Last week in RealClearEducation, Kenin M. Spivak argued that while Columbia University’s leadership and commencement ceremonies showcase a deep embrace of leftist ideology, student activism remains largely performative. Reflecting on his experience as both alumnus and guest at this year’s graduation, Spivak says that despite the dominance of DEI rhetoric and the praise for progressive causes, most students still choose traditional majors and career paths, hinting that Columbia’s ideological drift may prove shallow and short-lived.
Spivak’s assessment of the graduating students at Columbia is encouraging. Their years spent in close company with radicalized fellow students and woke faculty may have given the majority no more than a veneer of sympathy with the social justice agenda, and life will wear that veneer away pretty quickly. That sounds right. What won’t wear away, however, are all the things that they missed.
Columbia still has its core, but the Columbia grads I’ve interviewed and the several I have hired in recent years have all expressed regret at how the books assigned in that program were isolates, unconnected to anything else they studied. My impression is that the typical Columbia graduate doesn’t know much about American, Western civilization, or ancient history; has a superficial acquaintance—if any—with Western literature; has a smattering of knowledge about the arts, music, and philosophy, and commands any competence in the sciences, economics, or foreign languages only if those happened to be a special interest.
On the other hand, even the most conservative Columbia students can speak with authority—or “authority”—on climate change, racial justice, American turpitude, etc.
They may soon wander away from such certainties, but discovering the area where they have been left mostly unschooled and doing something about it will take a long time. I say that in part because my undergraduate education (Haverford, 1975) left me in much the same position. Haverford had abolished what was left of its core curriculum the year I arrived; I spent four years pursuing my interests in sub-Saharan African ethnography, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Jacobean drama, and similar subjects.
The only history I studied was West African colonial history. I had some incredibly good teachers, and I had the saving grace of being an assiduous reader of many subjects. However, I was ignorant of many things that a graduate of a good liberal arts college should know, and what I did know consisted of a deep understanding of fragments. I knew something about the symphonies of Mahler, but not those of Beethoven. I had read with care works by Mann and Kafka, but nothing by Goethe, etc.
So I spent the ensuing fifty years trying to fill the gaps. Maybe that’s all that can be expected of a liberal arts education: an awareness of the gaps and a determination to fill them. But I suspect I would have benefited from a sturdier foundation.
So, my assessment of a contemporary Columbia undergraduate education is partly a projection of my own disappointments and insecurities. That said, I welcome Spivak’s verdict.
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Image: “ColumbiaUniversity” by Beraldoleal on Wikimedia Commons
“Their years spent in close company with radicalized fellow students and woke faculty may have given the majority no more than a veneer of sympathy with the social justice agenda, and life will wear that veneer away pretty quickly.
The mooring on a lobster boat consists of a large multi-ton granite block to which is attached a length of heavy chain and then a rope (pendant) which is used to moor the boat. The block proceeds to sink into the mud or gravel of the bottom, and it’s really the last link of the chain that holds the boat most of the time — the chain is heavy and stays on the bottom, with the rope coming up from it, and there’s slack in the rope.
When it gets rough the wind & waves lift the boat and start lifting the chain — which will then drop back as quickly as it can. Eventually the storm will be enough to keep the entire chain off the ground (which, of course, is pulling back). Then the boat starts trying to pull the mooring block out of the mud/gravel on the bottom, and that’s not easy because the water creates a vacuum beneath the block.
Eventually the boat can pull out the block and start to drag it, but by then (hopefully) the storm has started to abate, the chain will drop to the bottom, the mooring will tighten up and the boat will be in the same place that you left her. But that’s if you’ve got a good block and chain assembly there — if all you have is an old engine block on the other end of your mooring line, good luck…
It’s not their thin veneer of sympathy for the social justice agenda but that they don’t have anything else… They have no mooring — they were cut loose from the traditional American values, they don’t really have social justice values — they don’t really have ANY values and are morally adrift.
This isn’t a problem in good weather, but come a storm, there is nothing to prevent them from being blown ashore and that is truly terrifying. Times were good in the 1920s, the middle class was doing quite well, my grandparents had quite a bit of money in the bank, over 90% of which they lost when the bank failed. It was American values that saved the country then, I shudder to think what would happen were that to happen today…
The moral flexibility necessary to succeed in academia today is not an inherent good thing…
“I knew something about the symphonies of Mahler, but not those of Beethoven.”
What a mope! For sure, you were a dope about Ludwig. And plenty of others. But you have had plenty of opportunity to remedy the deficits. Find something you really love and run with it, I say!
And I have to laugh about the poor Columbia students. Their deprivation! Countless opportunities to hear an endless stream of the greatest symphonies from all over the world at Carnegie Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Endless, endless. If your foundation lacked, that is your fault.