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Course Description
Columbia College's core curriculum has served as the model for honors, general education, and core courses across the United States. Its goal, wrote one of the original Core Curriculum instructors, was not to prepare students for a career, but "to help them see life broadly."
Established in the wake of World War I, Columbia’s core curriculum contained a core of knowledge that all students were to master. It also exposed students to the "best" that has been written or thought. Above all, it encouraged students to grapple with "the insistent problems of today" by exploring what major thinkers, writers, and traditions have had to say about the big questions—aesthetic, ethical, historical, philosophical, political, psychological, and theological. And it sought to cultivate those analytic, conceptual, critical, metacognitive, reasoning, and writing skills necessary to understand complex texts, explicate difficult arguments, recognize one’s own biases and presuppositions, and formulate and articulate one's own ideas and arguments in a clear, compelling, and coherent manner.
Literary Humanities and Contemporary Civilization provide all Columbia College students with a common intellectual experience that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. In an effort to overcome the superficiality and dilettantism that characterize too many "general education" curricula, these two year-long courses emphasize the close, rigorous reading of texts, intensive writing, informed and reasoned discussion, and the cultivation of one's own responses to key works in literature, philosophy, theology, history, and political philosophy and fundamental philosophical and moral issues involving certainty, evil, free will, freedom, government, human nature, identity, justice, leadership, and religious belief. In this intensive seminar, you will learn how to lead substantive and inclusive discussions of these foundational texts; identify significant intellectual problems posed by those texts; and strengthen students’ analytical and writing skills.
The History of the Core
The debate over the value of a liberal education is not a new one. At the time that Columbia moved to its Morningside Heights campus and became a university, at the end of the nineteenth century, the institution was deeply divided over its mission. Should it emphasize undergraduate education or should it instead stress graduate and professional training and faculty research? Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, sided with those who favored an institution oriented toward professional training and research. In 1905 he proposed the Columbia Plan: Undergraduates should be able to enter professional schools after just two years of undergraduate study.
Unexpectedly, World War I led Columbia to commit its undergraduate college to a liberal education. In 1917, the year that the United States entered World War I, the U.S. Army asked Columbia to create a special course for the students participating in an army training program. The class, entitled "War Issues," sought to
instill an awareness of the broad cultural values and moral issues at stake in the conflict.
Following the armistice, Columbia's faculty voted to establish a course to help students understand "issues of peace." Eventually named "Introduction to Contemporary Civilization," the course was designed to help students grapple with the pressing problems of the present, including imperialism, nationalism, internationalism, industrialism, and political control.
Lit Hum was designed in the late 1930s by Christian humanists who thought of paganism as a diversion in the moral history of the West that had to be overcome.
1988 the College instituted the extended core: two half year courses in major cultures or what is now called Cultures and Issues.
The Core Curriculum’s Objectives
Literary Humanities and Contemporary Civilization have four overarching goals: 1. To examine, closely and critically, how foundational works in literature, philosophy, theology, political theory and political economy have dealt with enduring questions. These include such timeless questions as: • What constitutes the good life? • Does free will exist or are human lives determined by outside factors? • Is there a Supreme Being? If so, what is this Being's nature? Does this Being intervene in human affairs? If this Being is good and all-powerful, how can evil exist? • How do individuals know what they know? Are there limitations be to the human ability to think, perceive, and understand? • What is good and what is evil? Who decides, and by what standards? • What is the best form of government and the proper relationship between the individual and the state? • What would a utopian society be like? • How should the young be educated? Who should control education—parents, students, the state—and what are the goals of education?
2. To trace the origin, nature, and evolution of critical ideas and modes of thought and expression.
▪ The sources and development of such ideas as natural rights and just war. ▪ The creation of modern scientific reasoning. ▪ The legitimization of and challenges to capitalist ideas of possessive individualism, property rights, and competition in a commercial marketplace. ▪ The emergence of our contemporary moral sensibilities. ▪ Shifts in forms of literary expression, from the epic to the modernist novel.
3. To develop students' critical reading skills
One of the purposes of the core is to nurture a generation of readers: Student will interpret foundational texts critically, thoughtfully, and from multiple perspectives:
▪ The aesthetic: asking how the author uses language, style, tone, and characterization to engage and manipulate the reader; identifying and interpreting the subtexts, deeper meanings, allusions, and symbolism within the texts; exploring what the texts tell us about the human condition (e.g., human nature, love, mortality); and analyzing how diverse schools of interpretation (e.g. feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, post-modernist) might interpret the text and how different readers might read and experience the text. • The dialogic: examining texts in conversation with one another. • The philosophic: analyzing how texts deal with fundamental issues of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. • The historical: situating and contextualizing texts. • The ideological: exploring the "political" orientation of the texts, including the ways that these texts deal with issues of gender, sexuality, race, and social class. • The ethical: assessing the moral implications of the ideas advanced in the texts.
4. To develop students' communication and rhetorical skills
Students will learn how to argue, reflect, and deliberate in clear, compelling, coherent prose and speech.
Required Reading
David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
Calendar of Topics
Topic 1. Introducing "Great Books" Curricula
What are the Courses’ Purposes? Debating the Canon: The Core and the Culture Wars Who are the Students? Why are the Classics Classics? Texts at War How to Read Demanding Texts How to Ensure that Students Come to Class Well-Prepared Topic 2. Greco-Roman Traditions Homer and the Heroic and Epic Traditions Greek Philosophical Traditions: Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics Greek and Roman Literary Traditions: Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil Topic 3. Theological Traditions The Hebrew Bible The New Testament The Qur’an The Reformation Topic 4. Early Modern Political and Philosophical Thought and Literary Expression Machiavelli Hobbes and Locke Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare Topic 5. Enlightened and Post-Enlightenment Thought Hume, Rousseau, and Kant Hegel, Mill, and Marx Topic 6. Modernism Nietzsche Freud and the Woolf and Modernism in Literature Topic 7. Cross-Cutting Themes Gender and Race in the Core Curriculum Readings Is There Design, Direction and Meaning in History? Shifting Understanding of Justice, the Good Life, and the Self Attitudes toward capitalism |