A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  Kahn liked teaching in the core. The courses are still taught seminar-style, in keeping with the Erskine formula, although with one teacher, not two, in the classroom—again, for money reasons. Columbia requires first-year core teachers to attend weekly tutorials on the books, which some instructors are reading for the first time. The college also provides a small kitty for core socializing, to finance pizza parties or other outings. “Our class saw ‘Bowling for Columbine’ using the money provided by the Core office,” one student reported on Columbia’s course review website, “and went to the [legendary, now-closed dive] West End for the last day of class. You can’t beat that.” Most freshmen take LitHum, which has a common final exam, and “kids spill out into the corridors the night before the exam to study,” says student Rebecca Lee. “It is very much a shared experience.”

  A vestigial Socraticism still prevails. Whereas Mark Van Doren once began a two-hour General Honors course by asking, “What is the role of passion in The Iliad?” today’s teacher may be more willing to provide some historical context for the readings. The perfect core course, however, still features students, not teachers, talking. “They want the students to talk more than you, though the idea is not to make the students squirm. I would tell them, ‘Next week you won’t remember what Kant said, forget ten years from now,’” Kahn explains. “It’s about learning how to have a conversation.”

  The great thing about Columbia is that the students know they’re signing up to read hard texts. There is an undergraduate determination you can count on. If you assign Kant, they’re going to read it. It’s nice to be in an institution where the assumption is made already. Left by themselves students are not going to force themselves to read these difficult texts. They’re going to be confused, and that’s the point.

  I told Kahn that a friend of mine, Michael Holquist, had trouble teaching Columbia’s athletes, who tended to sign up for early-morning classes, to save the afternoon for trekking to the college’s faraway athletic facilities. Holquist’s precise words: “They were totally at sea. They couldn’t locate Greece on a map, much less have any idea about who Homer was. These were people for whom these works were just not appropriate.” Kahn agreed that the early-morning time slots are tough to teach, although he felt that the engineering students “were a lot harder than the athletes.”

  Columbia has a separate engineering school, and its undergraduates don’t have to take both CC and LitHum. They can substitute a “Major Cultures” course for a portion of the Western core and need take only one semester of either MusicHum or ArtHum. “I thought it was fabulous, it was a great experience,” Jon Battat, a future graduate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told me. Other engineering schools accepted Battat, but he chose Columbia in part because of the undergraduate humanities offerings. He liked Nietzsche, Du Bois, and MacKinnon. “Surprisingly, I enjoyed Augustine,” he said. Battat plans to attend graduate school in aeronautical engineering, which is not offered at Columbia. So one day you may fly in a plane designed in part by a man who thrilled to The Geneaology of Morals at age 18.

  The core has its discontents, and they are smart and vocal. Veteran professor Holquist, the former president of the hide-bound humanities guild, the Modern Language Association, and, counterintuitively, a ferocious academic dissident, derides the “sentimental fuzz” among alumni and big Columbia donors that keeps the curriculum alive: “It’s motheaten. It’s death. It’s perceived as an obligation by the faculty, so of course you can’t expect good teaching. It’s a growth that perpetuates itself.”

  Other professors have mocked the curriculum as “intellectual tourism,” complaining that it can “lead only to a smattering of knowledge, and not to a real understanding of any one author.” When classicist Francisco Barrenechea taught the core, a female student blurted out, “What’s the point of learning this stuff? It’s just so we can sound smart at Upper East Side dinner parties.” “Another girl challenged her, and it was a lively debate,” Barrenechea remembers. John Erskine heard this objection all the time, and he had a pithy comeback. “Every book, he noted, had to be read for a first time,” Cross recounts in his history of the core, “and there was a profound difference between a humane familiarity with great authors and an academic exploration of them.”

  Another knock on the core is that there is too much of it. My son Christopher attended Columbia, and one day, as I was perusing the encyclopedic core syllabus, I asked him, “Did you read all those books?” Christopher admitted that in LitHum, “In the second semester I hardly read any of the books. I mean we had a week to read the Decameron. What I really gained was the ability to skim the classics of the Western canon.” Professor Montas told me that he, too, found the core quite daunting as an undergrad. “The story among freshmen was they give you a thousand pages to read each week and you do what you can with it.” Now faced with running the core, he says that “the perception is that it’s too big. The faculty worry that too much undergraduate time is taken away from the students’ majors.” Of course, if the faculty reduces the core offerings by even one chapter in The Wealth of Nations, Columbia will have its own Chicago-style “core wars,” complete with breathy New York Times op-eding to a fare thee well.12

  Montas loved the core. A native of the Dominican Republic, educated in the New York City public schools, he described the core as “a transformative experience for me.” Now a professor of English, he says that “my identification as an intellectual is caught up in the core.” While he and I were having lunch in the late fall of 2007, he reminded me that five Columbia students were waging a hunger strike, and that one of their demands concerned changes in the core curriculum. Unlike the famous Columbia strikers of 1968, who successfully targeted the CC syllabus, these students wanted to beef up the Major Cultures course, so that they could be taught in the intense seminar style of LitHum and CC. The strikers had no quarrel with Epictetus, Virgil, Locke, Kant, and Friedrich Engels. They were quite content to leave the dead white males right in the center of the Columbia undergraduate experience.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Montas mused.

  Well, yes and no.

  TEN

  HARD CORE

  ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE

  IT IS WITH CONSIDERABLE PLEASURE that I turn my attention to St. John’s College, where the core is the core is . . . the entire curriculum. St. John’s, which has two campuses teaching almost exactly the same courses in Annapolis, Maryland, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, embodies that marvelous French aphorism: They are comfortable in their own skin.

  Robert Hutchins’s dream of creating a four-year-long, classical college curriculum came a cropper in Chicago. Soon after he left the campus, the program vilified by A. J. Liebling in the New Yorker as “the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children’s Crusade” was discontinued. There is only one college in America where the Hutchins dream lives on: St. John’s, home of the croquet-playing, Greek-maxim-spouting “Johnnies.”

  After the University of Chicago faculty gave them the bum’s rush in 1936,13 Hutchins’s paladins Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan surfaced the following year in Annapolis, where they took over a tiny, failing, picturesque college on the banks of College Creek. Here they instituted their vaunted “New Program”—all Great Books, all the time. They fervently hoped that Robert Hutchins would abandon the Chicago morass and join them. Instead, he agreed to chair the board of trustees of St. Johns’s “self-governing republic of learning.” A flurry of puffy publicity greeted the first class of twenty students, only eight of whom would survive the four-year-long trek from Aristotle to Einstein. Columnist Walter Lippman, then at the apogee of his influence, hailed St. John’s as “the seedbed of the American renaissance.”

  Hutchins visited often. One of his daughters attended St. John’s, as did one of Adler’s sons. Adler himself lectured at Annapolis every year, and was subjected to ever-wilder pranks because he always ran an hour or more over his allotted time. The second time he vi
sited, the students planted alarm clocks in the auditorium, which he naturally ignored. In later years, a student dressed as an ape crossed the stage to interrupt a lecture on Darwin, and the Johnnies once cut the power to the auditorium, all in a vain attempt to get Adler to shut up. “I subsequently shortened my lectures to an hour and a half,” Adler admitted.

  Buchanan, a fiery teacher brandishing degrees from Amherst, Oxford, and Harvard, once said that the St. John’s mission was “preparing people to be misfits” in the universe. He was a bit of a misfit himself. A Rhodes scholar who hoped to make a career in Sanskrit, he ended up studying philosophy at Harvard, which nearly rejected his doctoral dissertation. The only person said to have understood his thesis was Alfred North Whitehead, one of the world’s most eminent thinkers, who informed his Harvard colleagues, “If you cannot understand this, so much the worse for you.”

  When Buchanan and Barr arrived at St. John’s, they realized that one of them would have to become president. “Well, that would have to be you,” Buchanan told his friend, “because I don’t answer my mail.” Buchanan turned aside a badly needed grant from the Rockefeller Foundation because he felt its “conventional system of grading and calculating degree credits would confuse and distort the sharp critical judgments that we would need to make in maintaining our course and correcting our mistakes.” At St. John’s, students see their grades only by request. Some teachers still object to assigning grades, which is done to help students who are transferring to other colleges or applying to graduate school. The main evaluative tool is the “don rag,” a twice-yearly meeting between a student and his or her assembled teachers.

  Like Buchanan, President Barr was a free spirit. St. John’s staffer Rosemary Harty directed me to Barr’s 95-page essay on “Growing Vegetables” that kicks off The Kitchen Garden Cookbook. “If I have been guilty [of ‘garrulity’],” Barr writes on page 94, “I ask pardon—but there was so much to talk about.” That’s St. John’s in a nutshell; the talk never stops. The college’s famous, two-hour-long evening seminars often repair to the coffee shop afterward, and then spill into the dormitory corridors. “We talk about our souls,” sophomore Clint Richardson told me amidst the clattering of the college’s only dining hall, adding, “I like truth a lot. I really value truth.” In our conversation, Richardson, a graduate of Michigan’s East Lansing High School, used the adverb eidetically in the presence of three classmates. It was obvious that I was the only person at the table who would be heading for the dictionary, to learn that eidetically means something like “visually.” Welcome to the republic of learning.

  In seventy years, practically nothing has changed at the postage stamp-sized college in Annapolis, a historic landmark now hemmed in by the U.S. Naval Academy on one side and a surprisingly tasteful public housing development on the other. All teachers, regardless of previous academic standing, are called tutors. Tutors address the students as “Mr. Smith” and “Ms. Jones” in class. All tutors must eventually learn to teach every course, so Nick Maistrellis, who did five years of graduate work in the history of science, had to learn how to teach Greek and French, the college’s two required languages. Tenure is awarded for teaching only. A tenured tutor, Susan Paalman, received her PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins and taught middle school before coming to Annapolis. In high school, college, and graduate school, she had never read The Iliad, The Odyssey, nor Plato. Now she teaches them. “From a practical point of view, there are drawbacks,” says Santa Fe tutor Emily Rena-Dozier, who teaches Euclid but hasn’t studied geometry since high school. “Because we teach every course, we are incompetent in a number of fields. We really aim to be the best naive readers imaginable.” There is a hoary joke about how having a PhD “is no barrier to being hired at St. John’s, but it can’t help.”

  You can see the entire four years’ curriculum on the Internet. All students take two years of ancient Greek, two years of French, four years of math, and three years of laboratory science. Yes, Great Books science. The freshmen read Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, and the seniors read Faraday and Heisenberg.14 Johnnies score well on the law boards and the graduate school exams. If a boy or girl wants to attend medical school, that means an additional year or year and a half of memorizing facts in conventional Biology and Chemistry classes, not learning the “truth” behind the science, Great Books-style. “Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum,” Robert Hutchins thundered in 1933. But they come in handy if you want to pass the MCAT.

  The curriculum hardly ever changes. Yes, Justinian was dropped from the syllabus, but tutor and former dean Eva Brann, who has taught at St. John’s for fifty years, can’t remember exactly when. A tutor who has taught there for ten years could name only one curriculum change: Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound was deleted from the freshman reading list and replaced by Aristophanes’s The Birds. Naturally, the school tries to capitalize on its musty offerings. “The following teachers will return to St. John’s next year: Beethoven, Euclid, Plato, Toqueville . . .” is the text of a successful promotional campaign that has been printed up on postcards and mailed to high schoolers taking Advanced Placement exams. Very often, it is the first contact prospective students have with the college, which, even after seventy years, is not very well known, and is considered an oddity in traditional academic circles.

  I first saw Brann speak in 2006 at a Great Books conference at Yale, where she shared a stage with former University of Chicago president Hanna Gray, Yale’s president Richard Levin, and Harvey Mansfield, a high-profile, conservative professor of government at Harvard. Brann, short, cheerful, gnomic, and embarking on her ninth decade, is probably the best-known ambassador for St. John’s in the outside world. A Yale-trained archaeologist, she won a National Humanities Medal in 2005 and exudes enthusiasm for the college’s distinctive program. St. John’s created a handsome, bound version of a long essay by Brann as the centerpiece for a recent capital campaign, and some of her pronouncements doubtless welled up many an alumni eye. “Why ancient Greek, a dead language?” Brann asks in her essay, and then answers her own question, Johnnie-style: “Well, it isn’t dead to us and it’s beautiful.” She rejects the notion that St. John’s is backward-looking: “No school was ever less interested in bygones than ours.” Rena-Dozier told me that some of her most exciting classes were devoted to the first-century astronomer Ptolemy. “We spent several months in freshman and sophomore math figuring out the equations that explain how the sun revolves around the earth, which I’ve been told it doesn’t,” she said. “It turns out to be quite a fascinating discussion, why we think the facts we think are facts are facts, and why do we care? Students get really het up about Ptolemy. There is something to be said for non-utilitarian learning.”

  At the Yale conference, Mansfield mocked Harvard’s latest remix of its undergraduate core, which he said demonstrated “a hostility to great books that was not previously present in the curriculum.” Revamping curricula was not a subject that Brann could warm to. “We don’t think particular times require particular educations,” Brann said on the podium. “St. John’s College is not for the next thing. It’s for its own sake.” Gray, a Renaissance historian, gently chided Brann and St. John’s for offering no history courses in its curriculum. History, you will remember, is mere facts, not knowledge. “We do teach history,” Brann countered, with a hint of defensiveness in her voice. “Thucydides . . . Tacitus. Unfortunately, it stops there.”

  When I approached Brann about visiting St. John’s, she reacted enthusiastically. “Send a letter to the dean, and send me a copy, too,” she said, adding, “A real letter, of course, not something electronic.”

  So what is St. John’s like? First off, it’s beautiful. The thirty-six-acre campus is dotted with eighteenth-century colonial buildings and houses, and rises from the low-lying athletic fields next to College Creek up to McDowell Hall, a stately, three-story neo-Palladian classroom building originally built as a residence for the governor of Maryland. Annapolis
remains Maryland’s capital, and the city center has become an opulent boutique village, like Georgetown or Alexandria in the nearby Washington, D.C., area. Even if it had a huge endowment, which it doesn’t, St. John’s could never grow, bound as it is by the Creek, the village, the Academy, and the housing development. The surrounding real estate is so expensive that few tutors can afford to live in the vicinity.

  What is it like, apart from eidetically? “It’s weird,” commented one prominent conservative educator, who is lionized when he visits Annapolis but preferred to keep his reservations private. I suppose it is a bit weird that college club presidents and team captains are called archons—Greek for “leader”—and the student body is referred to as the Polity. One of the girls’ intramural sports team is called the Kunai, Greek for “hell bitches.” Weird, yes. But weird in a good way.

  It’s interesting that Buchanan would claim to be churning out “misfits” at his new college, as most students apply to St. John’s because they are already misfits. As a prank, some St. John’s seniors posted an amusing “promotional video” for the college on YouTube. It starts off with two bedraggled, cigarette-puffing stoners driving through the countryside, while one sings the virtues of this college where “things are a little different.” “They call the teachers ‘tutors,’ they call the textbooks ‘manuals,’ and you know what they call the essence of the thing? ‘Ousia.’” That line would have them rolling in the aisles in Annapolis and Santa Fe, where the lowliest freshman encounters the present participle of the Greek verb to be, which also means “essence,” moments after arriving on campus.