Here’s to You, Jacques Barzun

There are Columbia professors, and there are Columbia institutions. Jacques Barzun is the latter. Undergraduate, provost, and everything in between, professor Barzun fundamentally redefined the Columbia experience through a half-century of dedicated service. Western, worldly, and undeniably brilliant, Barzun faithfully embodies the University’s greatness. As we approach his 100th birthday, a personal centennial, it is worth reflecting on his many accomplishments—for his is truly a Columbian life.

Born in Creteil, France and raised among Paris’ avant-garde intellectuals, Barzun gave his first lesson at just nine years old in the midst of the First World War. As fate would have it, he has yet to stop. Sent first by his father to preparatory school in the United States, Barzun entered Columbia College in the mid-1920s. Matriculating at the top of his class (’27), Barzun began to teach formally while pursuing his Ph.D. (’32). This relationship lasted until 1955 when the University promoted him first to dean and later to provost. For the 13 long years until his return as University Professor in 1968, a position he held until his retirement in 1975, Barzun remained a central figure in the Columbia administration. His intellectual pursuits and academic record proved invaluable for an administrator dealing with a university in a time of great fluctuation.

A naturally gifted writer, Barzun muses on all subjects from art and music to what might quite possibly be the most challenging of all, writing itself. But never has he failed to include his trademark charm, lucidity, and insight. As a scholar, the young Columbian broke ground as the vanguard of an emerging new discipline, cultural history. The author of well over 20 books, Barzun shaped and guided the nascent field to popular acceptance and use. In short, he is just as much an academic giant beyond Columbia’s gates as he is within.

Barzun’s last monumental work, the 800-plus-page survey of Western civilization a decade in the making, From Dawn to Decadence, stands as testament to that fact. The dark-horse New York Times bestseller introduced a new generation to the still-mesmerizing nonagenarian. Equal parts historian, anthropologist, philosopher, writer, and social critic, Barzun completed in his twilight years that which would take the rest of us a lifetime.

Many on the transatlantic right respect Barzun’s generally positive attitudes toward Western culture and his desire to preserve its key elements. In his review of From Dawn to Decadence, Roger Kimball, the old-guard editor of The New Criterion, calls Barzun “a voice of moderation and sanity in American intellectual life for some six decades.” In 2003, President George W. Bush presented professor Barzun with his long-deserved Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. With few exceptions, Barzun is the closest thing Columbia has to a conservative professor. And no, this isn’t grounds to discount him.

Rather, Barzun is emblematic of a different Columbia. Compared to today’s professors-turned-pundits, a practice that would make any good Kantian weep, Barzun kept his studies and classroom apolitical. Instead he focused his energies on celebrating and sharing Western civilization’s great texts. Barzun had a direct hand in the creation of Humanities A, that which we so lovingly call Lit Hum, and proved a key supporter of two new programs, Art and Music Humanities. Columbian Thomas Vinciguerra perfectly captures Professor Barzun’s quick wit as he describes one of the Core’s earliest and shortest debates: Arguing against Music Humanities, “Professor of music Douglas Moore roared, ‘We don’t want freshmen wiping their feet on Bach.’ Barzun hastily retorted, ‘Doug, freshmen have been wiping their feet on Shakespeare for years.’ Moore immediately withdrew his objection.”

Barzun’s own class offerings were equally impressive. For decades he co-taught a graduate seminar with famed literary critic Lionel Trilling. Known to the registrar as “Historical Bases of English Literature,” students called it something far more appropriate: “Great Books.” It rightfully goes down in academic lore as one of the greatest courses ever offered—it was Columbia at its intellectual zenith. For many, its contemporary equivalent, a seminar with Vaclav Havel and Umberto Eco, wouldn’t pose the slightest challenge. Long overdue, the Society of Columbia Graduates will present professor Barzun with the Great Teacher Award on Oct. 18th.

While I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting professor Barzun or reading all his work, there are countless alumni, former students, and Barzun aficionados to put me in my place. They revere professor Barzun as not only an academic, but a naturally kind and good-hearted human being. In my eyes, there is no better compliment for a man who gave his life and career to Columbia. So here’s to you, Professor Barzun. Happy 100th birthday.

Chris Kulawik is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science.
Chris Shrugged runs alternate Tuesdays.
Specopinion@columbia.edu