PrintTo get to school, I walk the hill—along Columbus Avenue and up Morningside Drive. Past joggers, panhandlers, and pedestrians.
Two years ago, I walked another hill. That hill did not overlook Harlem, but some faceless, nameless valley in southeastern Afghanistan. Instead of grand, deciduous trees, there were shrubs struggling to grow in rocky, alkaline soil. Textbooks and course-readers were replaced with weapons, ammo, and armor. The weight strains your shoulders the same, your breath is lost the same.
When I arrive at campus, time permitting, I get coffee from a vendor and am in class at least 10 minutes before it begins, sometimes as early as 20.
There are many things—besides showing up way too early—that I have carried over from the Army to Columbia. I don’t exhibit the normal nocturnal tendencies of a typical student: I go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up promptly at 6 a.m. My daily lexicon includes roger, wilco, and tactical patience as well as many of the monosyllabic modifiers common in the military.
For five years, I was a special operations combat medic with the Army’s 1st Ranger Battalion. During my tenure as a Ranger, I went to both Afghanistan and Iraq; treated soldiers, civilians, and enemy combatants; got shot at, and shot back; got ambushed, and ambushed back, over and over again.
In time I became restless with the Army life. I applied for and won an Army Green to Gold ROTC Scholarship—a full ride to college.
Before I came to Columbia, I knew about 1968. I arrived expecting a general hostility to the military. An unpopular war raged; the debate over ROTC was locked in stalemate. But in my first few months here, I began to see that Columbia’s history with the military was far more complex than I’d imagined.
Columbians today know little about this school’s long, symbiotic relationship with the armed forces. For much of the 20th century, Columbia positioned itself as a steadfast partner of the American military. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia and the consummate politician, announced that he wanted Columbia to be “a part of the apparatus of the government of the United States for the preparation and training of men to carry on that war.” That Columbia would serve as an organ of the state is difficult for students of our generation to imagine. Yet some of this school’s most hallowed traditions are vestiges of that jingoistic past.
In light of Butler’s diktat, the University instituted new policies designed to prepare students for military service. Some you may recognize—mandatory physical education classes for first-years and sophomores, a swim test, a nutrition program at the University Restaurant “bound up with the extension of physical training,” even a psychological test as an alternative form of admission. At the request of the Student Army Training Corps—the predecessor to ROTC—the University introduced a current events course to propagate the ideology behind the war. In 1919, the course, called War Aims, became mandatory for all undergraduates.
At the war’s conclusion, students and faculty alike were veterans returning, coming to terms with a different world. In anticipation of their arrival, the faculty that remained stateside revamped the war aims course for the new era of peace. That peace, Columbia College Dean Herbert Hawkes proclaimed, would be “far more important” than war “as a field of instruction of our college youth.” Refashioned as War and Peace Issues, the course became a sort of postscript to the war—a road-map of western civilization from the past to the present. It would offer student veterans insight into the new world order, so that they might rejoin civilian life inculcated with “civic virtue.” In September 1919, the course was renamed Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, and a Columbia institution was born.
In context, the air surrounding the unveiling of Contemporary Civilization was electric. The war to end all wars—where students and faculty members had fought and died—had ended, liberal democracy had triumphed, and now Columbia was unveiling a course that aspired to be the agency of man’s continued drive towards progress. In the New York Times, a press release described the bold new course that would “inform the student of the more outstanding and influential factors of his physical and social environment ... By thus giving the student, early in his college course, objective material on which to base his own judgments, it is thought he will be aided in an intelligent participation in the civilization of his own day.”
At a time when state law mandated military training for all college students, Contemporary Civilization offered Columbia’s all-male student body the philosophical argument for American might. The syllabus began as pamphlets distributed at the beginning of each semester and featured key texts of 20th-century Western political and economic thought. These were not the primary texts of today’s course, but dense secondary writings chosen by a faculty committee. Instead of Plato and Socrates, there were articles by Columbians like John Dewey, Carlton J. H. Hayes, and J. H. Randall. Tireless advocates of the American system, these men held up democracy as, in the words of Dewey, “the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity.” Contemporary Civilization, then, placed Columbia at the vanguard of liberal democratic thought. Jester, the campus humor magazine, even published a picture mocking the course as Butler’s weapon against communism.
Though the syllabus has been through many revisions over the last century—some drastic—the fundamental questions of Contemporary Civilization remain the same: How do people make a living? How do they live together? How do they understand their world? These are critical questions, but if the American brand of liberal democratic capitalism is their only answer, the course ceases to be discursive.
The greatest revision came with the upheavals of 1968. The Acropolis was divided over race, class, and the role of the military at Columbia. In those days, the University conducted war-related research with the Institute of Defense Analyses, and class rankings were submitted to local draft boards. On South Field, Naval ROTC conducted drills, and the CIA recruited on campus.
Contemporary Civilization, Butler’s contribution to the apparatus of the state, was challenged as a mere field manual for American ideology. The course texts, intellectual foundations of American military and economic hegemony, were discarded in favor of full editions. Informed by the pedagogy of Literature Humanities, which had always used whole texts, the reconstituted Contemporary Civilization course allowed students to develop a closer relationship with the material. More texts by female thinkers were incorporated, as well as ones by prominent African Americans. The war of ideas faded into the background.
When I started basic training in April 2003, the Iraq War had just begun. Before I had even finished my medical training, friends had already been shipped out to and died in Iraq. Volunteering for the Army Rangers only added to my training-time. From unqualified harassment in the Ranger Indoctrination Program (dubious acronym: RIP), to starvation and sleep deprivation in Ranger School, you were conditioned to hope for nothing and expect less. Only then could you function as a soldier.
Why, then, would a headstrong progressive join an organization whose telos it is to subordinate your individuality? Prophetically, an angry, tattooed sergeant from RIP once asked, “HEY ASSHOLE, WHY THE FUCK DID YOU JOIN THE ARMY?”
“It’s applied philosophy, SERGEANT!”
“DO FUCKING PUSH-UPS! Smart ass.”
“Applied Philosophy” means testing ideas. In high school, I was a good student—class president, debate captain, and an avid reader. I had ideas. But what’s the value of an idea if you don’t use or test it? I joined to see war.
In the movies, a soldier’s life is constant action. In reality, it’s pretty boring. Between the sporadic periods of violence, you wait. Constantly. When I inquired about that, the regimental commander, Colonel Nixon—the Grand Poobah of Army Rangers—gave me a ratio, 999:1. For every 999 hours spent deployed you may see one hour of “combat.” If that. A 90-day deployment cycle averages to about two hours of combat.
In the meantime, you have a lot of time to read and to think about yourself. What are you doing here? What kind of person are you? Where do you want to go? Can an individual make a difference? Can a nation make a difference? Canvas tents and plywood hooches become salons where ideas are discussed, our condition is examined. Shithouse philosophers in our shithouse agora. During these moments and discussions, I slowly regained consciousness. My studies in applied philosophy tumbled forward, deployments came and went, and I felt that this experience, though invaluable, was not sufficient.
The Army had exhausted me and I had exhausted it of the experience I’d originally sought. I wanted to pick up where I had left off. “DOC! Why the hell would you want to go to such a hippie-faggot-liberal-school?” my platoon sergeant asked. Because I wanted to get a top-notch education. Columbia, with the ideological combat of Contemporary Civilization, seemed an appropriate destination for my next deployment.
Contemporary Civilization is a sort of metonym for Columbia. Ideas are individuals meeting on Low Steps or clutching megaphones on the sundial—discussing, debating, and sharing ideas on these 36 acres. Without constructive dialogue, truly intuitive conclusions are hard to reach.
Perhaps John Stuart Mill best describes Contemporary Civilization’s pedagogical aims when he says, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Or, in the words of my professor, “The condition of knowing yourself is knowing the condition of others.”
I thought I knew myself when I left high school six years ago. Then, a child was shot in the crossfire of a gun battle, and I had to treat him. His name was Hamdi. When I carried him to the helicopters, he nestled into the crook of my neck and whispered. I didn’t know anything. Last year, back from my last combat deployment, I thought I knew myself. Contemporary Civilization again proved me wrong. Its original mission, through all of its flaws and changes, has resonated with me. It gives me, a returning veteran, insight into the new world order—not of 1917 or 1968, but of 2009.
On campuses across the country, veterans are coming to college in increasing numbers. Like the generations of veterans before them, they leave behind a world torn asunder. Columbia’s veterans—the largest crop in the Ivy League—enroll in the School of General Studies, which has long been a destination for men and women returning from war. A reconstitution of the University Extension program, the school was inaugurated in the aftermath of World War II to receive the thousands of veterans coming home. With the help of the GI Bill, veterans entering Columbia’s new undergraduate college had the chance to pursue an Ivy League education.
The School of General Studies grants bachelor’s degrees from Columbia, but its students aren’t required to take Contemporary Civilization. All 48 of Columbia’s undergraduate veterans are in General Studies; only two are enrolled in Contemporary Civilization. The four Marine candidates and one Army ROTC cadet in Columbia College are the only other military affiliates in the course. It’s more than a little ironic that a program originally founded to inform veterans and future soldiers has almost none of either.
Last year, the CU Military Veterans helped lobby for the Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Act, also known as the “new” GI Bill. This legislation sets the stage for a fresh influx of veterans on Columbia’s campus.
These veterans, like the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who came before them, will bring a wealth of experience to Columbia, and the University will have much to offer them.
But none of us will go beyond Columbia fully prepared for what the world will bring us. I watch the news and see the chaos unfold in Afghanistan. More troops will go to that country and see real combat, and in all likelihood I will go with them. Eventually. Until then I’ll stick with ideological combat.