Arguing the World

If given the chance between City College and Harvard University in the 1930s and 1940s, I wouldn't have gone to Cambridge. While the H–word is what inspires awe today, in the '30s and '40s the school at 138th Street was "the proletariat Harvard." It had the minds of the Ivy League without any of the pretension. It was at City College that a group of students that eventually came to be known as the "New York Intellectuals" came of age. Classes were free for those admitted, and it was all male-most of them working–class immigrants, and a disproportionate amount were Jewish. While C.U. first-years swipe $10 meals at John Jay, these students were on a shoestring budget. Paper-bagging it from kitchens in Brooklyn, they debated over sandwiches until it got dark outside, huddled in the alcoves of the cafeteria.

But don't take my word for it-see it for yourself. The 1998 documentary film "Arguing the World" offers a glimpse into this extraordinary period of American (intellectual) history through the story of the four boys of Alcove One. Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer are the four characters we follow through their lifelong romance with ideas. Homework wasn't in their vocabulary. Instead, college was spent in their alcove or in the main courtyard, where they debated the issues-liberalism, communism, religion, culture, war.

Though all start out as Trotskyites, with the exposure of Stalin's evil, McCarthyism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, we watch their political evolution as they grow into powerful public intellectuals. Bell becomes a social theorist, Glazer a sociologist, Howe a literary critic and founder of the Democratic Socialists, and Kristol the ideological father of the neoconservative movement. Their debate widened and came to include some of the most important American philosophers, literary critics, social critics, and political analysts of this century.

While they met to drink and debate at parties, the main forum in which they continued to argue the world was through the journals they established. Along with characters from the previous generation and their own predecessors, these partnerships resulted in The Nation, The New Republic, Commentary Magazine, Partisan Review, Dissent, The Public Interest, and the New York Review of Books.

The story of the New York Intellectuals matters not because of their name recognition, but because their story presents some of the most compelling ideals about college and politics.

For one, they make us ask, "What's college about?" For the City College crew, classes were secondary. And it certainly was not about rock-star professors; they often skipped class because of the terrible teaching. I am not advocating cutting class or arguing that students shouldn't try to cram into a Gulati, Sachs, or Brinkley lecture. What I am proposing is that college isn't about sponging up information. Having more knowledge than when you arrived fresh at the gates is undoubtedly a good thing, but too often we slip into the habit of writing our papers for our professors and our grades rather than for ourselves. We worship and parrot the experts we read rather than taking the risk of being wrong and coming up with a radically new idea. College is about making oneself a thinking, critical person-not mimicking the critics.

But becoming a thinking person is not enough. College is where we can make ourselves into arguing people-not necessarily argumentative, but arguing in the sense of being able to stand for a position and make the case. The ability to debate is not just something you can show off at the cocktail parties for which Lit Hum prepares you; it is to convince people of positions that really influence the world.

It should go without saying, but the only way to learn to argue the world is to seek out relationships with people who possess world views that differ from your own. The New York Intellectuals were powerful because of their fiery dissidence. As Nathan Glazer puts it at one point in the film, "I feel when I read something [by the others] I'm reading something that counts more than when I read other things... The involvement is a passionate one."

Undeniably, these sorts of friendships are a lot harder to come by and are often difficult, because they are built on issues that we care about most deeply. But the relationships I have built not despite of, but because of, political difference have been the ones that have marked my experience here most profoundly.

Perhaps our Columbia won't ever be a place where we hang off of lampposts spouting our political opinions to crowds of other students. But it should be a place where we learn to argue the world.