However Columbia’s core curriculum, whereas very a lot a great-books program in its execution, has additionally carried, since its inception in 1919, a mandate to deal with “the insistent issues of the current.” So one can criticize the ideological narrowness of the modern readings whereas nonetheless recognizing that the syllabus is making an attempt to meet its educational mandate, not betray it.
Right here, then, are 4 makes an attempt at fulfilling that mandate however with a wider lens. I’m presenting these as potential modules, packaged equally to the way in which the present Columbia curriculum packages its trendy readings underneath “anticolonialism,” “race, gender and sexuality” and “local weather and futures.” Notice that I’m imagining these as dietary supplements to these current modules; if I have been drawing up an entire syllabus, it might embody extra socialist and feminist and anticolonial views. And clearly if tomorrow Columbia determined to complement its syllabus alongside these traces, it may select (or excerpt from) only some of the books and essays I’ve listed; I’m simply making an attempt to indicate the vary that every module would possibly embody.
The Secular and the Sacred
Harvey Cox, “The Secular Metropolis”; Philip Rieff, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic”; Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Nice Awakening”; Christopher Lasch, “The Tradition of Narcissism”; Richard John Neuhaus, “The Bare Public Sq.”; Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age.”
Know-how and Its Discontents
C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”; C.P. Snow, “The Two Cultures”; Marshall McLuhan, “Understanding Media”; Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Loss of life”; Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget”; Sherry Turkle, “Alone Collectively.”
After the Chilly Conflict
Francis Fukuyama, “The Finish of Historical past?”; Samuel Huntington, “The Conflict of Civilizations?”
Group, Solidarity, Inequality
Robert Nisbet, “The Quest for Group”; Michael Younger, “The Rise of the Meritocracy”; Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone”; my colleague David Brooks, “Bobos in Paradise”; Lasch, “The Revolt of the Elites.”
