Twenty-five years ago, when I was an undergraduate, the high-end school I attended offered what they called a “core curriculum” that was actually nothing. Instead of giving students a set of foundational courses and assignments, a shared base of important ideas and discussions, our core brought together courses from a variety of disciplines and encouraged us to choose from among them. .
The idea was that we experience a variety of “approaches to knowledge” and that it doesn't matter what specific knowledge we pick up. There is virtually no difference between taking the late Helen Wendler's prestigious “Poetry, Poets, Poems” survey class and instead taking a course on “Women Writers in Imperial China: How to Escape the Female Voice.” There was no difference.
At the time, I looked south to Columbia University with a certain sense of envy. There, the core curriculum still provided what its name promised: a clear set of critical studies that all undergraduates were expected to encounter. Contrary to the idea that multiculturalism requires the dismantling of norms, Columbia University maintained that it remains an obligation to expose students to some version of the best that has ever been thought and said.
That approach survives today. Columbia University, which became a major setting for American political drama, still challenges its students to encounter what it calls “fundamental ideas and theories across literature, philosophy, history, science, and the arts.”
This is a laudable and useful goal. Because the current consensus in elite academia is that what “ideas and theories” are important for shaping citizens and future leaders (including the future leaders currently protesting at Columbia University) This is because it clearly indicates whether it is considered to be the case. and other campuses across the country. It identifies common compulsions that anyone with a keen eye would notice in a specific syllabus in any meritocratic school, from the big Ivies to liberal arts colleges to selective high schools and middle schools. will help you.
Columbia Core requirements include many of the traditional “Great Books” such as Genesis and the Book of Job. Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville — you can also read science and explore music and art. These also include sources that clearly aim to diversify the traditional core and bring it up to date. Some of them are from the medieval and early modern past, and many are from his 20th century.
In particular, I would like to pay attention to the syllabus of “Modern Civilization.” This is the core section that deals most with political debates and authors. Readings before the 20th century follow a traditional pattern (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), with certain additions that diversify the list. Medieval Islamic writers, along with Machiavelli, Christine de Pizan, and numerous medieval readings. Conquest of the Americas, Haiti's Declaration of Independence and Constitution alongside the American Declaration and Bill of Rights.
However, in the 20th century, the scope suddenly narrowed to only progressive concerns such as anti-colonialism, sex and gender, anti-racism, and climate. Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Barbara Fields and the Combahee River Collective. A meditation on how the transatlantic slave trade and climate change are “colonial déjà vu.”
Many of these reads are definitely worth reading. (Some of them I assigned in my own limited teaching experiments.) But they still embody a very specific set of ideological commitments.
To understand the world before 1900, Columbia University students study a variety of texts and authors important to understanding America and the West as a whole, including Greece and Rome, religion and the secular, capitalism and Marxism. read.
In order to engage with the modern world, a world that they are ready to influence and lead, they read documents that are truly important only in order to understand the perspective of the modern left.
Of course, these reading lists are subject to change and the way they are taught varies by instructor. But Colombia's normative priorities fit into broader trends. I speak with both college and high school students fairly often, and I often meet kids whose entire contemporary political agenda consists of racism and climate change. (Note that these are usually upper middle class children; generally from the age of 18 to the age of 29 they are more likely to worry about financial issues.) I'm not a big fan of the idea. If they're talking to me, they're more likely to be disillusioned. But this is the range of ideas that are given to educated people about what they should care about and what they should pay attention to.
This has two implications, one general and one specific to the current protests in Colombia. The first effect is a dramatic intellectual and historical narrowing. In his 20th-century reading of the Columbia University curriculum, the era of totalitarianism simply disappears, leaving decolonization as the only major political drama of the recent past. No Orwell or Solzhenitsyn. Hannah Arendt's essays on the Vietnam War and the American student movement are assigned, but “The Origins of Totalitarianism'' and “Eichmann in Jerusalem'' are not assigned.
Nor is there any reading material that sheds light on the ideas that the modern left is hostile to. There is no neoconservatism, certainly no religious conservatism, but there is also nothing that would make sense of neoliberalism in all its variations. There's no Francis Fukuyama, no “end of history” debate. Class criticism was largely invisible and remained with Karl Marx in the 19th century. And there are no readings that focus on the technological or spiritual aspects of the present, or that offer cultural critique from a non-progressive perspective – no Philip Rieff, no Neil Postman, no Christopher Lasch.
This narrowing also narrows the list of world-changing energy outlets that students are constantly encouraged to embrace. Conservatism of any kind is obviously off-limits. Center-left management positions appear to be a hot sell. There is no clear path to engaging with many of the important dramas of our time, such as new intercivilizational competition, the stresses of digital existence, and existential anomie.
Climate change looms over everything, and we can expect climate change activism to be fused in some way with anti-colonial and anti-racist action. But the reality is that anti-colonial concerns are growing as Western Europe ages and its population declines, former colonized populations fill its major cities, and centers of global power become the world's most domineering nation. It is very difficult to apply this to a world that has moved to Asia. Imperialist regimes are non-Western and non-white. In the power relations of the distant past he must inevitably think things a little mystically, constantly discovering hidden keys to the 21st century.
But if you're going to simplify and flatten history, especially 20th century history, it's easy to apply these obsessions to Israel and Palestine. Israel's unusual position in the Middle East, its relatively recent founding, close ties to the United States, and settlement and occupation make it a unique scapegoat for the sins of vanished European empires and white supremacist regimes.
Sometimes this scapegoat may seem subconscious, but often it is completely literal. video In this article that went viral this week, one of the organizers of the Colombian protests explicitly compared modern “Zionists” to pre-revolutionary Haitian slave owners, claiming they were legitimately murdered by their slaves. There is. (Students then statement I apologize for the excessive rhetoric. )
Even recognizing that this is happening, that Israel is a kind of enemy of convenience for a left-wing worldview whose theories lack real-world relevance, the failure of the Israeli government It does not excuse the issue, nor does it justify the Israeli government's search for the problem. – endgame strategy in Gaza, otherwise justifying all kinds of abuses against student protesters.
But it helps explain two things that seem so out of proportion in these protests and the culture surrounding them. First, why has this conflict generated so much attention, action, and disruption on campus while so many other wars and crises (Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Burma, Yemen, etc.) receive so little attention and are ignored? I'll explain what's going on.
Second, why does attention so quickly jump from criticism to cartoons, from sympathy for Palestinians to justifications for Hamas, from condemnation of Israeli policies to anti-Semitism? Explaining.
The truth is that these aspects of contemporary protest politics are not simply a rehash of past prejudices. They are partly like that, but they are also something strange, reflecting a worldview that has taken a detour into the temptations of anti-Semitism.
This worldview is broad enough to set a curriculum, but too narrow to fully understand the world as it currently is, and it seeks to find enemies, who are more often found in the past than in the present, and with excited legitimacy. Be attached to Israel with this feeling. A spirit that easily succumbs to hatred, as the defense of justice often does.