Denby Praises Great Books

At a conference on Core Curricula in the 21st Century, organized this weekend by core lecturers in Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities, Columbia administrators, faculty, and students took a critical look at Western Humanities-based courses in higher education.

David Denby, CC '65, Journalism '66, and a film critic and staff writer for the New Yorker who took core courses at Columbia a second time in 1991 to pen Great Books, a journalistic recount of his experience, kicked off the conference with his keynote address on the role of core curricula in wartime.

Denby began his speech by describing the film "300" as a "porno-military fantasia-a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an army-recruiting film," and pointed to general education as a means of combating "ignorance and extreme belief."

Professors from Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford-among other schools which have some form of core curriculum-discussed the evolution and place of a core in both a liberal education and a globalized world.

On Saturday, a student panel with Isabel Bussarakum, CC '07, Mark Krotov, CC '08, Spectator film columnist and Editor in Chief of The Birch, Jenni Oki, CC '07 and executive co-chair of the United Students of Color Council, Jeff Shrader, CC '08, moderated by Jonathan Blitzer, CC '07, discussed representation within the Core.

"Students have never really had the opportunity to voice their opinions in such a formal setting," said Classics major Sydney Cochran, CC '08, executive board president of Columbia Queer Alliance, an organizer of the student forum.

Much of the discussions focused on the question of whether core curricula should be based more on course content or critical thinking. Denby explained that his return to Columbia's Core in '91 was caused by what he called the "theory-based political attack on the Western classics." After writing Great Books, Denby maintains he does not recognize the "Western classics in the most extreme versions of the opposition from within the University-dead white males, that embarrassing phrase, the hegemonic discourse and all the rest of that."

Shrader said that the critical thinking skills taught by Columbia's Core are more significant than the cultural background of its texts while Krotov said that the Core has not given him all the skills stated in its mission statement. Citing a personal example, Bussarakum said Colloquium on East Asian Texts was the hardest class she ever took because "these skills work well for the Western tradition, but they don't work well outside of that."

Students and faculty alike expressed that there is much at stake in investing in a core curriculum. While no one proposed abandoning core curricula, Oki and others shared that feelings of an unfilled gap left by the Core.

At the end of the dialogues many questions were left unresolved. The fact that a discussion was begun, however, was in itself meaningful for some. "I would consider progress simply an hour of dialogue," said Blitzer.

"There's not really a narrative here. It's nobody's history," said professor Philip Kitcher, the Chair of Contemporary Civilization, in the closing remarks, adding, "It isn't such a bad idea to put Confucius side-by-side with Plato."

Julie Appel and Devika Bhushan contributed to this article.