PrintWhy spend your entire career at Columbia?
The freedom of an urban environment is really what appeals to me. Although, because I grew up in New York, I didn’t want to go to school here. But once I came back to graduate school, I began to feel this really was my mature home.
And that’s been wonderful. To me, a community that is entirely academic is suffocating, and so I delight in the fact that one has one’s academic environment here, but then you go five blocks away and you’re in another world. That, to me, is life-giving. I think Columbia is very much a life-giving place, which is why I find it so attractive. And why I think when it works for students—which it doesn’t always do—but when it does, it really works in serious ways.
I mean, you know, the best thing about having gone to Harvard is that one doesn’t have to worry about not having gone to Harvard. I never found anyone—and this can’t be true—but all the people I knew were not particularly shaped by Harvard in any sort of way. And that’s not true of Columbia kids. I think Columbia students, because of the curriculum, because of the city or whatever, when it works on them it really does give them something, it turns them into something interesting. I don’t think Harvard does that.
You went from instructor to associate dean of Columbia College in four years, then later returned to the English department as a professor. Has what you’ve called this “strange, backwards career” affected your perspective on Columbia as an institution?
Well, I think it did. First of all, I liked what I call my “deanly life.” It’s fascinating to see how institutions work, and where the power is and how one negotiates all these things. But since the normal trajectory is to teach, until somehow, your ambitions for a certain kind of power or your boredom of teaching leads you to become a dean, I think it’s sort of life-giving to begin deaning and then to decide in a fully conscious way that what one would really like to do is to return to teaching and to writing and to being with students.
So I think my returning to the classroom, having been a dean, was invaluable to me as a means of understanding what the institution is about.
I think Columbia faculty tend to live really fairly particular lives in departments. Departments are really what run the institution, not the divisions. And so you only learn essentially the affairs of the department. … You don’t really have a sense of what the whole thing is doing. When I became a dean, I didn’t know anything about the college. I knew about the English department. So learning about the college was extraordinary and then learning about the institution. So who knows how it in any particular way affected my teaching, but I think it gave me a perspective on the University that I like to think was useful to the students … when I returned to teaching.
How has Columbia changed in your time here?
Clearly, the fundamental change was the admission of women, which turned the place entirely into a more interesting, vibrant, vital, funny, terrific place. And so half the students that were admitted almost immediately were women, and that clearly changed the whole ambience and nature of the place.
People always ask me, “Are the students now much smarter than the students were?” Because now there are 25,000 people that apply, so they statistically have to be, and I say, “No, they’re really quite different.” But it’s not clear to me, you know, they’re more sophisticated, they’re more affluent, they obviously have all sorts of skills dealing with technology. But they’re not as committed to books as a means of understanding the world as they were when I first got here. And you can lament that, but I think that’s just the reality of things.
When I was first teaching, if one mentioned Philip Roth or Norman Mailer or whatever, there would be kids whose eyes would light up, who would have read them, or would go and read them.
Now if you mention those things, people just look at you as if, “Who are those people?” With some exceptions, obviously. Book culture, which was really so much a part of the Columbia spirit, has diminished. Other things have taken their place. That, to me, is a huge change. Kids are much more affluent now. More kids from prep schools. That has both a good and a bad effect on the place. The whole nature of early decision has changed the profile of applicants, in ways that are not always salubrious. … The downside of early decisionism is that people who know about early decision are people who tend to be more affluent, who don’t need to weigh scholarship offers. And so it’s a different profile of kids.
And what the consequence is—though I think the University doesn’t want to talk about it—that the financial aid bill is kept under control. Now, on the one hand, that’s fine, because money is money. And you have to look to the budget. On the other hand, that’s not so fine. So that’s a concern.
You’re a big advocate of the Core Curriculum. What do you find so appealing about the Core?
I think the curriculum of Columbia College is a big piece of what’s great about Columbia College. To read Homer and to read Aeschylus and to read Dante and Boccaccio—these are major formative intellectual, and even emotional, experiences. So I think that Columbia students are extraordinarily lucky, although I’m told that not all Columbia students come here knowing there is a Core Curriculum, which I find astonishing. But assuming they have chosen to come here because of the Core Curriculum, I think it’s a great choice, and I think they emerge with all sorts of valuable things that occur. Ways of thinking, experiences with great literature, dealing with themselves as they confront difficult texts. It’s all wonderful—when it works. And I have no illusions that every single Core section is brilliantly taught. But I think by and large most of them do succeed. So I think the Core is terrific.
And I think it’s a tribute to Columbia that it hasn’t turned away from it. And having heard Dean Moody-Adams talk about it, I’m confident that it will go on.
Of course, it’s not true that the faculty necessarily supports the idea of the Core. The people who are the most passionate are the alumni. And I think when people think about, “Well, we don’t need it”—it’s a very expensive operation to have 60 sections of Humanities, 60 sections of CC—I think it’s the terror of the alumni unleashed on the school that leads them to put aside financial exigencies and maintain what is, intellectually, a superb curriculum.
So the curriculum at Columbia I think is marvelous. That doesn’t mean that Columbia College students are always well served in services. In my deanly years, that was of enormous frustration for me. Columbia is probably the only major institution—undergraduate college—in which the president once raised the issue of whether Columbia should be an undergraduate college or just a university. This was Barnard, not President Butler. Though when Butler became president in 1902, he made this extraordinarily prescient statement that “in the long run, the great research universities will be those that take best care of their undergraduates.” And I think that’s proved to be correct. Butler never really believed it. He thought that undergraduates were simply there as fillers to go into the graduate faculties.
So the college has always been—in spite of the various rhetoric articulated by presidents—the undergraduate college has always been seen as something less central to the institution than it should be. And that’s too bad.
Why do you choose to teach Lit Hum?
It’s a great learning experience for the professor. It seems to me that professors of literature ought to be thrilled to teach these books. I understand that they’re not of immediate professional advantage, and it is four hours a week, as opposed to two hours a week. But how can you not want to teach these books? These are extraordinary books. And I read them every year. And one learns things, one sees the excitement that students have. So it’s actually disturbing that more faculty don’t choose to do it—they have to be coerced to some extent, which I think is too bad. But if you’re going to spend your life in literature, why wouldn’t you want to teach Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, etc., etc.? To me, that’s what teaching is all about: it’s smart students and rich, complicated, wonderful texts. So I do it with great pleasure.
When I was in the dean’s office, I had a vision of an ideal breakdown of instructor-level. There would be one-third senior faculty, one-third full-time junior faculty, and one-third graduate students. Now I never achieved that, but that was always my goal, it seemed like a nice thing. But it’s nothing like that anymore, which I think is too bad. It’s not to say that senior faculty … are better than graduate students, but I think the commitment on the part of a department to putting senior faculty into the Core says something to the students. I wish there were more of that.
What about the Global Core?
If you can awaken students’ sensibilities to other cultures and so on, that’s great. I don’t buy the notion that the Core is somehow crippled by being dead European males—I think that’s all preposterous. Every culture has its sacred texts which are read by educated people and by artists and by writers and poets, and those are books people should familiarize themselves with. Should there be other options in the curriculum? Sure, and there are—Asian humanities and Latin-American humanities. All that seems to speak to the proper embrace. But do I feel there is something amiss with the Core as it’s currently constituted? No, I don’t. You know, I’m kind of old-fashioned in those ways.
You were involved in the decision to go coed. Twenty-five years on, how do you think it’s turned out?
One of my frustrations now about the whole process by which Columbia became coed is that the dean of the college at the time was Arnold Collery, who was an economist who had come from Amherst. ... Arnold was really the motivating force behind getting all the energy started for coeducation among the students and the faculty, with Roger Lehecka, and I was involved in that as well. And the official record now in “Stand, Columbia,” literally doesn’t mention Arnold’s name, as if he were not involved whatsoever, and attributes everything to the decision of the president—which was clearly an important decision. But I’ve always felt that that was a totally unfair historical record. So that doesn’t speak to the joys of coeducation, but it does speak to the reality that the man who in my mind was very much involved in making it happen gets no credit at all.
It was a fundamental moment in the college’s life. And I think it’s fair to say we worked very hard in making it work successfully, and I think we succeeded. Of course coming at the end of every other school in the world, we had lots of things to consult. But I think we actually avoided all the problems that other places encountered. And the very first year was something like 43 percent women. There were people who questioned the sincerity—or interest—in admitting women on a full and equal basis, which was I think crazy.
There were those who felt we were doing it only to make the place more attractive to men, which is really an obscene notion. It was more attractive to men, but also we wanted women because we wanted women. To go into a classroom where there are 20 men and to go into a classroom where there are 10 men and 10 women is simply a different experience. When we said we were going to admit women, I think we had one letter from an alumnus protesting. And there were people who thought, well football would be affected. But basically everybody was enthusiastic, and it’s been great ever since.
What are your thoughts about the effect coeducation has had on Barnard?
One of the reasons that various presidents did not want Columbia to admit women was the thought that it would be seen to be destructive to Barnard. I think it is probably true that the first couple of years, the Barnard admissions pool probably suffered somewhat. But now Barnard is a full, thriving, happy place. I think that President Sovern said on the record that he didn’t want to be known as the “Butcher of Barnard.” And I think the reality is that Columbia admitting women did not destroy Barnard. In fact, I think in some ways it made Barnard sharpen its definition of what it was and what kind of school it was for women. So the notion that this was a bad thing simply did not work out, thankfully. And it was great for Columbia.
It was a long, tricky business. There was some concern that Columbia wanted to find some arrangement short of coeducation, to give the illusion of coeducation without actually achieving it. Because there were various gimmicks about, you know, if Columbia students took CC and if Barnard changed its curriculum in some ways, would that give the illusion, statistically, of being at a coeducational school.
You spent more than 10 years on “Nicholas Miraculous.” What compelled you to stick with it all that time?
I like to finish what I start. And by the time I am thoroughly overwhelmed I’m already into it. And he was fascinating. It was not just Butler, but it was Butler and America and the history of higher education—all those things coming together. I was driven on by curiosity, by a sense that I had to finish this. And every year that you put into it is another year and another reason not to give up. So I just—I wanted to get it right. And I suspect there won’t be too many other people who will try and do this. I just had to finish “Nicholas Miraculous.”
But why Butler in particular?
He was fascinating as a representative of a distinctly American institution, who came to power at the same time that America came to power. And so there was clearly that parallel—the story of Butler was the story of American higher education, which is a piece of American power and prestige. And so, in following Butler’s life, I felt I was following and learning about larger currents in the culture. You know, the great American presidents, Butler and Eliot, were like the great American entrepreneurs. And they were building empires. And Butler was a fascinating, self-advertising genius. And I found that to be symptomatic of how you sell things and how you sell the culture and how you sell the country. And he wasn’t just a college president. He was the president of the Carnegie Endowment, he was involved in politics, he ran for the Republican nomination in 1920, he got the Nobel Peace Prize—God save us.
So it was all those features, it was endless stuff there. He might have been stuffy and was indeed stuffy and pompous. But the story of Butler I thought was interesting, fascinating.
What vestiges of Butler’s tenure can you see at Columbia today?
The funny position of the college is in part a legacy of Butler. But, you know, Columbia was not destined to be a great research university. When I began the book, that was the question that plagued me: would Columbia have been Columbia without Butler? And as I got into it, it was quite clear that it wouldn’t, that Butler sold Columbia, he had a vision that Columbia would, in fact, be the great institution in America.
And he likened it to the Acropolis. Now that’s, on the one hand, absurd. On the other hand, if you have a vision like that, it animates the place. And so Butler was—with all of the preposterous claims he made for the institution—those claims actually helped make Columbia a great place. And so, NYU has sort of recently come to boil. But for years, NYU was simply a place that no one paid attention to. And there was no reason on earth why Columbia should have been any different, except that Butler somehow drove it and himself, and made it what it is. The very fact that we’re all here, that we understand that Columbia is a great place, with all of its problems and deficiencies, is absolutely a tribute to Butler.
What are your thoughts about retirement?
I always thought that retirement ought to be a conscious choice and not simply a playing out of the string until people beg you to leave. I see retirement as leaving at more or less the top of my game. It occurred to me that with the retirement of professors Kroeber and Rosenberg, I had become the oldest member of the department, and since I remember when I was more or less the youngest, that, I thought, was not a good sign. One should leave when one can still do other things. So what would I like to do? I would like to do different kinds of writing. I’d like to travel at times not in the summer. The problem with an academic life is that you never get to travel in the fall. And just explore. Do I have a set of plans? No, I don’t. Is that sort of scary? Indeed, it is. But the books we read talk about having courage and being willing to confront the unknown, adventure, all that. I think that’s the way to do it.
And you leave Columbia behind optimistic about its future?
Columbia is a great, wonderful place, and it enriched my life enormously. And I think the expansion into Manhattanville is absolutely critical—whether the economics of the next two decades or so are going to permit Columbia to have its expansion. Columbia will always be one of the few great institutions in the world. And it deserves that. The problem with the future now is money.
Columbia needs to expand, it needs more science facilities, it needs to take advantage of artistic things in the city. Universities either grow or they die—that really is true. And Columbia has not grown in a long time.
We’ve heard you’re a crackshot on the basketball court. Are the rumors true?
This is all true. Deadly, deadly is the answer. My shooting is still fabulous. I rarely miss. The problem is that I grew up in an era of two-handed set shots. The problem is whether I wish to make my two-handed set shots from three-point range, but in the process incur humiliation in doing so, or to try my one-handed jump shots from beyond my range, as I really didn’t grow up doing. Though I have a deadly one-handed jump shot as well.
But also, basketball, it turns out, is a sport where quickness is of some urgency. And when I last played a former student of mine, I found that I was rooted—not unlike a tree—to the ground, as he danced his way around me. And I thought that was chastening. But my shooting is still as great as ever.
So you leave on the top of your basketball game as well?
The shooting is great, I think the teaching hasn’t deteriorated. I like my book on Nicholas Murray Butler. … I think this is good, and I look forward to the uncertainties of the future. Just as I know seniors in the college do, with the same sort of terror, the same kind of enthusiasm. So we’ll see.