But Columbia’s core curriculum, while very much a great-books program in its execution, has also carried, since its inception in 1919, a mandate to address “the insistent problems of the present.” So one can criticize the ideological narrowness of the contemporary readings while still recognizing that the syllabus is trying to fulfill its academic mandate, not betray it.
Here, then, are four attempts at fulfilling that mandate but with a wider lens. I’m presenting these as potential modules, packaged similarly to the way the current Columbia curriculum packages its modern readings under “anticolonialism,” “race, gender and sexuality” and “climate and futures.” Note that I’m imagining these as supplements to those existing modules; if I were drawing up a complete syllabus, it would include more socialist and feminist and anticolonial perspectives. And obviously if tomorrow Columbia decided to supplement its syllabus along these lines, it could choose (or excerpt from) only a few of the books and essays I’ve listed; I’m just trying to show the range that each module might include.
The Secular and the Sacred
Harvey Cox, “The Secular City”; Philip Rieff, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic”; Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”; Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissism”; Richard John Neuhaus, “The Naked Public Square”; Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age.”
Technology 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 Death”; Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget”; Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together.”
After the Cold War
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”; Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Community, Solidarity, Inequality
Robert Nisbet, “The Quest for Community”; Michael Young, “The Rise of the Meritocracy”; Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone”; my colleague David Brooks, “Bobos in Paradise”; Lasch, “The Revolt of the Elites.”
