History of the Core Curriculum

The Core Curriculum of Columbia College did not emerge from some ideal Platonic form - took some time to emerge, and is, indeed, still evolving today. Frontiers of Science only became a mandatory course in 2004, and students continue to demand changes - to syllabi and course requirements - for various reasons.

Prologue: Erosion of the Liberal Arts

The idea of studying the Greek and Roman "classics" was not a new one when the Core Curriculum evolved into its current "Great Books" format - it had been the bedrock of a liberal arts education at Columbia and many other American and European places of higher learning for centuries. From the foundation of King's College in 1754 to the 1880s, a Columbia student had little choice within his curriculum, which was almost solely devoted to studying works in Greek and Latin.

Under the tenure of University President Frederick A. P. Barnard, however, this began to change: junior and senior years became mostly elective. When the college moved to Morningside Heights, became Columbia University, and began to deemphasize undergraduate education in favor of research-oriented graduate and vocationally-preoccupied professional schools, onerous requirements involving dead languages made even less sense. Some, such as graduate education pioneer John W. Burgess, saw the college's educational traditions as an obstruction to serious study; they were "kept in being only by inertia and the piety of its alumni," he claimed. The Greek requirement was eliminated and the Latin pared from two years to one. The Latin requirement was eliminated completely over the course of the 1916-1917 school year.

The college's first dean, John Howard Van Amringe, was not willing to see the college's liberal arts traditions go softly, however, postulating that the college was for "making men" rather than making professionals. This move may have had an unintentionally classist overtone; while many of the new immigrant children in New York City could thrive in an atmosphere of cognitive competition and upward social mobility such as the Burgessian model provided, few of these were acquainted with the tools for success in the liberal arts: a preparatory education such as those in New York's Knickerbocker aristocracy (including Van Amringe himself) would have received.

Bibliography

• An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College by Timothy P. Cross, published in 1995 by the Office of the Dean, Columbia College. ISBN 0-9649084-0-9.