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Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley
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New mid-career recognitions for tenured faculty who teach Core Curriculum courses have been created by the endowment of four chaired professorships in the Core, Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley announced at the Hamilton Dinner in Low Rotunda on Wednesday evening. The Core chairs are the most recent fruit of the Endowment for the Core Curriculum, an initiative started two years ago to enhance the College's signature set of required courses.
"With the Core's endowed chairs program, we at the College are trying to restore a balance in a profession which has focused its privileges and prestige on research and graduate work," Quigley said; "now they can also be directly related to work with undergraduate students."
The chairs are the Mark Van Doren Professorship in the Humanities, which is endowed by Michael Rothfeld, CC'69; the Gustave M. Berne Professorship in the Core Curriculum, endowed by Robert Berne, CC'60; the Theodore Kahan Professorship in the Humanities, given by Robert Kahan, CC'69; and the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization, funded by James Barker, CC'57.
Rothfeld said that he responded immediately to Quigley's suggestion that he name a chair after one of Columbia's most eminent teachers. "I didn't want to name the chair after me, so when Dean Quigley thought of Mark Van Doren, I immediately knew it was perfect: even after Van Doren became a great writer and theorist he still continued to teach Humanities courses to undergraduates. He's a terrific example for Columbia's senior faculty who are critical to the continued success of the Core Curriculum."
The recipients of the new chairs were also announced at the Hamilton dinner. They are Kathy Eden of the English and Comparative Literature Department, who becomes the first Mark Van Doren Professor; Martha Howell, chair of the History Department, is the Gustave M. Berne Professor; Gareth Williams of Classics is the Theodore Kahan Professor; and Jim Zetzel, also of Classics, is the James R. Barker Professor.
Quigley said that the Core will add three more chaired professorships in the near future. They will be announced to the University community as soon as their faculty recipients are selected.
"I have taught Literature Humanities on and off--mostly on--over the past twenty years," Eden said, "and I'm now teaching Contemporary Civilization for the first time. In my experience, there is no teaching at Columbia that is more challenging or rewarding than teaching in the Core. Our undergraduates are extraordinary, not only because of their intelligence, but because of their capacity to engage with some of the most provocative questions asked in the past and appreciate how the answers given continue to provoke their own questioning."
The Core chairs do not compete with departmental chairs, Quigley explained. They are awarded for a five-year term before passing on to a new faculty appointee.
Among other recent initiatives for enhancing the Core is the creation of a Core enter in what are now the undergraduate admissions offices off the lobby of Hamilton Hall. The two-year renovation will include a conference room where the entire Core staff can gather for discussions and reviews of teaching strategies and methods, a library of books about general education, an archive holding the materials that faculty have found useful in preparing and teaching Core courses, a computer room for devising ways of bringing digital media into the Core and a meeting space for the Core's faculty leaders to explore and develop connections between the different kinds of Core courses.
All the classrooms in Hamilton, where the majority of Core courses are taught, will also undergo renovation. The seminar rooms will be redesigned and refurnished, with better lighting, carpeting and airflow, and an appropriate level of technological upgrade.
These recent initiatives follow on the heels of such Core programs as the Chamberlains, an early-career incentive that offers a one-semester leave to junior faculty who have taught six semesters of Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilization. The new endowment will also fund a summer fellowship program for faculty who both teach in the Core and play a mentoring role in their departments to graduate preceptors also teaching in the Core. The overall goal of these initiatives is to upgrade the general quality of Core teaching by providing improved teaching resources and career-long recognitions for faculty teaching in the Core.
The Endowment for the Core Curriculum was begun in the fall of 1997 by Robert Butler, CC'47, and his wife, Myrna Lewis, who made a lead gift to the project that was immediately supplemented by a further gift from then chair of the Board of Visitors, Robert Rosencrans, CC'49. It has become one of the many success stories of the current Campaign for Columbia.
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