Columbia College Today

Wisdom, Training and Contemporary Civilization

By J.W. Smit

"Introduction to Contemporary Civilization" has been described as "probably the most famous course ever in the American curriculum." In this installment of "Living Legacies"- a series of articles chronicling Columbia's rich history (other articles in the series were published in Columbia magazine) - Queen Wilhelmina Professor of the History of the Low Countries J.W. Smit tackles the original course in the College's signature Core Curriculum, from the forces that encouraged its creation in 1919 through its many evolutions across the past eight decades.

Wim Smit is well suited to the task. A Dutch native, Smit studied at the University of Utrecht, where he received his doctorate in 1958. He taught at Utrecht until 1965, when he joined the Columbia faculty. A specialist in the social, cultural and economic history of early modern Europe, especially the Low Countries, Smit was hired to teach in GSAS. Yet, he gravitated toward the core, teaching CC since the 1970s and twice serving as chair of the course (1978-82, 1989-92). He served on the Commission on the Core Curriculum (1988-89) and was the first chair of the Standing Committee on the Core Curriculum (1990-93). Smit received the Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching (1984) and was a co-recipient (with James Mirollo) of the first award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum (1993).

A polymath with wide scholarly interests, Smit holds the unique distinction of being the only teacher to have taught all four basic Core courses - CC, Literature Humanities, Music Humanities and Art Humanities.

One wonders whether the small band of Columbia professors who, just after World War I's end, produced yet another proposal for reforming the College's curriculum could ever have imagined that their creation would be celebrated close to a century later as part of Columbia's legacy to American higher education. Yet we who celebrate "Contemporary Civilization" and also are aware of its history can just as easily wonder if that band would see the course we know today as its own. For the founders might view CC's current syllabus as the victory of something they had fought against. And I would like to suggest that such a first impression would be at the same time right and wrong.

When the College faculty voted in January 1919 to require "Contemporary Civilization," they were giving their support to an original, albeit precarious, alternative to two sides in a long-standing debate. Starting in the 1870s, university faculties across America engaged in sometimes heated discussions about traditional higher education and its relevance to modern society. What was more important? The "wisdom" and character-building supposedly provided by the old classics-based humanities curriculum, or the more specialized, technical professional training central to the modern natural and social scientific disciplines, engineering, medicine and law?

At Columbia, the debate was as heated as anywhere. And at the risk of caricaturing the main camps, on one side stood the advocates of a deeply entrenched, largely classical (and highly prestigious) humanities curriculum with an emphasis on general education - a curriculum designed to create cultured, polished gentlemen. On the other stood their critics - primarily professors in newer, more specialized research-based disciplines that did not yet have a firm place in the College curriculum - who argued for greater academic freedom, disciplinary diversity and more focused professional training. In short, general education linked to the traditional humanities was pitted against specialization linked to the professions and the sciences. While it cannot be denied that the newcomers had their own professional interests in mind when they opposed the traditional curriculum, it is just as easy to argue that their very choice of academic specialty embodied a true concern with the real-world civic problems posed by the "second industrial revolution" of the late 19th century. And however much we might rightly sympathize with staunch advocates of humanistic training, it is hard not to concede that in their heyday, before they became the academic underdogs, they easily could create an atmosphere that was downright hostile to talk of professional training and real-world "practicality." And it's equally hard not to understand their critics' puzzlement at how the capacity to quote Horace or Virgil could help one understand the modern world.

J.W. Smit, Queen Wilhelmina Professor of History, is the only person to teach all four of the basic Core courses: Contemporary Civilization, Literature Humanities, Art Humanities and Music Humanities. (Photo: Michael Dames)

In their argument with what I'll call the "wisdom" camp, advocates of the "training" camp did not work in an intellectual void. Their model for reform also came from Europe, more specifically from Germany, the home of the prestigious and highly successful new-style research university, with its emphasis on specialized, research-based training and high standards of scholarship in the natural and the social sciences. Many American scholars who had earned their degrees abroad sought to reform their own schools along German lines. At Columbia, one such German-trained professor was John W. Burgess, whose proposals for reorganizing the Government Department's curriculum had the enthusiastic support of President A.P. Barnard and his successor, Nicholas Murray Butler (Class of 1882).

In a blow to the wisdom camp's case for general - or perhaps "liberal" would be better - undergraduate education, Butler, who during his presidency said that many at the College were engaged in mere "intellectual dawdling," floated the so-called Columbia Plan (1905) that would shepherd students who wished to work at a more rapid tempo into graduate or professional school right after the sophomore year. Motivated individuals would be free to rush ahead professionally, but general, liberal education and a common curriculum would fall by the wayside.

The advocates of "dawdling" fought back, but with weapons that were too antiquated to be effective - so much so that, on reading their rhetoric, the committed humanist yearns to put other words in their mouths, words that reflect the very basic fact that the wisdom camp's curriculum had been the standard introduction into real-world problems for hundreds and hundreds of years. But, seemingly oblivious to that line of argument, Dean of the College John Howard Van Amringe stubbornly insisted that the purpose of a college education was, as he somewhat quaintly put it, "to make men" (not professional specialists) by shaping students' characters through the contemplation of ancient wisdom contained in the Greek and Latin classics. His argument reflected Columbia's old self-image as a sort of cultural finishing school for the sons of the New York elite, and it is perhaps too easy for us now, in a very different world, to mock it. But it is also apparent that Van Amringe's rhetoric was no answer to the concerns of Burgess, Barnard and Butler, who could not ignore the need to prepare Columbia's students for a changing, and increasingly powerful, America.

It was to be expected that at the beginning of the 20th century, the trend against liberal education, then linked almost exclusively with the traditional humanities, would begin to gather steam. It was a trend that was powerfully supported by the waves of first- and second-generation immigrants who began to seek admission to American colleges and universities. For men like Butler, it was those institutions' responsibility to turn the most intelligent and driven of those new citizens into managers, engineers, scientists, technicians and teachers. But however gifted, the new sort of student generally had not received the classics-based high school training that was common among the old elite and that was a virtual prerequisite for the old-style curriculum.

So too Columbia, which had educated so many of the New York establishment, was going to face a quite different student population. How suddenly the immigrant pressure surfaced and how strong it became is not exactly clear, but it was probably gradual. But change eventually came: The 1916 abolition of Latin as an admissions requirement was the first formal adaptation to the new reality. It was a signal that, in the battle against the old ideal of general education, the newcomers and the advocates of professional schooling were allies. But the fight had a long way to go. Against this background, the easy acceptance in 1919 of something as radical as CC might seem to be just short of a miracle. It was a reversal of sorts, the general education idea in a new and very different key. And to make any sense of it, we must first understand the sea change in American life that preceded it.

In 1914, World War I began, with America as only an interested bystander. But in 1917, the United States had become actively involved. While “The Great War” hardly deserves its global moniker when compared with World War II, contemporaries perceived that this war was not simply the old-fashioned Clauswitzian pursuit of diplomacy by military means. Certainly after the Russian Revolution, during the same year that the United States entered the war, it began to look more like a tectonic shift, long in preparation, that was going to change the face of the world. It also seemed that clashing ideologies played as much a role as clashing interests, or at least clashing interests easily translated into ideological rhetoric.

Universities, which supposedly specialized in understanding the wedded worlds of interest and ideas, were expected to give more than just technical support to the war effort. Columbia’s contribution was the 1917 creation of a course in war issues, with the purpose, in the words of later Dean of the College Herbert Hawkes, of “understanding the worth of the cause for which one is fighting.” Because the war ended just a year later, the course did not have a long life. But the work put into creating it ironically bore fruit in the idea of creating something similar, a course devoted instead to peace issues, which were — again in Hawkes’ words — “far more important as a field of instruction of our college youth” than the issues of war.

So, the initial thinking about CC took place in the exhilarating atmosphere of the first months of peace, marked by a mix of idealistic and realistic anticipation of a new world waiting to be built. The experience of the war had produced a sense of national community, but one also knew (or simply feared) that powerful forces within the country made consensus precarious. Among those forces were ignorance and lack of interest. As the historian (and later dean) Harry Carman — soon one of the main forces behind CC — put it somewhat later, “the vast majority of Americans never critically examine our existing social standards.” And that could mean trouble.

It was no doubt in part this sense of civic responsibility and a felt need to improve each Columbian’s ability to “understand the civilization of his own day and participate effectively in it,” as CC’s first syllabus put it, that pushed some creative faculty members away from the extremes of the two pre-war camps toward a new synthesis: general education that aimed at a different sort of wisdom, one bound up not only with the old history of ideas, but also with the methods and the more contemporary focus of the newer, more specialized social science disciplines.

On January 20, 1919, the College faculty, after but a few scant weeks of discussion, resolved to accept those innovators’ ideas and voted to replace the required introductions to philosophy and history, so central to the traditional curriculum, with something entirely different. The new required course, which would meet five days a week for one-hour classes, would place new demands not only on students but also on the faculty, who would be charged with teaching something that neither they nor anyone else had ever taught. As it was a new concept, a committee was created and charged with the daunting task of composing a syllabus. The committee managed to have an elaborate document printed before the fall semester and complete yet another in time for the spring.

Certainly, the unusual speed of these events and the absence of strong opposition to new general education requirement that cut back the power of older, more established departments demands explanation. Part of it, no doubt, was Butler’s support. Even before the war, this longtime opponent of general education had begun to soften his stance. But now he showed almost a convert’s enthusiasm, which prompted a Jester cartoon portraying the new course as Butler’s weapon against the Bolshevik threat. (Perhaps there is something to that.) Whatever its source, that no-doubt contagious enthusiasm, combined with a general mind shift induced by the war, cannot in itself account for such a quick and large leap over an old faculty divide.

Indeed, the advocates of specialized professional and graduate-style education may have been placated because this attempt at general education was fundamentally different from what Van Amringe had promoted. The syllabus offered students an interesting mix of the varied disciplines of its principal proponents: John C. Coss, the first chairman, was a philosopher, Rexford Tugwell an economist (and later a prominent member of FDR’s Brain Trust), and Harry Carman a historian. The course they put together essentially was a comprehensive introduction to a social scientific and historical analysis of what they called the “insistent problems of the present world.”

Although some grumbled about alleged superficiality, the people who took the initiative wanted rigorous scholarship, and the course syllabus reflected that intention. But they also wanted their scholarship to serve ethical and civic goals. Their philosophy was similar to that of philosopher John Dewey — a member of the Columbia faculty who did not participate directly in developing the course, but who looked on it with a sympathetic eye — for whom education was meaningless if disconnected from the experience of civic life. As their softer, more humanities-based ethical concerns crept into a primarily social-science based syllabus, the language of the old traditionalists was fused with that of their opponents. One early participant, Professor Cassius Keyser, called for an education that would instill in students “a certain wisdom about the world.” Butler found perhaps the most felicitous use for this old and un- (or at least non-) scientific language when, in his address to the University in September 1919, he spoke of the need to give students a firmer message about the realities of life — “to get knowledge and translate it into wisdom.” Wisdom as the ultimate end of the pursuit of knowledge: Was that not the perfect summary of what the founders of CC were aiming at? Perhaps unaware, Butler had paraphrased one of Jacob Burkhardt’s best aphorisms about the study of history. Its purpose, he wrote, was to teach you “not to be clever the next time, but to be wiser forever.”

How then did CC’s trajectory shift from a course grounded in the social sciences, with their focus on the problems of the present, to one based on the “great books” of the past?

The best place to start is the official 1919 course syllabus, which is not, of course, in any way an ordinary syllabus. A far cry from the one-page-per-semester photocopied book list that we now find in the CC office, it might seem to us today almost too centralized, even tyrannical, for it outlines specifically — session after session, week after week — precisely the issues to be discussed and the pages to be read. But more than a centralized schedule of assignments, it was itself an intellectual document, an admirable achievement of concentrated, systematic thought about man in nature and society. It was not so much a syllabus as the detailed outline of a book.

It was, indeed, first printed as a booklet, and one that became thicker and thicker over the years, as the likes of maps and essays (sometimes written by the staff) were added. But though the booklet’s content expanded, its conceptual structure remained unchanged for more than a decade: A survey of geography and the physical environment (hence the maps), Part I was called “The World of Nature”; Part II, “The World of Human Nature,” stressed social psychology, ethics and forms of human behavior, with an emphasis on “individual traits that are socially significant”; Part III was a more historical treatment of the socio-economic and intellectual history of the United States and Europe; and Part IV tackled the insistent contemporary problems. Titled “National States of Today,” the course’s final section covered such things, according to Carman’s notes, as “nationalism, imperialism, industrialization and economic growth” and “imperialism in its relation to backward peoples” (problems, it is interesting to note, that — without the judgemental term “backwardness,” of course — more modern versions of CC have been accused of neglecting).

When it comes to course readings, one thing in particular might strike the present-day Columbian as odd: Not surprisingly for a course that began as a modern, real-world alternative to the general education of the pre-war traditionalists, its readings included no “great books” nor any primary sources. The material students had to digest was, as it were, pre-digested for them in texts often written especially for the course by their own Columbia professors: J.H. Randall ’18’s Making of the Modern Mind provided a challenging overview of Western philosophy; Irwin Edman ’17’s Human Traits and their Social Significance, though written by a philosopher, served as an introduction to social anthropology; and the titles of John Dewey’s How We Think and Carleton J.H. Hayes’s Economic and Political History of Modern Europe speak for themselves.

The famous Red Books weren't always red; some editions were tan or gray. (Photo: Peter Kang '05)

Though not “great books,” these texts were not easy reading. The first CC students worked hard. The sheer mass of problems thrown at them was daunting, involving much more than a passing acquaintance with European and American history, social psychology, world geography, philosophy, economics and politics.

What actually went on in those first CC classrooms cannot, alas, ever be recovered, so we will never really know how much of the syllabus (given time constraints) was addressed, how much the students absorbed or how well the class discussions functioned. But from the little available evidence, it seems that the students viewed their experience very positively and were willing to sustain the heavy workload. The teaching staff made it a point to stay close to them, invite their reactions and take their ideas seriously — things that might not have been students’ daily experience in less experimental courses.

To anyone familiar with academic life, it can all sound almost unreal: eager, happy students in a demanding required course and a cooperative faculty from different departments imbued with a joint sense of purpose. But though the picture of CC’s earliest years has no doubt been touched up by time, it is clear that consensus and a sense of shared mission were real.

Curiosity as to how that consensus was achieved makes us wish we had a record of what went on in the weekly staff lunches where continuous adaptations of — and to — the syllabus were hammered out. Those discussions would no doubt provide some significant insights into an important phase in American intellectual life, to the thinking of a diverse group of characters bound together by what might seem to us a naïve, but nonetheless attractive, coupling of scientific beliefs with educational and political idealism. For they had an enviable trust that science could solve society’s most urgent problems.

Until the early 1940s, it seems, that consensus more or less endured, even through inevitable challenges. Perhaps the biggest problem was something anyone who has taught CC even recently can all too well understand: even now, with our abbreviated book list and our much welcomed flexibility, it’s hard when you must link texts with life (and through discussion, not straight lecture, at that) to avoid an unceasing struggle with time. In those days, things were in some ways harder, for everything was written into the syllabus and the reach of the required material was more vast; but things were easier, as well. Since the course was not yet part of a “core,” much less an “extended core,” the staff could simply make CC longer. Which they did.

In 1928, unable to telescope the mass of required material into the space of one year, the College created CC-B, which essentially was Part IV of the original syllabus — the crucial contemporary issues — while CC-A kept Parts I–III. For this new year-long course, government and economics professors sacrificed their required introductory courses to make CC a reality, just as their historian and philosopher colleagues had done a decade before.

If nothing else, this unusual willingness to forgo departmental independence suggests that in the 1920s and 1930s, the new program generally was accepted by the faculty, even in those disciplines most inclined to prefer German-style specialization and training. Despite tensions and conflicting interests, the consensus behind CC was strong. And for a good many years, both courses, taught by an assortment of professors from across the faculty, thrived.

But as is the world’s wont, things did not remain rosy. Thirty years after CC-B’s birth, it was dead, and CC-A was radically transformed. By the time of the turmoil of 1968, the consensus seems to have broken.

From the little that has been written about the great change in CC that took place in the 1960s, just what happened is not exactly clear. (It would certainly be useful, while there are still people alive who actually participated in, or simply witnessed, CC-A’s transformation and CC-B’s death, for someone to write the story.) What we do know is that, though an inkling of the difficulties appeared in the 1940s, only in the late 1950s did those problems become intense.

Between 1957 and 1968, four committees were set up to make sense of the travails of both halves of CC (but especially of the more troubled CC-B, which never achieved its partner’s organization and unity of purpose) and suggest solutions. Those reports reveal low staff morale and an unwillingness of tenured faculty to participate — signals of a changed attitude toward general education.

The attitude of the faculty — tenured and untenured, across disciplines — had indeed changed, shifting toward something very familiar: For the individual professor, the need to survive professionally in increasingly research-focused disciplines made CC’s teaching load seem much more onerous, and departments, pressed to meet internal staffing needs, were more and more reluctant to share faculty with CC. In a more general manner, the expansion and increasing specialization of the faculty had watered down the old esprit de corps. The MacMahon Committee report of 1957, which deemed faculty recruitment to be among CC’s most crucial weakness, made valuable suggestions for increasing faculty participation, but later committees saw little chance for CC-B’s survival. In 1968, after several attempts at reorganization, a course that had basically been dead for several years finally was given its funeral.

CC-A, which had faced many of the same challenges that its defunct other half had confronted, was allowed to live, in part because it still breathed. For no matter what staffing problems it might have had, it enjoyed a cadre of faithful senior professors and young instructors. Professor Peter Gay recalled his experience: “When I first began teaching CC, it was with something of a Deweyite (or shall I say dewey-eyed) common faith.” And he remembers how the instructors wouldn’t have missed one of the staff’s weekly lunch meetings, where course material and pedagogy were the main topics on the table.

But after 1968, those meetings would be about a different course. No longer able to rely on CC-B to handle Part IV of the original curriculum, the staff, if they wanted to be true to the course’s title, would have to re-incorporate the contemporary. And they would have to squeeze it back into a two-semester format with a very different syllabus. For the new CC, it was decreed in ’68, was to be based not on the old social sciences and history but on classic texts that students would read in their entirety.

A shade from 1919 might not recognize the course that was supposed to be his legacy. Now that specialized, research-based training and scholarship had prevailed in academe, he might wonder if what had once been a refuge from the old-style humanities had become instead a refuge for it? How had a social science-based course with a focus on the present — and built around secondary sources — become a humanities course based on primary texts dear to the students of the past? Had the whole focus on the present and its “insistent problems” been lost?

Professor of Economics Harold Barger, perhaps the last from his discipline to teach CC, certainly thought so. In an interview with Spectator he announced his refusal to teach what he pejoratively described as just a “great books course.” What he probably meant was that the “great books” are read because they are great in themselves, not because they naturally fall into place around themes appropriate for a course focused on contemporary issues. Was there not a risk that CC would become a book- and author-centric literature course, a philosophy-based equivalent of Literature Humanities? Given CC’s origins and history, and the considerable energy that social scientists had put into it, his disappointment was understandable. And he was probably not the only old-time CC instructor to share these worries.

A sampling of texts from the current Contemporary Civilization syllabus. (Photo: Masha Volynsky '06)

But without filling in some more details of the life of CC-A following its split from CC-B in the 1920s, we risk exaggerating the changes of the 1960s. For starting as early as the 1930s, CC-A had slowly but surely transformed from a course that relied solely on secondary sources to one based heavily on excerpts from primary documents in social, political and economic thought. Clearly, the staff had grown to believe that to merely read modern texts that commented on Aristotle, Aquinas or Mill (among the few white males on the original syllabus who were dead) was not sufficient. Students ought rather to read and comment on actual works.

This was the beginning of the so-called Red Books, the two volumes of Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, the first edition of which was published in 1946 (with revised editions in 1954 and 1960). It was a publication that would be used in colleges all over America; its excellence made the name of Columbia stand for the very idea of general education of a modern sort — a 20th-century alternative to the classics-centered curriculum of the pre-World War I opponents of specialization. The Red Books represented the last large-scale collective efforts of the CC staff, and as a legacy, their importance is second only to that of CC itself.

The change in the reading list that the Red Books marked did not mean a change in CC’s purpose, though not everyone, of course, believed that. The transition was not surprisingly criticized by some fundamentalist 1919ers, who were uncomfortable with the shift to what they called “ideological-literary texts” alone. But a mere glance at the two volumes’ table of contents refutes the charge: along with the “ideological-literary texts” (those primary sources in civic and moral thought), the volumes contained historical documents illustrating real-world social, political and economic issues of the past (e.g., constitutions or labor contracts, manorial records, parliamentary debates and popular manifestos). The section “Early Modern Capitalism and the Expansion of Europe,” for example, included texts from Jacob Fugger (the great early modern banker), rebellious German peasants and Christopher Columbus. Under “The Elaboration of the Sovereign State,” a student could find, along with Jacques Bossuet’s defense of absolutism, government documents penned by Cardinal Richelieu and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the British Hat Act of 1732.

Though the second-hand social analysis found in the earliest syllabi had for the most part been deleted from the Red Books, like their predecessors, they had an explicit topical and thematic structure. The shift toward “literature” had not eliminated the goal of helping students develop the mental tools they would need to analyze civic reality in all its complexity and studying the past to learn the sorts of questions they might ask of the present. In the days before the social sciences began taking over the study of the civic — before knowledge, training and specialization began to triumph over “wisdom” — it was, after all, on historical-literary texts that people relied to learn about the civic world. There was, in short, no necessary incompatibility between the course’s new material and its goals. And, should CC-A’s teachers cut back on the explicitly contemporary, they had their CC-B partners, in theory, waiting to fill it all in.

The Red Books’ 1960–61 edition was nonetheless their swan song. It would be only eight years before they joined the ranks of the booklet-length CC syllabi of the 1920s; their approach, short documents and excerpts selected around major themes, would be rejected in favor of that of Literature Humanities, with its emphasis on reading whole books. And though today’s reality, for the most part, is excerpts, not whole books, chosen by individual instructors, the official syllabus is still based on the model of 1968.

No more than the introduction of the Red Booksdecades earlier did the transition to great books (in theory read whole) require a change either in the course’s substance or in its teachers’ will to include the contemporary. But it could. For it did increase the danger that the course would lose some coherence and unity of purpose. Without the formal conceptual framework that, albeit in different forms, had provided CC with structure from 1919 through 1968, it would be trickier to fulfill the course’s original mandate.

The so-called great books, often vilified as a dead and even an oppressive “canon,” are equal and often superior to more recent analysis of civilization. And they are easy to use as pedagogical tools to help students look more lucidly at the present’s “insistent problems.” It’s hard, for example, to think of a better way to understand the centripetal and centrifugal forces in all societies that can make what seemed so steady fall apart than by reading Thucydides’ account of the breakdown of social order during the Peloponnesian War. But Thucydides also can be read from many angles — from the point of view of historiography, for example, or naval history, or Greek tragedy — not all of them related to CC’s themes. And if you have less than two hours to devote to him, where do you start? The complication, in short, is that — in the context of a thematic course where the books are less the end than the means — the greatness of great books makes it crucial that teachers learn how to use them to suit the course’s purpose. Beginners, who have not yet run through the reading with a class, understandably need help.

In the end, the survival of CC as conceived by that small band of post–World War I professors depends not so much on what sources are read as on how those sources are taught. In this area, there is reason for concern. Because of the expansion of the College, CC now has more than twice the number of sections than when it started, exacerbating the old and potentially threatening problems of faculty recruitment and esprit de corps, as well as leading to the loss of the “common faith” of which Peter Gay spoke with amusement but also affection, that kept CC-A alive in the 1960s.

As graduate student preceptors with mere two-year appointments (giving them neither time to acquire experience nor wiser fellow students to turn to for help) increasingly become the cork upon which CC must be kept afloat, there is a real danger that it will become what people like Harold Barger feared — a mere great books course. This is not due, of course, to the preceptors’ lack of intellectual capacity nor determination. It is due, rather, to CC’s difficulty. It’s a tough place in which to begin to learn a professor’s most basic skills: inventing exam and paper topics, grading, guiding individual students and learning to steer between the twin temptations of letting discussion drift according to the proclivities of the loudest students and lecturing to keep coherence and beat the clock. For in CC, you’re not teaching your specialty, and the texts you’re working with don’t automatically serve your goal of balancing present with past and theory with practice, and keeping your eye steadily on themes. Graduate students, whose careers depend on the ability to focus on their own narrow specialty — 19th-century German philosophy or medieval Islam or early modern Russia or Church history — may succumb to the expedient of delivering an “it’s September, so it must be the Greeks” textbook overview of Plato and Aristotle and sitting back to listen while the class bully or ideologue goes on and on.

So, then, does the legacy of the past live on in present-day CC? In general, yes, with the proviso that, as its purpose and themes are not automatically built in to the official syllabus — which brings the advantage of freedom and flexibility — it needs continuous vigilance on the part of the administration and faculty. But vigilance alone will not do. It also will require more teacher training and other forms of support.

Today’s CC is not a replica of that of 1919. In some ways, it is worse; in some ways it is better. But the most important thing is this: CC still gives a precious coherence to the student body and can do the same for faculty lucky enough to be involved. It challenges the students to contemplate extraordinary thinking, to read and write more carefully, and to reflect upon themselves. And — one hopes — it makes them humble before the power of genius.

Click here to view the current CC syllabus.

COVER STORY

Wisdom, Training and Contemporary Civilization

By J.W. Smit