The beginning of what would become Columbia’s Core Curriculum lies in the World War I era, when two courses were started that soon became the heart of the Columbia College program later known as the “Core.” One of these was the prewar General Honors course of John Erskine (1879–1951), which sought to conserve the values of classical liberal education in the face of the growing trend toward specialization in the research university. Along with this latter trend came the threat to classical learning that arose from the abandonment by the college of the requirement for Latin and Greek, the languages in which most of the classics had been read.
Erskine argued that the most essential values of the ancient classics could be conveyed in translation. If modern laymen could feel comfortable reading the Bible in English, the same could be done for other classic works. Indeed, translations into the vernacular had the advantage of bringing the classics within reach of laymen in general rather than preserving them as the special province of classical scholars.
Such an understanding was implicit in the title of Erskine’s pioneering course: General Honors. As an experimental venture it was offered first as a challenge to a select group of promising students—who were attracted to it as a special honors course. At the same time, it had a new and democratic appeal for them in its aim to reach the generally educated person or layman. In these features of the original course lay the germs of what would later become spoken of as “general education.”
The central focus and subject matter of this course, however, was the classics. These were texts that had proven themselves capable of speaking to generations of humankind in terms that could still be meaningful to their own life and times, reaching into their own hearts and touching them personally.
This was how the texts were to be read—in the raw, directly, and not mediated too much by scholarly introduction or commentary. No doubt, such a reading could result in somewhat different personal understandings, and to deal with these differences—as a no less essential part of Erskine’s next step on the road—was the method of engaging in small group discussions, led by a pair of teachers who could help students to articulate, share, and compare with others their own reading of the texts.
Among academics, Erskine was unusual in being a creative artist himself: a notable poet, musician, novelist, and playwright. To him, a classic text was a great work of art not only in its literary perfection but in its appeal to the heart, the senses, and the aesthetic imagination. It was not just an object for the exercise of critical reason and analysis. In this respect, he resisted the increasing enshrinement of “critical thinking” as the be all and end all of learning, which could only result in a narrowing and impoverishment of the self, unless it included sympathetic appreciation and synthesis as well as critical analysis.
In the printed syllabus for the course (which would serve as the syllabus for its direct successor, the “Colloquium”), Erskine entitled his preface “The Enjoyment of Reading the Classics,” which expressed the essential features of this learning experience in these terms:
Just before the United States entered the World War, a course of reading for Juniors and Seniors in world masterpieces of literature was proposed in the faculty of Columbia College. The plan lapsed during the next two years, but when the College re-organized itself in 1919, the so-called Honors Course was inaugurated—a system of weekly meetings in small groups of students, each group presided over by two or more members of the faculty, for the purpose of discussing some great book in the field of history, philosophy, economics, science, or literature. The ideas underlying the course were simple. It was thought that any fairly intelligent person could read with profit any book (except, of course, highly specialized science) which had once made its way to fame among general readers. Even without the introductory study which usually precedes our acquaintance with classics in these various fields, any reader, it was thought, can discover and enjoy the substance which has made such books remembered. It was thought, also, that in a weekly discussion of the reading, such an exchange of ideas as might occur in any group which had read an interesting book, would be more illuminating than a lecture. It was thought, also, that the result of such reading and discussion over a period of two years would be a rich mass of literary information, ideas and principles, even emotions.
In practice this course has been so successful that the list of readings has been somewhat expanded, and is here published in the thought that others outside of the College group might care to follow it, Any such list, however expanded, must remain somewhat arbitrary. The reader will think of many titles which to him seem to deserve a place here, or which seem more important than some of the titles here given. Undoubtedly we get a better historical approach to anything that is old if we have the time to study its environment and its associations. But in art it is not the history of a masterpiece which makes it famous so much as qualities of permanent interest. It is precisely those qualities which we recognize first when we take up an old book without prejudice, and read it as intelligently as we can, looking for what seems to concern our times. I personally would go rather far in protest against the exclusively historical approach to literature or any other art.1
From this we can see that Erskine’s early list was not thought of as complete but as open-ended. He was not defining a fixed canon (such as later was promoted with great fanfare as the Hundred Great Books by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago). But it did involve a process of induction, of constructive reasoning, from the legacy of enduring classics, as to what might be considered central concerns of human life, judging from the experience of one’s forbears. It was not a fixed quantity but a process of focusing on perennial issues. In other words, though open to new experience, it was not open-ended in the sense of being open to the indefinite, indeterminate, and potentially infinite exploration of any and all possible forms of new knowledge. If such exploration should occur, quantitatively speaking, it should be accompanied by a parallel process of qualitative reflection and judgment.
The point is illustrated by what occurred when the followers of Erskine succeeded in converting his Honors course into a course required of all undergraduates, a decision of the College faculty in 1936 and first enacted in 1937. This was a signal achievement for the movement, underscoring for its proponents (as for Erskine) that the “general” part of General Honors aimed at a general audience and its active assimilation of the classics, not just a generality or diffusiveness of knowledge.
The point is underscored when one recognizes that the same followers of Erskine persisted in offering the General Honors course as a junior-senior level “Colloquium on Important Books” (known in the 1930s, 1940s, and on into the 1970s and 1980s as the “Colloquium”). Why, since they had succeeded in establishing the Humanities course as a requirement for all freshmen, was there any need for a an almost identical junior-senior colloquium—especially considering the heavy duplication in the readings?
At least one view of this seeming anomaly was that the upper-college course enabled students in the humanities to pursue this as a form of specialized study, just as other students would follow the other required course with an upper college major in one or another discipline that would serve their professional needs. Indeed, one observer of this process described it as yielding to the insistent trend toward professionalization that still exerted strong pressure on the college program. “The Colloquium represents a rather narrow scholarly enterprise: the desire to prepare would-be scholars for further study.… [It was] designed to provide specialized academic training of future liberal arts graduate students rather than for all students.”2
To whatever extent this may have been so, the Colloquium continued to draw students destined for professions outside the humanities (e.g., natural sciences, medicine, and engineering), and the advocates of the Colloquium saw it otherwise than as specialized training: they thought of it as a continuing parallel to specialized study, alongside and complementary to it.
Erskine himself had emphasized that the classics were to be read and reread many times, sometimes in the company of other classics one had not had a chance to consider the first time around or even in the new contexts of expanding research. Later, the continuing reflection on classic works should be a constant accompaniment to specialized study, a core understood as central to all new learning, as an integrative function bringing old and new together.
Strong evidence for this view comes from the fact that the Colloquium was based on the same syllabus as the original General Honors course, which included Erskine’s own succinct rationale for the process. Here, he especially disputed the idea that classics should only be read in historical context or with the benefit of expert commentary.
The titles here suggested are arranged chronologically without regard to different fields of knowledge. The reading of these books will not be training in history, nor in economics, nor in literature—we should not like to imply that any subject or special field is here completely represented. But of course it is the critic, not the artist, who invents distinct fields of knowledge. In life these fields all overlap. The reading of this list consecutively would give, we believe, something better than an introduction to special fields—it would exhibit the mind of western Europe, moving for two thousand years or more through the various interests, imaginative, intellectual, scientific, and emotional, which have occupied it from century to century. Great books read simply and sensibly are an introduction to the whole life; it is the completeness of their outlook which makes them great.3
In the circumstances that attended publication of this syllabus in 1927, two notable features stand out. First, Erskine’s preface is followed by a statement by Everett Dean Martin of the People’s Institute of New York, where teachers in the Columbia program also taught an audience made up of labor union members and other adults. Martin testified that the same course conducted for Columbia College students had
been used by the People’s Institute in various reading and discussion centers in New York City: In the present instance we were able to secure the services of a number of the faculty of Columbia University, who had given the course in that university. The experiment in taking the course off-campus and giving it to groups of average readers, led to the belief that there may be persons everywhere who would be interested in such a course in the humanities.4
To all of this we can easily imagine Erskine saying Amen, when he agreed to have it included in his published syllabus along with a statement by a supporting cast of scholars who readily lent their names to the enterprise, i.e. the Columbia College Colloquium, as heir to the original syllabus of General Honors, published first in 1927. The fact that it was published by the American Library Association for the use of a national audience speaks for the wide appeal just noted by Everett Dean Martin and testifies to the eagerness of many distinguished scholars to lend it their endorsement. Here is the list of signatories:
M. J. Adler, J. B. Brebner, J. M. Barzun, R. L Carey, I. Edman, J. Erskine, J. Gutmann, M. Hadas, J. Hutton, C. W. Keyes, S. McKee Jr., R. P. McKeon, E. E. Neff, P. H. Odegard, H. Peterson, H. W. Schneider, J. Storck, L. Trilling, R. G. Tugwell, M. Van Doren, R. M. Weaver, H. T. Westbrook, A. Whitridge, P. N. Youtz.5
Each of these signers was a distinguished scholar in his own right, and some achieved national importance, e.g., Rexford Guy Tugwell, an economist who became a leading member of FDR’s “Brain Trust”; Herbert Schneider of UNESCO; and Peter Odegaard, later president of the University of Washington. (I need not emphasize the obvious importance of Mortimer Adler and Richard P. McKeon in taking the movement to Chicago in the form of general education and the Great Books program). The continuity at Columbia was extended from Erskine to both the Humanities course and the Colloquium on Important Books by J. B. Brebner (among those just listed), Jacques Barzun, Irwin Edman, James Gutmann, Moses Hadas, Herbert Schneider, Mark Van Doren, Raymond Weaver, and Harold Westbrook. Several of them doubled in importance as contributors to the development of the Contemporary Civilization course, as did Robert Carey. Although both CC and Humanities experienced many vicissitudes over the years, the fact that so much of what Erskine advanced when he “started on the road” endured into the twenty-first century is attributable to their persistent efforts in a long-term collegial effort.
Of the two original Core initiatives mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I have yet to say something about the origins of the second major initiative, which first appeared in the form of the Peace Issues course. Although it would eventually emerge as one of the two main components of the Columbia program, to be known as the Core, its origins are quite different from those of its counterpart, General Honors, later the Colloquium. The latter, as we have seen, was born of the growing contest between the earlier liberal education of the American college gentleman and the increasing emphasis on professional specialization in the emerging research university of the twentieth century. Peace Issues, by contrast, exploded on the Columbia campus as a direct hit from World War I, from the insistence of university leaders like President Nicholas Murray Butler and Dean Herbert Hawkes that Columbia gentlemen face their civic responsibility for supporting the Allied cause, which was variously advertised as the “War to Save [Western] Civilization” and the “War to End All Wars.” The political heat and patriotic fervor at the moment was such that the College plunged into action to pursue these big questions without much resistance but with many educational issues left unaddressed.
A further accounting of these issues will be attempted in later chapters. Important to note here is that there were no preexisting answers or historic models to draw upon. A wide range of possibilities presented themselves. It was not immediately apparent that any of the classics would offer readymade solutions to the problems of war and peace. This became all the more apparent when the war ended and the issues of peace took center stage. Many of these issues were immediate and pressing, but since the war had ostensibly been fought to save “Civilization,” it did not take long for current problems to take civilizational values as a framework for discussion. It was the contemporary situation that had forced itself on the college’s attention, and the terms of the discussion were therefore sought in the modern period. John Herman Randall’s Making of the Modern Mind became a standard text for years. A further compilation of major historical documents (postmedieval) and scholarly articles, published as the syllabus of the Contemporary Civilization course, became widely used as a model for similar courses elsewhere.
Problems of staffing and pedagogy beset Contemporary Civilization from the start, and these remained, even after the adding of a second year entitled Contemporary Civilization B, which addressed immediate social, economic, and political issues in a kind of hands-on way (including local field trips). CCB did not last; ironically, it eventually fell victim to the demands for political relevance of the antiwar movement in the sixties, insisting on radical action instead of considered reflection on longer-term values.
Much more can be said about the checkered and tortuous history of Contemporary Civilization. For the present purpose, however, it may suffice to point out two salient developments over the ninety-odd years of local history as to what became of its ideas and methods as adopted and adapted elsewhere: First, Contemporary Civilization (like the Peace Issues course) was the first to become required of all College students, and insofar as its required status marked it as the essential feature of what became known as “general education,” Contemporary Civilization stood as an historical landmark, whereas Humanities A, the successor to Erskine’s General Honors course, only became a general requirement for all students in 1936–1937. Nevertheless, the earlier (Honors) Colloquium, with which Erskine “started on the road” in the pre–World War I era, emerged in the longer run as contributing the two most durable formulations of the essential Core Curriculum: a direct personal reading of enduring classics by each student and the discussion method (“colloquium”) as superior to lectures for their shared serious engagement with perennial issues that were also “contemporary.” These twin formulations may not capture all that was meant to be made available in general education, but I think they come close to pointing at the heart and practice of the Core.
