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
“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.