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COVER STORY |
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J.W. Smit, Queen
Wilhelmina Professor of History, is the only person to teach
all four of the basic Core courses: Contemporary Civilization,
Literature Humanities, Art Humanities and Music Humanities.
(Photo: Michael Dames) |
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In their argument with what I'll call the "wisdom" camp, advocates
of the "training" camp did not work in an intellectual void. Their
model for reform also came from Europe, more specifically from Germany,
the home of the prestigious and highly successful new-style research
university, with its emphasis on specialized, research-based training
and high standards of scholarship in the natural and the social
sciences. Many American scholars who had earned their degrees abroad
sought to reform their own schools along German lines. At Columbia,
one such German-trained professor was John W. Burgess, whose proposals
for reorganizing the Government Department's curriculum had the
enthusiastic support of President A.P. Barnard and his successor,
Nicholas Murray Butler (Class of 1882).
In a blow to the wisdom camp's case for general - or perhaps "liberal"
would be better - undergraduate education, Butler, who during his
presidency said that many at the College were engaged in mere "intellectual
dawdling," floated the so-called Columbia Plan (1905) that would
shepherd students who wished to work at a more rapid tempo into
graduate or professional school right after the sophomore year.
Motivated individuals would be free to rush ahead professionally,
but general, liberal education and a common curriculum would fall
by the wayside.
The advocates of "dawdling" fought back, but with weapons that were
too antiquated to be effective - so much so that, on reading their
rhetoric, the committed humanist yearns to put other words in their
mouths, words that reflect the very basic fact that the wisdom camp's
curriculum had been the standard introduction into real-world problems
for hundreds and hundreds of years. But, seemingly oblivious to
that line of argument, Dean of the College John Howard Van Amringe
stubbornly insisted that the purpose of a college education was,
as he somewhat quaintly put it, "to make men" (not professional
specialists) by shaping students' characters through the contemplation
of ancient wisdom contained in the Greek and Latin classics. His
argument reflected Columbia's old self-image as a sort of cultural
finishing school for the sons of the New York elite, and it is perhaps
too easy for us now, in a very different world, to mock it. But
it is also apparent that Van Amringe's rhetoric was no answer to
the concerns of Burgess, Barnard and Butler, who could not ignore
the need to prepare Columbia's students for a changing, and increasingly
powerful, America.
It was to be expected that at the beginning of the 20th century,
the trend against liberal education, then linked almost exclusively
with the traditional humanities, would begin to gather steam. It
was a trend that was powerfully supported by the waves of first-
and second-generation immigrants who began to seek admission to
American colleges and universities. For men like Butler, it was
those institutions' responsibility to turn the most intelligent
and driven of those new citizens into managers, engineers, scientists,
technicians and teachers. But however gifted, the new sort of student
generally had not received the classics-based high school training
that was common among the old elite and that was a virtual prerequisite
for the old-style curriculum.
So too Columbia, which had educated so many of the New York establishment,
was going to face a quite different student population. How suddenly
the immigrant pressure surfaced and how strong it became is not
exactly clear, but it was probably gradual. But change eventually
came: The 1916 abolition of Latin as an admissions requirement was
the first formal adaptation to the new reality. It was a signal
that, in the battle against the old ideal of general education,
the newcomers and the advocates of professional schooling were allies.
But the fight had a long way to go. Against this background, the
easy acceptance in 1919 of something as radical as CC might seem
to be just short of a miracle. It was a reversal of sorts, the general
education idea in a new and very different key. And to make any
sense of it, we must first understand the sea change in American
life that preceded it.
In 1914, World War I began, with America as only an interested
bystander. But in 1917, the United States had become actively involved.
While “The Great War” hardly deserves its global moniker
when compared with World War II, contemporaries perceived that this
war was not simply the old-fashioned Clauswitzian pursuit of diplomacy
by military means. Certainly after the Russian Revolution, during
the same year that the United States entered the war, it began to
look more like a tectonic shift, long in preparation, that was going
to change the face of the world. It also seemed that clashing ideologies
played as much a role as clashing interests, or at least clashing
interests easily translated into ideological rhetoric.
Universities, which supposedly specialized in understanding the
wedded worlds of interest and ideas, were expected to give more
than just technical support to the war effort. Columbia’s
contribution was the 1917 creation of a course in war issues, with
the purpose, in the words of later Dean of the College Herbert Hawkes,
of “understanding the worth of the cause for which one is
fighting.” Because the war ended just a year later, the course
did not have a long life. But the work put into creating it ironically
bore fruit in the idea of creating something similar, a course devoted
instead to peace issues, which were — again in Hawkes’
words — “far more important as a field of instruction
of our college youth” than the issues of war.
So, the initial thinking about CC took place in the exhilarating
atmosphere of the first months of peace, marked by a mix of idealistic
and realistic anticipation of a new world waiting to be built. The
experience of the war had produced a sense of national community,
but one also knew (or simply feared) that powerful forces within
the country made consensus precarious. Among those forces were ignorance
and lack of interest. As the historian (and later dean) Harry Carman
— soon one of the main forces behind CC — put it somewhat
later, “the vast majority of Americans never critically examine
our existing social standards.” And that could mean trouble.
It was no doubt in part this sense of civic responsibility and a
felt need to improve each Columbian’s ability to “understand
the civilization of his own day and participate effectively in it,”
as CC’s first syllabus put it, that pushed some creative faculty
members away from the extremes of the two pre-war camps toward a
new synthesis: general education that aimed at a different sort
of wisdom, one bound up not only with the old history of ideas,
but also with the methods and the more contemporary focus of the
newer, more specialized social science disciplines.
On January 20, 1919, the College faculty, after but a few scant
weeks of discussion, resolved to accept those innovators’
ideas and voted to replace the required introductions to philosophy
and history, so central to the traditional curriculum, with something
entirely different. The new required course, which would meet five
days a week for one-hour classes, would place new demands not only
on students but also on the faculty, who would be charged with teaching
something that neither they nor anyone else had ever taught. As
it was a new concept, a committee was created and charged with the
daunting task of composing a syllabus. The committee managed to
have an elaborate document printed before the fall semester and
complete yet another in time for the spring.
Certainly, the unusual speed of these events and the absence of
strong opposition to new general education requirement that cut
back the power of older, more established departments demands explanation.
Part of it, no doubt, was Butler’s support. Even before the
war, this longtime opponent of general education had begun to soften
his stance. But now he showed almost a convert’s enthusiasm,
which prompted a Jester cartoon portraying the new course
as Butler’s weapon against the Bolshevik threat. (Perhaps
there is something to that.) Whatever its source, that no-doubt
contagious enthusiasm, combined with a general mind shift induced
by the war, cannot in itself account for such a quick and large
leap over an old faculty divide.
Indeed, the advocates of specialized professional and graduate-style
education may have been placated because this attempt at general
education was fundamentally different from what Van Amringe had
promoted. The syllabus offered students an interesting mix of the
varied disciplines of its principal proponents: John C. Coss, the
first chairman, was a philosopher, Rexford Tugwell an economist
(and later a prominent member of FDR’s Brain Trust), and Harry
Carman a historian. The course they put together essentially was
a comprehensive introduction to a social scientific and historical
analysis of what they called the “insistent problems of the
present world.”
Although some grumbled about alleged superficiality, the people
who took the initiative wanted rigorous scholarship, and the course
syllabus reflected that intention. But they also wanted their scholarship
to serve ethical and civic goals. Their philosophy was similar to
that of philosopher John Dewey — a member of the Columbia
faculty who did not participate directly in developing the course,
but who looked on it with a sympathetic eye — for whom education
was meaningless if disconnected from the experience of civic life.
As their softer, more humanities-based ethical concerns crept into
a primarily social-science based syllabus, the language of the old
traditionalists was fused with that of their opponents. One early
participant, Professor Cassius Keyser, called for an education that
would instill in students “a certain wisdom about the world.”
Butler found perhaps the most felicitous use for this old and un-
(or at least non-) scientific language when, in his address to the
University in September 1919, he spoke of the need to give students
a firmer message about the realities of life — “to get
knowledge and translate it into wisdom.” Wisdom as the ultimate
end of the pursuit of knowledge: Was that not the perfect summary
of what the founders of CC were aiming at? Perhaps unaware, Butler
had paraphrased one of Jacob Burkhardt’s best aphorisms about
the study of history. Its purpose, he wrote, was to teach you “not
to be clever the next time, but to be wiser forever.”
How then did CC’s trajectory shift from a course grounded
in the social sciences, with their focus on the problems of the
present, to one based on the “great books” of the past?
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Clockwise from top
left: John C. Coss, Herbert Hawkes, Harold Barger and Harry
Carman. (Photos: © 1961 V. Sladon) |
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The best place to start is the official 1919 course syllabus, which
is not, of course, in any way an ordinary syllabus. A far cry from
the one-page-per-semester photocopied book list that we now find
in the CC office, it might seem to us today almost too centralized,
even tyrannical, for it outlines specifically — session after
session, week after week — precisely the issues to be discussed
and the pages to be read. But more than a centralized schedule of
assignments, it was itself an intellectual document, an admirable
achievement of concentrated, systematic thought about man in nature
and society. It was not so much a syllabus as the detailed outline
of a book.
It was, indeed, first printed as a booklet, and one that became
thicker and thicker over the years, as the likes of maps and essays
(sometimes written by the staff) were added. But though the booklet’s
content expanded, its conceptual structure remained unchanged for
more than a decade: A survey of geography and the physical environment
(hence the maps), Part I was called “The World of Nature”;
Part II, “The World of Human Nature,” stressed social
psychology, ethics and forms of human behavior, with an emphasis
on “individual traits that are socially significant”;
Part III was a more historical treatment of the socio-economic and
intellectual history of the United States and Europe; and Part IV
tackled the insistent contemporary problems. Titled “National
States of Today,” the course’s final section covered
such things, according to Carman’s notes, as “nationalism,
imperialism, industrialization and economic growth” and “imperialism
in its relation to backward peoples” (problems, it is interesting
to note, that — without the judgemental term “backwardness,”
of course — more modern versions of CC have been accused of
neglecting).
When it comes to course readings, one thing in particular might
strike the present-day Columbian as odd: Not surprisingly for a
course that began as a modern, real-world alternative to the general
education of the pre-war traditionalists, its readings included
no “great books” nor any primary sources. The material
students had to digest was, as it were, pre-digested for them in
texts often written especially for the course by their own Columbia
professors: J.H. Randall ’18’s Making of the Modern
Mind provided a challenging overview of Western philosophy;
Irwin Edman ’17’s Human Traits and their Social
Significance, though written by a philosopher, served as an
introduction to social anthropology; and the titles of John Dewey’s
How We Think and Carleton J.H. Hayes’s Economic
and Political History of Modern Europe speak for themselves.
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The famous Red Books
weren't always red; some editions were tan or gray. (Photo:
Peter Kang '05) |
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Though not “great books,” these texts were not easy
reading. The first CC students worked hard. The sheer mass of problems
thrown at them was daunting, involving much more than a passing
acquaintance with European and American history, social psychology,
world geography, philosophy, economics and politics.
What actually went on in those first CC classrooms cannot, alas,
ever be recovered, so we will never really know how much of the
syllabus (given time constraints) was addressed, how much the students
absorbed or how well the class discussions functioned. But from
the little available evidence, it seems that the students viewed
their experience very positively and were willing to sustain the
heavy workload. The teaching staff made it a point to stay close
to them, invite their reactions and take their ideas seriously —
things that might not have been students’ daily experience
in less experimental courses.
To anyone familiar with academic life, it can all sound almost unreal:
eager, happy students in a demanding required course and a cooperative
faculty from different departments imbued with a joint sense of
purpose. But though the picture of CC’s earliest years has
no doubt been touched up by time, it is clear that consensus and
a sense of shared mission were real.
Curiosity as to how that consensus was achieved makes us wish we
had a record of what went on in the weekly staff lunches where continuous
adaptations of — and to — the syllabus were hammered
out. Those discussions would no doubt provide some significant insights
into an important phase in American intellectual life, to the thinking
of a diverse group of characters bound together by what might seem
to us a naïve, but nonetheless attractive, coupling of scientific
beliefs with educational and political idealism. For they had an
enviable trust that science could solve society’s most urgent
problems.
Until the early 1940s, it seems, that consensus more or less endured,
even through inevitable challenges. Perhaps the biggest problem
was something anyone who has taught CC even recently can all too
well understand: even now, with our abbreviated book list and our
much welcomed flexibility, it’s hard when you must link texts
with life (and through discussion, not straight lecture, at that)
to avoid an unceasing struggle with time. In those days, things
were in some ways harder, for everything was written into the syllabus
and the reach of the required material was more vast; but things
were easier, as well. Since the course was not yet part of a “core,”
much less an “extended core,” the staff could simply
make CC longer. Which they did.
In 1928, unable to telescope the mass of required material into
the space of one year, the College created CC-B, which essentially
was Part IV of the original syllabus — the crucial contemporary
issues — while CC-A kept Parts I–III. For this new year-long
course, government and economics professors sacrificed their
required introductory courses to make CC a reality, just as their
historian and philosopher colleagues had done a decade before.
If nothing else, this unusual willingness to forgo departmental
independence suggests that in the 1920s and 1930s, the new program
generally was accepted by the faculty, even in those disciplines
most inclined to prefer German-style specialization and training.
Despite tensions and conflicting interests, the consensus behind
CC was strong. And for a good many years, both courses, taught by
an assortment of professors from across the faculty, thrived.
But as is the world’s wont, things did not remain rosy. Thirty
years after CC-B’s birth, it was dead, and CC-A was radically
transformed. By the time of the turmoil of 1968, the consensus seems
to have broken.
From the little that has been written about the great change in
CC that took place in the 1960s, just what happened is not exactly
clear. (It would certainly be useful, while there are still people
alive who actually participated in, or simply witnessed, CC-A’s
transformation and CC-B’s death, for someone to write the
story.) What we do know is that, though an inkling of the difficulties
appeared in the 1940s, only in the late 1950s did those problems
become intense.
Between 1957 and 1968, four committees were set up to make sense
of the travails of both halves of CC (but especially of the more
troubled CC-B, which never achieved its partner’s organization
and unity of purpose) and suggest solutions. Those reports reveal
low staff morale and an unwillingness of tenured faculty to participate
— signals of a changed attitude toward general education.
The attitude of the faculty — tenured and untenured, across
disciplines — had indeed changed, shifting toward something
very familiar: For the individual professor, the need to survive
professionally in increasingly research-focused disciplines made
CC’s teaching load seem much more onerous, and departments,
pressed to meet internal staffing needs, were more and more reluctant
to share faculty with CC. In a more general manner, the expansion
and increasing specialization of the faculty had watered down the
old esprit de corps. The MacMahon Committee report of 1957,
which deemed faculty recruitment to be among CC’s most crucial
weakness, made valuable suggestions for increasing faculty participation,
but later committees saw little chance for CC-B’s survival.
In 1968, after several attempts at reorganization, a course that
had basically been dead for several years finally was given its
funeral.
CC-A, which had faced many of the same challenges that its defunct
other half had confronted, was allowed to live, in part because
it still breathed. For no matter what staffing problems it might
have had, it enjoyed a cadre of faithful senior professors and young
instructors. Professor Peter Gay recalled his experience: “When
I first began teaching CC, it was with something of a Deweyite (or
shall I say dewey-eyed) common faith.” And he remembers how
the instructors wouldn’t have missed one of the staff’s
weekly lunch meetings, where course material and pedagogy were the
main topics on the table.
But after 1968, those meetings would be about a different course.
No longer able to rely on CC-B to handle Part IV of the original
curriculum, the staff, if they wanted to be true to the course’s
title, would have to re-incorporate the contemporary. And they would
have to squeeze it back into a two-semester format with a very different
syllabus. For the new CC, it was decreed in ’68, was to be
based not on the old social sciences and history but on classic
texts that students would read in their entirety.
A shade from 1919 might not recognize the course that was supposed
to be his legacy. Now that specialized, research-based training
and scholarship had prevailed in academe, he might wonder if what
had once been a refuge from the old-style humanities had become
instead a refuge for it? How had a social science-based course with
a focus on the present — and built around secondary sources
— become a humanities course based on primary texts dear to
the students of the past? Had the whole focus on the present and
its “insistent problems” been lost?
Professor of Economics Harold Barger, perhaps the last from his
discipline to teach CC, certainly thought so. In an interview with
Spectator he announced his refusal to teach what he pejoratively
described as just a “great books course.” What he probably
meant was that the “great books” are read because they
are great in themselves, not because they naturally fall into place
around themes appropriate for a course focused on contemporary issues.
Was there not a risk that CC would become a book- and author-centric
literature course, a philosophy-based equivalent of Literature Humanities?
Given CC’s origins and history, and the considerable energy
that social scientists had put into it, his disappointment was understandable.
And he was probably not the only old-time CC instructor to share
these worries.
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A sampling of texts
from the current Contemporary Civilization syllabus. (Photo:
Masha Volynsky '06) |
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But without filling in some more details of the life of CC-A following
its split from CC-B in the 1920s, we risk exaggerating the changes
of the 1960s. For starting as early as the 1930s, CC-A had slowly
but surely transformed from a course that relied solely on secondary
sources to one based heavily on excerpts from primary documents
in social, political and economic thought. Clearly, the staff had
grown to believe that to merely read modern texts that commented
on Aristotle, Aquinas or Mill (among the few white males on the
original syllabus who were dead) was not sufficient. Students ought
rather to read and comment on actual works.
This was the beginning of the so-called Red Books, the two volumes
of Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,
the first edition of which was published in 1946 (with revised editions
in 1954 and 1960). It was a publication that would be used in colleges
all over America; its excellence made the name of Columbia stand
for the very idea of general education of a modern sort —
a 20th-century alternative to the classics-centered curriculum of
the pre-World War I opponents of specialization. The Red Books represented
the last large-scale collective efforts of the CC staff, and as
a legacy, their importance is second only to that of CC itself.
The change in the reading list that the Red Books marked did not
mean a change in CC’s purpose, though not everyone, of course,
believed that. The transition was not surprisingly criticized by
some fundamentalist 1919ers, who were uncomfortable with the shift
to what they called “ideological-literary texts” alone.
But a mere glance at the two volumes’ table of contents refutes
the charge: along with the “ideological-literary texts”
(those primary sources in civic and moral thought), the volumes
contained historical documents illustrating real-world social, political
and economic issues of the past (e.g., constitutions or labor contracts,
manorial records, parliamentary debates and popular manifestos).
The section “Early Modern Capitalism and the Expansion of
Europe,” for example, included texts from Jacob Fugger (the
great early modern banker), rebellious German peasants and Christopher
Columbus. Under “The Elaboration of the Sovereign State,”
a student could find, along with Jacques Bossuet’s defense
of absolutism, government documents penned by Cardinal Richelieu
and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the British Hat Act of 1732.
Though the second-hand social analysis found in the earliest syllabi
had for the most part been deleted from the Red Books, like their
predecessors, they had an explicit topical and thematic structure.
The shift toward “literature” had not eliminated the
goal of helping students develop the mental tools they would need
to analyze civic reality in all its complexity and studying the
past to learn the sorts of questions they might ask of the present.
In the days before the social sciences began taking over the study
of the civic — before knowledge, training and specialization
began to triumph over “wisdom” — it was, after
all, on historical-literary texts that people relied to learn about
the civic world. There was, in short, no necessary incompatibility
between the course’s new material and its goals. And, should
CC-A’s teachers cut back on the explicitly contemporary, they
had their CC-B partners, in theory, waiting to fill it all in.
The Red Books’ 1960–61 edition was nonetheless their
swan song. It would be only eight years before they joined the ranks
of the booklet-length CC syllabi of the 1920s; their approach, short
documents and excerpts selected around major themes, would be rejected
in favor of that of Literature Humanities, with its emphasis on
reading whole books. And though today’s reality, for the most
part, is excerpts, not whole books, chosen by individual instructors,
the official syllabus is still based on the model of 1968.
No more than the introduction of the Red Booksdecades earlier did
the transition to great books (in theory read whole) require a change
either in the course’s substance or in its teachers’
will to include the contemporary. But it could. For it did increase
the danger that the course would lose some coherence and unity of
purpose. Without the formal conceptual framework that, albeit in
different forms, had provided CC with structure from 1919 through
1968, it would be trickier to fulfill the course’s original
mandate.
The so-called great books, often vilified as a dead and even an
oppressive “canon,” are equal and often superior to
more recent analysis of civilization. And they are easy to use as
pedagogical tools to help students look more lucidly at the present’s
“insistent problems.” It’s hard, for example,
to think of a better way to understand the centripetal and centrifugal
forces in all societies that can make what seemed so steady fall
apart than by reading Thucydides’ account of the breakdown
of social order during the Peloponnesian War. But Thucydides also
can be read from many angles — from the point of view of historiography,
for example, or naval history, or Greek tragedy — not all
of them related to CC’s themes. And if you have less than
two hours to devote to him, where do you start? The complication,
in short, is that — in the context of a thematic course where
the books are less the end than the means — the greatness
of great books makes it crucial that teachers learn how to use them
to suit the course’s purpose. Beginners, who have not yet
run through the reading with a class, understandably need help.
In the end, the survival of CC as conceived by that small band of
post–World War I professors depends not so much on what sources
are read as on how those sources are taught. In this area, there
is reason for concern. Because of the expansion of the College,
CC now has more than twice the number of sections than when it started,
exacerbating the old and potentially threatening problems of faculty
recruitment and esprit de corps, as well as leading to
the loss of the “common faith” of which Peter Gay spoke
with amusement but also affection, that kept CC-A alive in the 1960s.
As graduate student preceptors with mere two-year appointments (giving
them neither time to acquire experience nor wiser fellow students
to turn to for help) increasingly become the cork upon which CC
must be kept afloat, there is a real danger that it will become
what people like Harold Barger feared — a mere great books
course. This is not due, of course, to the preceptors’ lack
of intellectual capacity nor determination. It is due, rather, to
CC’s difficulty. It’s a tough place in which to begin
to learn a professor’s most basic skills: inventing exam and
paper topics, grading, guiding individual students and learning
to steer between the twin temptations of letting discussion drift
according to the proclivities of the loudest students and lecturing
to keep coherence and beat the clock. For in CC, you’re not
teaching your specialty, and the texts you’re working with
don’t automatically serve your goal of balancing present with
past and theory with practice, and keeping your eye steadily on
themes. Graduate students, whose careers depend on the ability to
focus on their own narrow specialty — 19th-century German
philosophy or medieval Islam or early modern Russia or Church history
— may succumb to the expedient of delivering an “it’s
September, so it must be the Greeks” textbook overview of
Plato and Aristotle and sitting back to listen while the class bully
or ideologue goes on and on.
So, then, does the legacy of the past live on in present-day CC?
In general, yes, with the proviso that, as its purpose and themes
are not automatically built in to the official syllabus —
which brings the advantage of freedom and flexibility — it
needs continuous vigilance on the part of the administration and
faculty. But vigilance alone will not do. It also will require more
teacher training and other forms of support.
Today’s CC is not a replica of that of 1919. In some ways,
it is worse; in some ways it is better. But the most important thing
is this: CC still gives a precious coherence to the student body
and can do the same for faculty lucky enough to be involved. It
challenges the students to contemplate extraordinary thinking, to
read and write more carefully, and to reflect upon themselves. And
— one hopes — it makes them humble before the power
of genius.
Click here
to view the current CC syllabus.
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