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The ivory tower, often under scrutiny, has wobbled during the current economic crisis. Finally, critics proclaim, smarter-than-thou academics must turn their gazes downward as financial chaos takes hold of their ivy-covered halls. Is the end of the vaunted liberal arts curriculum at hand?

The humanities, more than other fields of study, embody elite education’s cloistered mentality. And as the recession wears on, they bear the brunt of shrunken endowments. Faced with budget cuts and hiring freezes, top universities have prioritized hard sciences over their philosophy, religion, and anthropology departments. Classics majors find themselves relegated to the bottom shelf. With strained resources and choked budgets, the humanities, while still holdouts for intellectual isolation, have found themselves on shaky ground.

With its Core Curriculum—a program emblematic of the traditional liberal arts education— Columbia embraces the life of the mind more than most schools. The Core claims to promote learning for its own sake. As its mission statement notes, the “enduring habits of mind developed in the Core will leave an indelible mark in the capacity to experience one’s own life in a richer and more meaningful way.” The Core ultimately aims to promote students’ self-cultivation. Removed from financial or professional concerns, students may examine and challenge their own perspectives.

But the recession has hit higher education hard: Ivy endowments have decreased by as much as 27 percent (Cornell), with Harvard and Yale’s each down by 25 percent and Columbia’s down by a slightly less drastic 22 percent. Having experienced portfolio losses of 15 percent over the six-month period ending Dec. 31, 2008, Columbia has seen an 8 percent decrease in endowment payout, affecting every part of the budget. Cost-cutting measures have included a hiring review board, the postponement of faculty hiring searches, a 10 percent decrease in the number of doctoral students, and a faculty wage freeze.

Columbia has made some tough financial decisions, and it seems the choices will only get tougher. In debating which academic programs should carry the burden of the financial crisis, many schools have targeted the humanities. But for a place like Columbia to de-emphasize its liberal arts curriculum would be to sacrifice its fundamental educational philosophy.

Wherever you are, and wherever you live in America, you cannot spend a day, you can hardly spend an hour of your life, without paying tribute to Columbia University,” Upton Sinclair declared in 1923, referring to Columbia’s large stake in the business world. In The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, Sinclair describes how the activities of everyday Americans support the University: “I helped to build it up when I telephoned my friends to make engagements, for Columbia University owns $50,000 of the New York Telephone Company’s 4 ½ per cent bonds; I helped to build it up when I took a spoonful of sugar with my breakfast, for Columbia University owns some shares in the American Sugar Refining Company.”

Sinclair’s words still ring true. Columbia remains an elite educational institution, but it’s also a big business. In fact, it’s a voracious machine. In 2007, Columbia’s investment returns alone reached $331 million. And with the markets down across the board, Columbia must reorganize its financial priorities to account for decreased capital flows. The difficulty is in choosing what to save and what to sacrifice.

Left with only three-quarters of their original endowments, schools like Columbia are in the process of juggling resources and reallocating funds. Nationwide, fields like literature, classics, religion, and philosophy are taking the brunt of the burden. The New York Times reported in February that “in the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy. ... The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature, and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.”

The Core Curriculum adds an additional and substantial cost to Columbia’s liberal arts program. The fact is that the Core is expensive to maintain: slightly over 50 percent of Core classes are taught by full professors, whose average annual salaries can reach $162,500 according to the American Association of University Professors. To control costs, Columbia has increased Core class sizes (now capped at 22 students in each Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization section), as well as the proportion of adjunct professors and graduate student instructors.

These changes reflect the reality that the Core does not exist solely for the edification of undergraduates. Professor Michael Rosenthal, who has taught Literature Humanities on and off since the ’60s, believes alumni loyalty helps shield the Core from substantial change. “My sense is that the Core has been maintained out of loyalty to alumni rather than a true academic commitment of the administration,” Rosenthal says. “I think that in the innermost heart of the administration, they probably place less significance on the Core.”

Roosevelt Montas, associate dean for the Core Curriculum, elaborates on the administration’s desire to keep alumni happy. “Alumni tend to think their education is best exemplified by the Core,” Montas says. “Alumni are really central to the Core’s sustainability.” To retain alumni donations, Columbia College must keep a consistent educational philosophy across the decades, leaving it little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances.
That the Core is, to an extent, preserved to sustain alumni loyalty—rather than for its own perceived merits—does not bode well for humanities programs with less history.

While the Core is privileged at Columbia, the obstacles the humanities face here and elsewhere are many. The financial crisis has heightened these challenges, but it did not create them. Hard times have merely brought a simmering pot to a boil. The last few decades have seen top universities placing increasing emphasis on the hard sciences. In his 2007 book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman offers an explanation for the troubles facing the humanities. “The mood in the humanities is one of insecurity and doubt,” he explains. “Teachers of the humanities, unlike their counterparts in other fields, do not share a clear and confident understanding of the contribution they make to higher education.” Not only do the humanities lack a clear sense of purpose, Kronman argues, but their academic prestige has also diminished as that of the research sciences has increased. He writes, “While those in the natural and social sciences often express a conventional respect for the humanities, their real attitude is frequently one of bemusement or even contempt for these disciplines, whose paroxysms of political correctness have made them appear increasingly ridiculous.”

And so a new ivory tower has been erected, one in which the untouchability of scientific research has brought the value of the humanities into question. And unlike the humanities’ ivory tower, this one brings in about $500 million a year in research grants, as well as the possibility of lucrative patents in fields like medicine or engineering. In 2007, Columbia received approximately $437 million from the Department of Health and Human Services, $70 million from the National Science Foundation, $17 million from the Department of Defense, $16 million from NASA, and $12 million from the Department of Energy. The concrete benefits of the sciences, in terms of the research they produce and their marketability in the job world, stand in contrast to the standard image of the liberal arts as self-indulgent and overly abstract. That $500 million isn’t chump change—it’s certainly a number the humanities can’t match.

The debate over whether the Core’s learning-for-the-sake-of-learning philosophy is outmoded prompts an evaluation of what the program offers to its students and how to justify its funding. The most common defense of the Core is that—like the humanities in general—it offers students intellectual edification. In an interview in his book-filled office in Philosophy Hall, professor Rosenthal recalls a passage from Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. “Who says it better than Montaigne?” he asks, quoting: “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”

The Core, Rosenthal argues, “promotes a fully complex and rich life. And that’s what at least a portion of education ought to be about.” To focus university learning entirely on practical knowledge, to “deprive students of the opportunity to explore their own complexity, would be an abrogation of the university’s full responsibility.” The practicality of the Core, then, resides not only in its relevance to future employment. It is practical in the sense that it gives students the tools to reflect on their daily lives.

Like Rosenthal, University President Lee Bollinger believes the intellectual inquiry of the humanities is irreplaceable: “There’s material well-being, and there’s health, and there are ways in which we organize ourselves and understand the world through science ... [but] the meaning of life, friendship and love and wars ... these are the subjects of the humanities.”

Other defenders of Core argue that Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization offer practical or tangible benefits equal to the sciences. According to Gareth Williams, chair of Literature Humanities, it just depends on what is meant by practical knowledge: “I resist the idea that the Core is confined to the ivory tower. It has a practical dimension that directly contributes to life skills.” The humanities, says Williams, are “a prime education in ordering logic.” Times may change, but employers will always be looking for the same qualifications in applicants. They want “intelligence, articulate speech—someone who can evaluate different sides of a situation.”

Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley shares Williams’ view that the Core teaches useful skills: “The Core provides wide-ranging forms of knowledge that can be adapted for many kinds of circumstance, and it helps develop a variety of transferable skills that are applicable to many kinds of careers.” In a time when people often have multiple careers, it is “an education in adaptability.” The Core, Quigley says, teaches students “how to develop an individual voice, how to argue a case, how to weigh competing principles and conflicting criteria, how to listen well, how to make sophisticated judgments, how to write effectively, how to ask unorthodox questions, and how to develop unexpected answers.” As the recession eliminates more and more jobs, he argues, there is no more valuable education than the Core’s training in intellectual flexibility.

During rocky financial times, it is more difficult than ever for Columbia to reconcile its academic ideology with its business plan. That plan poses particular challenges for the humanities. Founded on the belief that knowledge is inherently valuable, they are not easily commodified. For the humanities to fit into the new University business model, they will need to promote their concrete advantages, to emphasize their connection to the practical, not just the theoretical.

Quigley’s views are echoed by Lisa Carnoy, who graduated from Columbia College in 1989. Carnoy, who was named a top banker under the age of 40 by Investment Dealers’ Digest in 2006, states in a Forbes article, “It turned out that Columbia’s core curriculum was essential in helping me develop good judgment and reasoning skills, which are vital to me today. Nothing in life is ever going to be as hard as taking a stand on a philosophical point raised by Kant or Plato.” Many administrators make this argument for the Core, packaging it as preparation for lucrative fields like finance or corporate law.

In offering his vision of the humanities, Quigley references Goethe, one of the names inscribed on the façade of Butler Library. A good education, he says, is “a matter of providing young people with roots and wings, with an ability to ground their personalities in chosen aspects of personal and social history, and with a capacity to acquire and refine the abilities needed to create a better self and a better world.” The humanities provide the space for that self-development. Is there any more important task?

The University is forging a new educational dogma to meet changing demands. What remains to be seen is whether this repackaging—the humanities stripped of their stature—will alter or distort the fundamental intellectual principles of the liberal arts.

For now, Columbia appears to be something of a last bastion of liberal education. Its charge is to protect that education from the many roadblocks—financial and ideological—that lie ahead.