectual pursuits while featuring buzzwords like “wellness,” “your journey,” and “your experiences.” Rather than encouraging students to pursue unfamiliar studies and activities, he suggests that the most valuable thing at Columbia is not such education, but appreciating ourselves and our experience. Gone was any discussion of how a liberal arts education transcends personal experience and how robust intellectual debate is a good thing.
Anti-intellectual political activists are louder than most students, but they do not seem to be the majority. Thousands of students enroll in Columbia specifically to receive a good liberal arts education. In general, they study the Core and benefit from it. Spectator even occasionally prints a defense of the value of freely exchanging ideas and entertaining disagreeable views. But the administration could do a lot more to teach the importance of liberal arts, liberality and philosophical debate.
From the ranks of the administrators, strong support for the principles of the Core have emerged from Roosevelt Montás. For supporters of free speech, this is encouraging, if a bit unsurprising, because Montás is the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. Stressing the university’s civic responsibility, Montás has written in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The crucial contribution we can make is to introduce students to the texts, ideas, and norms of deliberative argumentation that gave rise to liberal-democratic politics in the first place.” He adds, “To ‘educate’ is to nurture an individual into a particular community. We must recognize plainly that all education is education for citizenship,” and “What we teach, how we teach it, and whom we teach it to necessarily describe a vision of society and of the types of individuals we want to prepare for that society.” He writes that we can preserve liberal democracy in America only by teaching young adults about its value.
Columbia could amplify Montás’ sentiments in freshman orientation programs. Deans could contribute by reiterating the importance of the liberal arts in their communiqués. Instead of promoting childish opposition to hearing new ideas and contrarian opinions, administrators could educate students about the philosophical basis of the University’s traditional principles. Columbia could then resolve its cognitive dissonance in favor of producing broad-minded, learned adults who appreciate and can contribute to a liberal democratic society.
A child is the center of his own universe. To be an adult is to realize that the universe does not revolve around oneself and that one must share the planet with other people. Liberal arts education aims to teach us to shed childishness, equipping us to enter a world of adults. Infantilizing students—tolerating their hyper-sensitivity—negates the liberal arts.
Critics of the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses often identify faculty and students as the sources of the problem. At Columbia, it seems to me, faculty have little to do with it. The problem originates with students and is aggravated by administrators responsible for fostering “student life” outside the classroom.
Some students with strong political views demand that the University protect them from being challenged by contrary views. Heven Haile, a Columbia Daily Spectator columnist, for example, resents that Columbia allows a variety of views on campus. “No, we do not have to respect the harmful ideas of conservatives for the sake of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Some conservatives are lucky that we choose to spend precious oxygen on their often ignorant and ill-intentioned comments,” she wrote in a March 2018 column. Dismissing all contrary political ideas as irrational or immoral is as immature as covering one’s ears and yelling “la-la-la I can’t hear you.” That is something less than respectable, respectful, adult behavior. Indeed, as a practical matter that, if sufficiently widespread, would make liberal democratic society impossible to maintain. Of course, that may be the very intention.
Does Columbia foster maturity or immaturity? What is one to make of the school’s student life administrators issuing a “study break” room in Lerner Hall “where you can always enjoy coloring, Play-Doh, board games and Legos”? In the 1960s, campus progressives argued that they were grown-ups and that the university should treat them as such. They wanted universities to abandon their in loco parentis role. Activists today, however, are moving in the opposite direction.
Worse than children’s playrooms is the indulgence of students’ refusal to listen to views they don’t like. A Columbia student group invited a British anti-Muslim thug named Tommy Robinson to speak on campus. Sixteen students disrupted the event and prevented him from talking. Administrators began to investigate the disruption as a violation of university rules, but then dropped the matter. The University might have used the incident as a teaching opportunity to show what liberal arts in action looks like. It might have protected the right of student groups to host speakers with despicable views (Columbia’s pro-Israel students, myself included, did not shut down or disrupt last year’s talk by Omar Barghouti, the anti-Semitic leader of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement against Israel). Instead, administrators gave the disruptors a pass after a number of students and professors petitioned in their favor. The message seemed to be that university principles won’t apply if disruptors can garner a mass of support.
The annual “welcome back” emails from Columbia College Dean James Valentini suggest that senior administrators may be gradually downgrading the importance of intellectual diversity on campus. Valentini dedicated his 2014 message to the value of the Core Curriculum. He wrote that, by means of the Core, the College aims to teach students “to listen to and understand the perspectives of others, to debate and discuss with thoughtfulness and respect, and to value one another.” In 2015 and 2016, Valentini told us that the Core’s essence is to teach us “to question and analyze what we know and how we know it, what we believe and why we believe it, to imagine new knowledge and to entertain new beliefs.”
In 2017, however, the Core disappeared from his message. The dean now chose to pay tribute not to intellect but to feelings. “Think about what you liked and what you didn’t” about the previous three months of summer vacation, Valentini advised. Meanwhile the University would focus on improving “wellness efforts.” The dean’s message deemphasized intellectual pursuits while featuring buzzwords like “wellness,” “your journey,” and “your experiences.” Rather than encouraging students to pursue unfamiliar studies and activities, he suggests that the most valuable thing at Columbia is not such education, but appreciating ourselves and our experience. Gone was any discussion of how a liberal arts education transcends personal experience and how robust intellectual debate is a good thing.
Anti-intellectual political activists are louder than most students, but they do not seem to be the majority. Thousands of students enroll in Columbia specifically to receive a good liberal arts education. In general, they study the Core and benefit from it. Spectator even occasionally prints a defense of the value of freely exchanging ideas and entertaining disagreeable views. But the administration could do a lot more to teach the importance of liberal arts, liberality and philosophical debate.
From the ranks of the administrators, strong support for the principles of the Core have emerged from Roosevelt Montás. For supporters of free speech, this is encouraging, if a bit unsurprising, because Montás is the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. Stressing the university’s civic responsibility, Montás has written in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The crucial contribution we can make is to introduce students to the texts, ideas, and norms of deliberative argumentation that gave rise to liberal-democratic politics in the first place.” He adds, “To ‘educate’ is to nurture an individual into a particular community. We must recognize plainly that all education is education for citizenship,” and “What we teach, how we teach it, and whom we teach it to necessarily describe a vision of society and of the types of individuals we want to prepare for that society.” He writes that we can preserve liberal democracy in America only by teaching young adults about its value.
Columbia could amplify Montás’ sentiments in freshman orientation programs. Deans could contribute by reiterating the importance of the liberal arts in their communiqués. Instead of promoting childish opposition to hearing new ideas and contrarian opinions, administrators could educate students about the philosophical basis of the University’s traditional principles. Columbia could then resolve its cognitive dissonance in favor of producing broad-minded, learned adults who appreciate and can contribute to a liberal democratic society.
//DORE FEITH is a senior in Columbia College and Politics Editor of The Current. He can be reached at dlf2133@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of Kingofears.