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 problems of the present.” So one can criticize the ideological narrowness of the up to date readings whereas nonetheless recognizing that the syllabus is attempting to meet its tutorial 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 fashionable readings below “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 a whole syllabus, it will embrace extra socialist and feminist and anticolonial views. And clearly if tomorrow Columbia determined to complement its syllabus alongside these traces, it might select (or excerpt from) just a few of the books and essays I’ve listed; I’m simply attempting to point out the vary that every module may embrace.
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.”
Expertise 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 Dying”; 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.”