Incredulity Toward the Western Canon: In Praise of Readability

As detailed elsewhere, I started as a pre-ministry major at Concordia Lutheran Junior College in Ann Arbor, switched to philosophy at Cal State Long Beach, transferred to political science at Columbia, stayed on for JD and MBA degrees, dabbled in other coursework over the next two decades, returned for a master’s in social work at a different Columbia (i.e., University of Missouri), finished that degree back in Ann Arbor, this time at the U of M, and got thrown out of three different PhD programs (Indiana: Parks & Rec and Social Work; Arkansas: Educational Statistics and Research Methods).

The shorthand explanation for those PhD episodes is that I am a white male, living during a racist and sexist phase in American higher education, and as such was readily discarded when my presence proved inconvenient. The previous paragraph’s links lead to longer explanations, for those who lack more edifying reading material.

That shorthand explanation may seem to imply a conservative political orientation. I’m not sure that my views fall neatly into a single political category, but at least in this area the better characterization would be socialist, as reflected in this excerpt from an article on the World Socialist Web Site (2001):

By defining “diversity” solely in terms of race, the university [of Michigan] obscures the enormous class inequalities in the educational system. Why does it not enrich the educational environment by allowing working class youth of all races to attend? In addition to ensuring greater racial diversity, such a policy would undermine the privileges accorded to the economic elite ….

The aim of creating diversity and equality in higher education is a legitimate goal. This goal, however, must be based upon granting to all youth of all races the ability to pursue an education.

I provide those introductory remarks for context. I try to read articles on various subjects from across the political spectrum, and for some time have been mulling over the many references to the “Western canon” that I have seen in such sources as The American Conservative (TAC). As an undergraduate in Columbia College, I was one of those young adults whom TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) speaks of:

Columbia University is distinctive for continuing to teach the Western canon to its students. The Core Curriculum, commonly referred to as “the Core,” is compulsory for all Columbia undergraduates; it includes mandatory courses in Western music, philosophy, literature, and art. …

[I]t is important to read the canon because its texts, from the Bible to The Wealth of Nations, have shaped the world in which we live …. [contributing (to) such concepts as] “democracy,” “national self-determination,” “civic equality,” “reason,” “scientific innovation,” “free inquiry,” “abolitionism,” “individualism,” “human rights,” and “the rule of law.” …

Whether that heritage is “net good” or “net bad” is a secondary concern. More important is possessing the knowledge needed to trace the genealogy of the ideas in the world around us, to understand the history of the intellectual trends (from Christianity to the Enlightenment) that created our surroundings, to have a point of comparison between our current circumstances and those of the past societies that most shaped the present.

I first became acquainted with the concept of the Western canon in 1967, I think, when I migrated from the one-room Lutheran elementary school to the public junior (or possibly it was the senior) high school, whose library had a copy of The Great Books of the Western World. The dozens of authors represented in that 54-volume set started with the ancient Greeks and continued to the early 20th century. According to American Heritage (Mcarthur, 1989), that Great Books series grew out of Columbia’s very first Core literature course (1919), in which Professor John Erskine inaugurated the format that I experienced: each week, the class would discuss a single classic.

In those roots, we encounter several problems in the concept of the Western canon. First is the extent of that canon. The Great Books of the Western World series grew from 54 to 60 volumes in its second edition, with broader inclusion of 20th-century writers. But others have been more ambitious. Open Culture (2014) describes Harold Bloom’s famous Western Canon (1994) as “tightly focused on only 26 authors” – but then says that, “in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical.” Stretching the concept to its limits, Goodreads indicates that (at this writing) its members have shelved a total of 6,922 books in the “western-canon” category.

Even among the relatively small list of authors covered in The Great Books of the Western World (GBWW) series, there is a problem of selectivity. Note that, in the foregoing quote, TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) speaks of “texts, from the Bible to The Wealth of Nations,” and of “intellectual trends (from Christianity to the Enlightenment) that created our surroundings.” One might ask what happened to the last couple of centuries. According to Wikipedia, The Wealth of Nations and the Enlightenment were already a part of history more than 200 years ago. Gonzalez may like the Bible, but it’s not in GBWW. On the other hand, his fellow writers at TAC – for example, TAC (Zubatov, 2021) – dislike what they consider Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas of recent decades:

[According to Bauerlein,] the moral relativism and universal skepticism of French theory opened up a vulnerability in the academic humanities, which stripped them of their role as fora for weighty intellectual combatants to wage a contest of visions …. [Yet] students remained eager to learn—indeed, still sensed intuitively—that something deep and significant was at stake in the great artifacts of the Western canon. Neo-Marxist theories swept in to fill that void.

Turned over to the care of theorists who resented everything the landmark canonical works represented, interpretation was no longer about discerning the actual or potential aesthetic and intellectual insights infused by great creators or even about finding “the hidden roads” that lead from one installment in the Tradition to the next, to quote the great literary critic Harold Bloom. It became, rather, about ferreting out the power relations and systems of oppression and domination of which such works were held to be emanations.

But Marx is in GBWW, and are these not texts that – to quote Gonzalez again (above) – “have shaped the world in which we live”? Zubatov (better, McWhorter, 2021) may be right in contending that some of these new ideas manifest a religious commitment to belief at the expense of reason – that, basically, you can’t talk to these people, because they already know what they want to believe. Still, these are ideas that one must understand if one is to achieve Gonzalez’s goal of understanding “the history of the intellectual trends … that created our surroundings.”

So, within the uncertain scope of the Western canon, there is a problem of selectivity, where people who trumpet the importance of that canon are hostile to parts of it – elevating the Bible, in many TAC articles, and denigrating Marx, as just illustrated. There is also a problem of inscrutability, where – as I discovered when I first began paging through GBWW – a lot of that stuff is damn technical. I still remember my bafflement at Aquinas’s Objections and Reply Objections and so forth. To my Jesus Freak mindset, the operative question was, What does this have to do with the Bible? That, however, was only a sampler of the antiquated and/or obscure verbiage pervading so many other works in that series. One must wonder: have these people who are so loud and proud about the Western canon ever actually tried to read it?

The answer seems to entail another form of selectivity. Truth be told, nobody is reading Schopenhauer. Nobody is reading Plutarch. Nobody is reading Rabelais. Even within the works of better-known writers, as I learned in my many literature and philosophy courses over the years, nobody is reading much beyond a few well-known high points (e.g., Descartes’s cogito ergo sum; selected passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). You could flush a very large portion of GBWW down the toilet (assuming it were printed on appropriate paper), with little to no consequence beyond requiring a small number of inordinately recherche reports to fall back on secondary sources. I am no stranger to the fascination of ancient works. But on the question of what constitutes the core of our culture, please, let’s be realistic.

There is a difference between what is preserved and what Gonzalez et al. are praising. Not every old manuscript is worth reading, not even if it played some role in leading to something important. Keeping that clutter merely dilutes and distracts from the canon’s legitimacy. The primary reason why academia has not been more excited about the Western canon is not that the feminists or multiculturalists took over (e.g., National Review, 2021). The primary problem is that the canon’s defenders have been trying to defend the wind – more precisely, the hot air of so many archaic texts. If you want people to fight for something, you have to make it worth fighting for.

What’s worth fighting for? The question begs another: for what? There must be some objective or ideal at stake, else we would not bother. The sources cited above are predominantly concerned with acquainting undergraduates with key writings. So let us dispense with two competing scenarios. First, for the general public – and also for college students studying ideas rather than works – it might be feasible (and it would surely be more effective) to distill the canon’s millions of words into a network of digitized, linked, clearly stated questions and propositions, so that people could get to the heart of an issue on a realistic timeframe. Second, for the lifelong learner or the student in anything more advanced than a general-purpose survey course, it is not clear that a canon is helpful. If I want to explore Plato’s philosophy, I might appreciate pointers to which of his works would be most relevant for my purposes; but even in that, I should be led by scholars and by curiosity, not by an inflexible canon.

For purposes of introductory undergraduate education, the Western canon calls for yet another level of selectivity. With limited exceptions, what excites people about the canon is its works of fiction, not of nonfiction. Melville and Hemingway, yes; Montesquieu and Harvey, no. Some people may be talking about book-burning, but this is not that: this is just a question of what a college education should include, where the inclusion of one item means the exclusion of another. With few exceptions, this seems to be the primary message of canon devotees – as in, for instance, Bloom’s Western Canon (1994).

But even when you narrow the canon down to those Western works of fiction that have been exceptionally influential or compelling, you still have a problem of having far too much material to cover within the 30 weeks of an academic year, at the rate of one per week. It would be more realistic to assign one work per week for the four years of a college degree – yet even that would not carry students beyond the many books recommended on various “100 best” lists.

And then there is the problem of what it means to “cover” or “discuss” a work within a single week of an undergraduate course. Consider, for instance, Columbia’s current syllabus, which includes Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Wikipedia presents that novel as an important influence on psychoanalysis, existentialism, and suppression of dissent in the Soviet Union. These are broad and important topics. But how well are undergraduates prepared for them? Note that last example, involving suppression of dissent. Within this very article, we see TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) arguing for the importance of the Western canon – and yet dismissing classic writers, like Dostoevsky, whose works came into existence after the Enlightenment. Even Gonzalez gives signs of not internalizing what Dostoevsky tried to tell him.

Let us not overestimate what actually happens in college education these days. Crime and Punishment runs to 430 pages. Do you think most college students will even read that, in one week, never mind being prepared to discuss its intellectual import? I wouldn’t bet on it. Over my many years of study in quite a few universities, my observation was that, even at the graduate level at the University of Michigan – indeed, even in my PhD-level classes at Indiana University – the situation is what Gorzycki et al. (2019) found:

[U]ndergraduates report that reading is valuable, yet their noncompliance with reading assignments suggests otherwise. Undergraduates report that they achieve their academic goals with little reading and that they perceive reading as too voluminous and irrelevant to class outcomes. The data highlight a misalignment between conventional academic expectations that undergraduates will read in scholarly ways and their actual academic reading practice. Qualitative analysis illustrates that students do not experience academic reading as a venue for scholarly engagement in disciplinary discourse. Whereas the academic reading literature proposes that students develop along a continuum from novice to expert reader, findings suggest that the undergraduate experience of academic reading is not representative of that continuum.

That finding echoes many others (e.g., Gorzycki et al., 2016; Kalbfleisch et al., 2021; Howard et al., 2018). Olney et al. (2017) found that only 32% of college freshmen read at a 12th-grade level – and that, at that level, students have only a 69% chance of passing the reading portion of the GED high school equivalence test.

I had the gratifying experience of having my Columbia Core literature professor apologize to me for the quality of my classmates’ participation. I had several advantages: I had been in college longer than they had; I had spent most of that prior attendance as a philosophy and religion major, which tended to have something to do with most of our readings; and I hadn’t yet discovered women. Be that as it may, plainly that professor was not impressed, overall, with our engagement with the topics of intellectual interest that arose as we discussed books on the level of Crime and Punishment. As I would later observe in more detail in reading, writing, and math coursework, there was an enormous gap between what professors would tell themselves they were doing (or at least trying to do) and what students were actually getting out of it.

The purpose of this post is not to suggest that The American Conservative or other conservative outlets are simply wrong. To the contrary, I hope I have signaled some degree of sympathy with some of TAC’s priorities. I merely suggest that general-purpose blathering about the Western canon is likely to be ineffectual.

We are most likely to value and retain a set of shared works when they are in some sense meaningful to us. First and foremost, we have to be able to read and understand them. Even at the college level, that tends to mean fiction rather than nonfiction; and if it must be nonfiction, it has to begin where we are. Most of us are not literature or philosophy majors. We are not going to travel to where the nonfiction writer begins his/her tale. Even if we do, in later years we are not likely to remember how we got there.

If professors want people to go beyond the story to the important or controversial sociopolitical idea, they must allow time for such development. Rather than a cheap one-year rip through thousands of years of literature, by which Columbia seeks to make every student a dilettante, students should be expected to participate in (and to use in their other classes) a constant, every-year relationship of classic works to current studies and activities.

A Western canon should not and probably cannot survive as an end in itself, mounted on an inscrutable pedestal. The pursuit of women (in my example); the limitations of reading (compared to e.g., fine arts or team sports) – these and other real-life imperatives call, not for a superficial dabblings in abstruse notions for ephemeral amusement, but rather for engagement with the best of what past and present generations can teach us in hard, practical terms in real time.

Failure in Journalistic Education: An Encounter with the Columbia Missourian

The University of Missouri at Columbia became notorious, last year, for events that Wikipedia summarizes thus:

In 2015, a series of protests at the University of Missouri related to race, workplace benefits, and leadership resulted in the resignations of the president of the University of Missouri System and the chancellor of the flagship Columbia campus. The moves came after a series of events that included a hunger strike by a student and a boycott by the football team. The movement is primarily led by a student group named Concerned Student 1950.

National Review (Melchior, 2016) reports that these events were deeply unpopular with alumni and also with potential future students. The impact upon the university was reportedly severe: as of April 2016,

freshman enrollment is down 25 percent, leaving a $32 million funding gap and forcing the closure of four dorms. The month after the protests, donations to the athletic department were a mere $191,000 — down 72 percent over the same period a year earlier. Overall fundraising also took a big hit.

Among the events chronicled by National Review, I was particularly interested in the one where Melissa Click, a professor in the university’s School of Journalism, was charged with assault and solicited the use of force to prevent media coverage by — would you believe — a student in her own journalism school.

I would have been inclined to assume that Click was just some kind of renegade, not at all representative of the J-school or of the university or the city of Columbia. Would have been, I say, but for two sets of experiences. First, I lived in that city and attended that university for a few years myself. And second, in the summer of 2016, I had my own unpleasant encounter with the Missourian.

During my time in Columbia, I had the bewildering experience of being physically attacked — by a woman who called herself “the crazy lady,” swinging a baseball bat at me — for which I was then punished by being subjected to a restraining order (despite the court-ordered investigator’s conclusion that I did not pose “any immediate danger or harm”). The faculty of the School of Social Work, where I was newly enrolled, seized upon the episode as an excuse to harass me for the balance of the academic year. I did not return to this pattern of abuse in that poorly ranked program, choosing instead to finish my degree at the University of Michigan (ranked first in the U.S. in social work).

So much for the city and the university. Unfortunately, next I was to have this encounter with the Missourian. It started when I saw the following article in the May 29, 2016 issue (click to enlarge):

Meg Hegemann happens to be my ex-wife. In that article, the caption at the bottom of the picture reads as follows:

Members of Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church settle into the pews at the beginning of service on May 8. The Mothers’ Day message, titled “Teach Your Children Well,” discussed the theme of violence against women, and Pastor Meg Hegemann spoke about her personal experience.

I found that caption intriguing because I knew Meg’s life story fairly well, up through our divorce in 2002. I was pretty sure that, as of that date, she had no significant “personal experience” in the area of violence against women. It was possible that she had been speaking of something that had happened since 2002, but that seemed unlikely; she had apparently been with her second husband since shortly after our divorce, and I doubted she would be complaining of violence at his hand, with him sitting there in her church.

I would have been happy to start by checking this with Meg herself. Unfortunately, she refused to respond when I tried to contact her, in the year or so after our divorce; she has not spoken to me in the past 14 years. Besides, I would have had to verify whatever she told me because, as she admitted during openly recorded conversations in July 2002, she had been lying to me for years.

As another way of checking out this claim that Meg had “personal experience” in the area of violence against women, I contacted student journalist Erin Quinn, author of that photo caption, and asked her what Meg had said, during that sermon. This seemed like a reasonable inquiry. It’s not as though these were deep personal secrets. Meg had made her statements out loud, to an audience.

In order to explain my interest, I told Ms. Quinn about the trauma that I had endured in my domestic abuse experience, there in Columbia, with “the crazy lady.” From personal experience at Columbia’s Missouri United Methodist Church, I knew that there were gossipy and meanspirited elements within the city’s Methodist community. If I was being used as a convenient target of false accusations, I wanted to know.

It did seem that Meg, in particular, would be capable of making such accusations. I recalled that, while we were dancing together during one of our first dates, back in 1993, a look of anxiety or fear had crossed her face, as she noticed one of the men standing nearby. I asked what was the matter. She said that, for a moment, she was afraid her ex-boyfriend had followed her to that dance hall. The bystander at whom she had glanced was indeed an unpleasant-looking individual. As I got to know more about Meg, however, I would eventually conclude that this purported fear was quite farfetched. For one thing, her ex-boyfriend lived more than 140 miles away, and would presumably have no way of knowing where she was on that particular evening. Moreover, as I would eventually learn, what actually happened in that relationship was not that the man was in any sense violent or threatening. He was a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. He tried to help people. As far as I could tell from Meg’s comments, the only damage occurring in that relationship was the damage that she did to his marriage.

In short, it seemed Meg could sometimes be among those damsels who appeal to gallantry by alleging distress. And apparently such allegations gain traction at the Missourian. Because when I asked Ms. Quinn what Meg had said in that sermon about violence against women, she refused to answer. Not to blame her alone: she was a student, and she said she was proceeding according to her supervisors’ instructions. Then again, the excuse of “only following orders” has long since failed to justify wrongful behavior.

Under such circumstances, a person in my position might consider him/herself entitled to relief under the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. For example, the Code says this: “Seek truth and report it”; “Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story”; “The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources”; “Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing”; and so forth. Taken together, such excerpts from the Code seem to affirm that Ms. Quinn and her newspaper handled this matter improperly.

So it looked like Melissa Click’s appointment in the J-school might be consistent with the latter’s ethics after all. The Daily Caller reports, moreover, that Dr. Click’s husband, a professor in the religious studies department, participated in the harassment of the journalism student mentioned above. It wasn’t just the J-school; apparently the university likewise had no serious problem with the behavior of either of these professors.

By refusing to answer my question, Ms. Quinn did provide an answer of sorts. It certainly appeared that Meg had made comments, regarding violence against women, that had something to do with me in particular. Otherwise, during our exchange of several emails, I think Ms. Quinn would have just said that Meg’s remarks were not about me. It also appeared that those remarks may have been too ugly to share: again, Ms. Quinn would presumably have told me if Meg were merely complaining about my haircut. The topic was violence against women; I seemed to have been slandered in that regard; and the Missourian seemed inclined to protect the female committing that slander, without knowing or caring whether she might actually have been the abuser during our years together.

I did make still another effort to follow up on this incident: on two separate occasions, I attempted to contact Rev. Brad Bryan, who has replaced Meg as minister at the church where she made her remarks about violence against women. I have verified that his office does respond promptly to inquiries from others. But it did not respond to those inquiries from me. To my knowledge, I have never met, spoken with, or otherwise been engaged in any way with Rev. Bryan. His repeated refusal to respond to me, in particular, did seem to suggest that he had formed some kind of negative impression of me, based on something that he must have heard from someone other than me.

I made yet another attempt: I contacted another man whom I had met at one point, while I was still living in Missouri. This man apparently had years of experience with the United Methodist community of central Missouri. I sent him a message, on Facebook, notifying him of the foregoing concerns. Facebook confirmed that he had seen the message. But he, too, declined to reply.

In short, the indicators available to me all seem to point in the same direction. It is regrettable that the so-called free press, in the form of the Columbia Missourian, was useful only to support the politically correct claim that a damsel was distressed. At the Missourian, that claim — unsupported by evidence — apparently trumps the ethics of the journalistic profession. This intellectual irresponsibility is consistent with my own horrendous experience (above) as a student in the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri – Columbia.

The Missourian trains students to become journalists. It appears that, for all its past laurels, that newspaper has become something of a journalistic cesspool. It’s not just the Melissa Click travesty. More quietly but ominously, students like Ms. Quinn have been going forth, for some years now, to join the profession that purports to inform the American public on daily events. Let us not be surprised that Americans’ trust in the media has sunk to its lowest level in more than 40 years. In the wake of this sort of experience, it would obviously be more difficult for me, personally, to doubt conservative complaints about suppression of the truth in mainstream media.

A Country Boy Went to Columbia College

I transferred from California State University, Long Beach to Columbia College (New York) in 1977. I did that because I met a guy named Chris Waters at a party, that January, who said that, if I hoped to get into a good grad school, I had better try to graduate from someplace more prestigious. I don’t know if that was true. He, himself, had just been accepted into a PhD program at Harvard. But he was sort of an academic superstar, whereas I was just a good student. For better and for worse, his advice built a fire under me. I did some quick research and chose Columbia because, by that point (i.e., January), a lot of the best-known schools’ transfer application deadlines had already passed, but Columbia’s hadn’t.

Background: Cal State Long Beach

I’d had a good educational experience at CSULB. I’d been living in a garage for a few months before I decided to return to school. That was due to a decision to prioritize Bible study, to resolve a crisis of belief that I had been wrestling with for more than a year. Not surprisingly, that background led to a major in philosophy.

Some of the philosophy professors at CSULB were oddballs. Some were poor teachers. But for the most part it was a stimulating, interesting field of study. It was excellent preparation for law school; it had a permanent impact on how I saw things, and fed my enduring desire to learn more – not only about philosophy, but about literature, the arts, and other areas of learning and experience that intersect with philosophical thought. It was the kind of big state university where a history professor of Middle Eastern heritage would invite me to spend the night with his family so that we could get a good start on a Paul Klee conference in downtown L.A. the next day.

Even the instances of oddness meshed with campus lore. I heard about a professor who, to prove a point of some kind, climbed up into a tree on campus, clambered out onto a limb, and sawed it off. Apparently he fell to the ground (along with the limb) and broke his arm. There was someone who often played a pretty instrument, like maybe a piccolo, at the start of the day, standing high up on one of the classroom buildings’ external staircases; there was a semi-crazed literature student who got expelled for a violent poetry reading that featured urine, mice, and a hammer. Famous alumni included Steve Martin, Steven Spielberg, Stu Rosen, and Richard and Karen Carpenter.

Long Beach itself was a funky place. In some spots, it still had a flavor of the old surfer towns; in others, it felt like New Mexico. It was where Larry Walters came up with the idea of tying helium balloons to a lawn chair, and went up to 15,000 feet. It was the home of Egg Heaven and the Strand bookstore and a lot of homeless veterans and the Queen Mary and (at that time) the Spruce Goose and God knows what else.

It cost me $98 a semester for full-time tuition at CSULB. I made the most of it. Along with the philosophy, I had good courses in history, literature, and German. Somehow the German students formed a cohesive group: we had a lot of fun, and some of us stayed in touch for years thereafter. My fellow students included an octogenarian working on her master’s degree, a spelunker who biked all the way from Hermosa Beach, a Vietnam vet who loved learning, a bearded thinker who left for a PhD at Stanford, a woman who had earned a 4.0 while taking courses there for seven years … and so on. It was a lovely place – the kind of place where a student could derive enormous pleasure from just lounging around the pretty campus and becoming fascinated with assigned readings from writers as varied as Franz Kafka, Bertrand Russell, and Amos Tutuola.

Criticisms of Columbia College

I flew from L.A. directly to LaGuardia, took a taxi to the Times Square Motor Hotel, and rode the subway up to Columbia the next day. When I got there, I immediately walked across College Walk (116th Street). I went from Broadway to Amsterdam to the end of 116th at Morningside Park – and then stopped, baffled. Where was the campus? After the sprawling real estate of CSULB, it seemed that I must have missed it somehow. I went back to Low Library, turned north, and walked past the Business School, past the gym, down toward the tennis courts – and now had to accept that this was it. The campus of this famous university was just this little space of maybe a dozen square blocks?

Because of limits on transfer credits, I had to spend another two years at Columbia College. One of my courses was a mandatory Literature Humanities course. I remember that, one time after class, the professor apologized to me for the quality of the other students. It was obvious that I was really into this stuff, and for the most part they just weren’t.

I have no doubt that, compared to my CSULB classmates, these were more competitive students. They would surely tend to do better on homework assignments, standardized tests, and so forth. But unlike the situation among philosophy and literature majors at CSULB, it seemed that most of these people were not taking these courses because they were interested. They were taking them because they were required. The question, for them, was not what Faulkner was trying to say; it was whether they actually needed to read The Sound and the Fury, or could instead find a way to fake it. It often seemed that the purpose of having brains was to be an extrovert: to do a superior job of self-promotion and playing the academic game. A great example arose when one student was forcefully expressing his viewpoint on Afghanistan, which the Soviets had invaded. The professor got a twinkle in her eye, went to the blackboard, and sketched out the boundaries of nations in central and south Asia. Then she asked which country was which. Students knew which was India, but what was the name of this one? Afghanistan, maybe. Or was that Pakistan, or Iran? People weren’t too sure.

At Columbia, I switched from philosophy to political science. That was OK – I learned a lot of things – but if I had it to do again, I would not choose that major. I did it because I felt pressure to be getting in touch with something involving the real world. I still planned to go for a PhD; I just thought it should probably be in a social science. Some of the subject matter was good. It was valuable, for example, to learn about material measures of a nation’s political strength (e.g., miles of railway, annual steel production, GDP), and about historical and cultural influences shaping the course of development or the form of government. But there were also a lot of assigned readings in dry political theory that did not seem to have much use except to stimulate disagreements from other political theorists.

Many of our professors had solid credentials. For example, the guy teaching a course on Eastern Europe was a former top member of the Polish government. But he was hard to understand, and he wasn’t a good teacher. It seemed that the professor who taught several of my required political science courses, another poor instructor, was related to one of the university’s key administrators. For faculty, as for students, the emphasis seemed to be upon career advancement, not on love of the subject matter. So, for instance, when I asked my favorite professor for her thoughts on whether I should proceed on to a PhD in political science, her chief concern seemed to be that faculty were paid such relatively paltry salaries.

That preoccupation was understandable: New York was expensive. But it was also characteristic: New York, and Columbia, were all about careers. I had gone from working-class humanities students who rarely spoke of specific career goals, at CSULB, to classrooms full of mostly well-to-do students who wanted to be doctors and lawyers – and not, for the most part, because they loved people or justice, but because these were the most prestigious, powerful, and remunerative fields. If you came to a school like this, you had probably already made a choice to focus on career rather than learning. I guess this kind of orientation must seem obvious to those who have been raised to think in no other way.

Not that I was exempt. Within a year after arriving, I had largely swallowed the belief that a person should pursue a highly paid and prestigious career. Maybe my quick conversion to that perspective just shows that I had never before imagined such things for myself; or maybe it was more a case of misdirecting an impressionable young man. There is probably some truth to both, but the latter seems more applicable because, as it turned out, I became disgusted with Wall Street pretty quickly, once I actually made it to a promising career opportunity.

But let me not get ahead of the story. I was saying that Columbia did not generally exude an air of fascination with learning. I did sympathize with that professor’s concern with paying the rent, but that just led me to wonder why the humanities departments of this university, at least, had to be located in such an expensive, careerist ambiance, where a love of books and knowledge could seem musty if not downright immature.

Throughout my time at Columbia College, I was still in the grip of the fantasy that good students had to read and understand the assigned texts, as distinct from following the professor’s hints as to what would be on the exam, supplemented with Cliffs Notes and previous years’ hand-me-down outlines. It did take me a while to learn what a Columbia College political science education was all about. Even in law school, I was still not “smart” enough to just read over the previous versions of the Torts exam that the professor had put on reserve for us in the library. I was wasting hours working through my voluminous class notes and the actual Torts casebook, thinking that I was supposed to have a broad understanding of the subject.

I was also slow to relinquish the idea that higher education at its best is a place for creativity and imagination. In the 1970s, especially, one might have expected such a place to have lingering remnants of 1960s funkiness. But I guess that was over. I didn’t find Columbia to be terribly supportive of the sorts of imaginative, take-a-chance efforts that I had encountered in Long Beach. As someone said of the University of Michigan, when I was there in 2009-2010, at Columbia you hear “no” a lot. It seemed that people in a highly competitive place can easily slip into a perverse pride, based not on their ability to recognize and develop human potential, but rather on their real or imagined superiority, their opportunities to swat down (indeed, to ridicule) people who are trying to make a start.

The place had some really rough edges. For instance, I had never before encountered a university where fellow students would deliberately ram right into you as you walked through campus. I don’t mean the occasional jostle or unintentional bump when navigating crowded spaces. I mean recurrent situations where there are only two of you on the entire sidewalk, and somehow the other guy manages to bang into your shoulder as you pass. It seemed especially likely to happen if I was walking along with a smile on my face, thinking about something good.

There was this tendency to belittle fellow students. This wasn’t limited to my political science classes. For example, when I called the Dean’s Office after a particularly difficult semester, to see if I had made it onto that semester’s Dean’s List, the student assistant who answered the phone asked my semester GPA and then sneered, “Not even close.” This is obviously different from “Better luck next time.” It was as if the school were trying to train us to be unpleasant. One could say that’s New York as a whole, not just Columbia; but the point remains: why foster or even tolerate attitudes and behaviors that are more likely to harm than help students, in their project of developing networks and preparing for the real world?

Needless to say, there were many students – a substantial majority, perhaps – who did not behave in such ways. And I’m sure the students in some other fields would tend to be less nasty than the worst political science majors. What seemed more pervasive was the attitude that you don’t matter. This attitude could be indulged even where it would be self-defeating. For example, the student newspaper, Spectator, was forever advertising for people to join the staff – to lend their unpaid assistance in various editorial and production processes. I had briefly managed a printing shop, back in Long Beach. It seemed like I might have some experience they would find useful. So I went in a couple of times. It’s not as though students were flocking to help out with the tedious typesetting tasks for which I was volunteering. But the attitude was dismissive, as though they were doing me a favor by letting me be there.

Perhaps for these reasons, Columbia was somewhat bigoted. Not toward the international types, to be sure. Over a period of four or five years’ residence on 116th Street, I had Chinese-American, Pakistani, Korean, Ethiopian, Colombian, and Sri Lankan roommates, along with a variety of gay and lesbian friends. All seemed to feel welcome at Columbia. That’s not surprising: it was a feather in our caps to be cosmopolitan – to gain exposure to, and to demonstrate tolerance toward, such peoples. What was less fashionable was to treat the boring old Midwest, where my accent came from, as a place that was valid and important in its own right. It seemed bizarre, when I later lived in Passaic, New Jersey, ten miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, to encounter people who had never been to Manhattan; but maybe this was not terribly different from those East Coast students whose family resources had allowed them to spend extended periods in Europe while rarely if ever traveling within the U.S. It seemed that I – that we, middle America – just didn’t have much to offer them. I might have been a relatively scarce representative of a huge portion of the U.S., but it often seemed that my culture was assumed to be uninformed and peripheral, if not downright invalid.

Finally, in a longer-term perspective, if I had not gone to Columbia College, I probably would not have gone into law. Law proved to be a tremendous distraction from my actual interests and from my ultimate career direction. Going to Columbia, and being influenced by the careerist mentality there, was probably the worst single thing that has happened in my career. Without that, I would surely have pursued a PhD in a subject of interest, and would likely have made a career of it.

(Later note: it was not until June 2020 that I discovered William Deresiewicz‘s essay, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. That and other articles produced by a search suggest that, if Columbia’s administrators had been more broadminded, they might have improved the quality of Columbia’s education by learning about the perspectives of people like me, who weren’t marching in lockstep with the standard elite mentality.)

Praise of Columbia College

If I had not gone to Columbia College, I probably would not have gotten into Columbia Law School. I say that on the basis of information, provided by the Dean’s office, indicating that students from the College were much more likely to get into Columbia’s law school than into any other top school. Otherwise, I was getting into places like NYU, Northwestern, and Georgetown, but not into Harvard or Michigan. A Georgetown degree would surely have exposed me to governmental rather than corporate opportunities, and I probably would have found those more palatable. But at least I did get a chance to work on Wall Street, with my Columbia degree; and Columbia was more prestigious, for whatever that was worth.

There’s also the probability that, if I hadn’t gone to Columbia, I would never have lived in New York. New York is an important city, in the U.S. and in the world, with enormous influence across multiple fields. It was gratifying to be able to treat names like Madison Avenue and 42nd Street and the World Trade Center as parts of everyday life. I commuted along and through such places on a daily basis, to various jobs I had during my 12 years in the New York-New Jersey region. I got to see museums, to develop tastes in various forms of art, to be a daily visitor to Central Park, and so on. Here, again, I had opportunities to do things that most people won’t. Some may not want to, but there are plenty of others who do. So I am grateful for that.

I also benefited from exposure to New York in another sense. There are some truly crazy, cynical, exploitative, and mean people in this world. In other places, they often find it advantageous to conceal their true nature. Many do in New York as well. But there are enough of them in NYC to achieve critical mass – to develop, that is, subcultures in which it becomes normal and even desirable to entertain destructive attitudes toward people. In some circles, you can actually get to a place of considering yourself inferior for failing to evince a degree of sociopathy. Let’s just say nobody will be surprised to hear that values and priorities can become distorted there. You risk some permanent psychosocial impairment from exposure to that sort of thing, but you can also learn about yourself and the world.

While political science was not the best choice of major for me, at least it got me started into social science study. I probably would have gravitated in that direction anyway, at CSULB or elsewhere, and as noted above I probably would have made a deeper and more successful career of it. While political science at Columbia generally left a bad taste, it did expose me to some remarkable perspectives. I don’t really know if, elsewhere, I would have had a senior seminar with a professor who announced his intention of converting all of us into practicing Marxists – a seminar in which some students already favored violent revolution in the U.S. At the time, this sort of thing left me nonplussed; but since then, I have had occasion to think about it, to understand it a bit better. It certainly broadened my worldview.

Columbia and New York endowed me with considerable arrogance. That was helpful for purposes of meeting women (or at least a certain type of woman) and for impressing myself. Over a period of years, it was surely more harmful than helpful in career and personal terms. Over an even longer term, however, it gave me the opportunity to experience that sort of tendency, and then to question it, and ultimately to arrive at, perhaps, a more balanced view. It seems that some confidence is helpful for purposes of persuading people (or at least Americans) that you know what you are talking about and are likely to be successful, but that it can be overdone.

It has been helpful to have the Columbia name on my résumé. This is especially true of the Law School, but it also applies to the College. For one thing, this gave me the sense that I was among the cream of the crop. Whether that was true or not, it was convenient to think so. All other things being equal, your Ivy League credential will tend to persuade people that you are smart, and perhaps that you are in some other sense special. There is a countervailing risk that the Ivy League graduate will assume there is truth to these perceptions – that, in other words, s/he can succeed despite being actually unqualified, just because s/he is smart or special. It can be tempting to rest on one’s laurels, treating prestige as a substitute for hard work and motivation.

I’ve published a book about the law school experience, so I won’t go into that here. Focusing just on the College, as already hinted, it was good to be exposed to such international diversity. You get a lot of that anyway, just by being in New York, but these international students were not Americanized foreigners: these were people who had just come from the airport, relatively speaking, and who thus brought a real flavor of their part of the world with them. In addition, as would probably be the case in most college educations, I acquired some practical skills in computers and writing, thanks to a couple of good courses in those areas.

Among my professors and fellow students, there were some who seemed destined for higher things. It was instructive to be among such people – to see their dedication, confidence, and ability. There were actually some like that at CSULB too; but with the Ivy League/New York backdrop, these people gave me a glimpse of just how far a person could go. In that regard, as a criticism of myself and my background, I was not at all sure how far there was to go – of the specific steps that might take someone like me from being a nobody to being a big somebody. My origins and ambitions were too humble for that. Those people were in another world. It would be some years before I would even begin to visualize how someone like me could actually climb that ladder, assuming I would have wanted to.

Conclusion

In retrospect, for purposes of getting an Ivy League credential, Columbia was perhaps as good as any. For purposes of getting an in-depth New York experience, I think New York University might have been better. For purposes of fitting into my larger life picture, any university on the East Coast was too far away from home; my network there eventually became tangential to my life developments. I do appreciate the strengths of the Columbia undergraduate experience; but for me, for purposes of getting an education leading to an appropriate career, going there was a life-changing mistake. If I had it to do again, choosing among universities that I have actually attended or have otherwise come to know, I would probably choose the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, and would ideally stay on as a grad student in a department whose ambiance and objectives would have provided a better fit.

.

P.S. Some years after writing this post, I viewed the Freedom Writers movie. It didn’t take place at Cal State Long Beach. But its star was a CSULB alumna, and apparently she returned to teach there, and then moved on to create the Freedom Writers Foundation. The movie, and that career trajectory, capture something of the marvelous spirit of CSULB as I experienced it.