COLUMBIA FORUM
An Inheritance of Indescribable Richness

In Ex-Friends (1999), Norman Podhoretz '50, the former editor of Commentary and leading conservative intellectual, described his "falling out" with Allen Ginsberg '48, Diana and Lionel Trilling '27, and other liberals of the 1950s. Despite Podhoretz's break with many Columbia friends, he did not reject his Columbia past. In this excerpt from his most recent memoir, My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (Free Press, $25), Podhoretz, the son of immigrants, looks back on the College's role in bringing him to the "third level" in his progress toward becoming "a full-fledged American."

Norman Podhoretz '50

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The third level was left for Columbia to help me climb. The four years I spent there, from 1946 to 1950, were extraordinary in a number of ways. First of all, because of the GI bill, which paid the tuition of soldiers who had just been discharged from the armed services, half or more of my classmates were veterans. This meant that, entering college at the age of 16, I was immediately thrown into the company of men who were anywhere from five to 15 years older than I. A lot of them were already married, and having lost so much time to the war, they were in no mood for the frivolities that had once marked life in an Ivy League college like Columbia. They were in a hurry to get going, and they were intensely serious about their studies. It is unlikely that the Columbia campus had ever before been enveloped in so earnest an atmosphere, and I doubt that it ever was again.

Secondly, Columbia in those years probably had the best faculty of any undergraduate college anywhere. At Harvard, famous senior professors never, or only rarely, had any truck with undergraduates except perhaps to deliver lectures to hundreds of them with whom they had no personal contact; their actual teaching was confined to the supervision of graduate students working for advanced degrees. At Columbia, by contrast, most of the senior professors taught small classes, seminar-style, in the undergraduate college. Even as a freshman, then, one could find oneself being instructed by and getting to know the likes of eminent literary men like Lionel Trilling ['27] and Mark Van Doren, and highly distinguished classical scholars like Moses Hadas.

The reason this could happen had to do with the third extraordinary feature of Columbia, which was the two courses, then known as Humanities and Contemporary Civilization (or CC), that all freshmen and sophomores, no matter what they eventually intended to specialize in, were required to take. The purpose of these courses was to give the students a chance to become acquainted with the great classics of Western literature and philosophy. The selection of authors might vary from year to year (Rabelais, say, might be dropped and Dostoevsky added), but only within very narrow limits, since there was general agreement in the faculty as to the pool of works from which to draw.

The powerful effect of these courses was well described in a report issued in the late 1950s by the sociologist Daniel Bell, who claimed that they shocked many students into "a new appreciation of the dimensions of thought and feeling." I have at various times in the past vouched for the accuracy of that claim, and I do so again now. Before Columbia I had never truly understood what men were doing when they committed words to paper. Before Columbia I had never truly understood what an idea was or how the mind could play with it. Before Columbia, I had never truly understood that, as an American, I was the product of a tradition, that past ages had been inhabited by people like myself, and that the things they had done and the thoughts they had thought bore a direct relation to me and to the world in which I lived. At Columbia, through those two courses, all this began becoming clear to me, and I would never be the same again.

Curiously, there was next to nothing written by Americans in the vast reading lists of these courses, which began with the ancient Greeks and ended somewhere in the twentieth century. Nor, for that matter, was there much American literature on offer in the English department to anyone who might wish to study it. The vast majority of the authors taught in the English department were English (or, more precisely, considering the large number of Irishmen and Scots among them, British).

This in itself refutes the charge later hurled by the Left that curricula like the one at Columbia concealed an underlying political agenda shaped by the propagandistic imperatives of the cold war. Obviously, if patriotic indoctrination had been the objective, America would not have been scanted so drastically in favor of Europe. In any event, at Columbia, both courses long predated the cold war. Humanities had been designed in the 1930s, and from the start it reflected the belief that students ought to be introduced to the looks that had shaped the world in which they lived. It was further assumed, in the spirit of the famous definition of criticism framed by the great Victorian literary critic Matthew Arnold, that these books contained the "best that has been known and thought in the world."

As for CC, it is true that it had originally been instituted with the open intention of demonstrating the greatness of their Western heritage to Columbia students. But that was in the 1920s, long before "the West" had come to be used as a term in opposition to the Communist world, and even longer before the idea of Western civilization had been turned into the kind of political issue it would become for radicals from the 1960s onward. The radicals began with a campaign to abolish Humanities and CC and courses like them in other colleges: they failed at Columbia but were relatively successful elsewhere. Then, after a long lull, this campaign started up again in the 1980s at Stanford.

After such a course had been reintroduced there, students led by Jesse Jackson and spokesmen of other minority groups, joined now by the feminists, marched around the campus shouting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go." They demanded that the course be dropped because the reading list - made up of the likes of Plato, St. Augustine, Dante, Galileo, Rousseau, Mill, and Nietzsche - was marked (in repulsive phrasing that had already become tiresomely familiar) by a "European-Western and male bias." Alternatively, the course could be kept, but only if it were subjected to affirmative action through the inclusion of (in another tiresomely familiar litany) "works by women, minorities, and persons of color."

I must admit that, coarse and vulgar though their language was, these people knew what they were doing. For in addition to shocking students into "a new appreciation of the dimensions of thought and feeling," something else had tended to happen through such courses as well. Bell characterized it as a kind of "conversion experience" - a conversion not to another religion but, "so to speak, to culture." Though he did not say so explicitly, by culture Bell specifically meant the heritage of Western civilization, and on this point too I have in the past and still can offer personal testimony that bears him out.

There is no doubt that Columbia left me with a reverence for Western civilization - and by extension for its great heir, defender, and new leader, America - that was nothing short of religious in intensity and that has remained alive all my life, including that part of it I spent in the camp of the radical Left. It was because they wanted to put a stop to this "conversion experience" that the radical students of the 1960s first zeroed in on the courses that were producing it. Beyond that, their aim was to clear the way for the opposite conversion experience: one that would leave most undergraduates feeling not reverence for Western civilization and/or America but hatred and contempt.

In other words, it was not, as the radicals claimed in their original assault, because the great books were "irrelevant" that they should no longer be studied; it was because they were all too relevant. Similar bad faith was shown in the complaint of the feminists and the students "of color" in the 1980s that they felt ignored and demeaned by not being prominently or flatteringly enough represented in the great classic texts of the West.

In dismissing this claim as made in bad faith, I could speak from my own experience as a Jew. The texts in question included very few by Jews, and whenever they referred to Jews or Judaism, it was more often than not in an unfriendly and even hostile spirit. Yet working through the two reading lists as a Columbia student, I felt that an inheritance of indescribable richness which in the past had been inaccessible to my own people (because of a combination of actual - that is, legal - exclusion and voluntary isolation) was now mine for the taking. Far from being left out, I was being invited in, and I looked upon the invitation as a great opportunity and a privilege.

From MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA: THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF A CHEERFUL CONSERVATIVE by Norman Podhoretz. Copyright © Norman Podhoretz, 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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