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CLASSIC READINGS, MODERN TECHNOLOGY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
additional resources for instructors such as secondary readings
and classroom materials.
“Each generation brings new tools to the course,” says Mercer.
“Why shouldn’t we use all the tools available to us to make Lit
Hum more engaging for students and easier for teachers to teach”
The Lit Hum website has another motive: building connections
among the Core courses. “I don’t want the whole to be less
than the sum of its parts,” Mercer says. She envisions links between
the Lit Hum website and its sister websites, say with the
Lit Hum exploration of Montaigne linking to the Art Hum website’s
information on Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
“We want to help students see the connections between the parts
of the Core,” she says.
“The value of technology is to expand the experience, to extend
the interaction that students have in the classroom to out of
the classroom,” Valentini says. “It is something that expands and
enhances, not replaces.”
These sorts of educational enhancements wouldn’t have
been imaginable 25 years ago, and not just because the
Internet was in its infancy. The growth in the size of the
College since the 1980s — along with the large number
of engineers and, now, General Studies students who take Lit Hum
— makes administering the course (indeed, all the Core) more of
a challenge than ever. But the College’s commitment to the Core
Curriculum has enabled it to meet the course’s obligations as well
as implement a host of improvements.
In the late 1980s, the primary administrator for Lit Hum and
CC was a junior administrator who presided over two cramped
offices on the seventh floor of Hamilton Hall that were packed
with filing cabinets stuffed with decades of records and old syllabi,
shelves of Core books and a chronically malfunctioning photocopier.
The course’s instructors had to wedge themselves into
an East Campus conference room for their weekly staff meetings
with the senior professor who served as the course’s chair.
Austin Quigley, dean emeritus of Columbia College and the
Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, made enhancing
and institutionalizing the College’s commitment to the
Core Curriculum a central thrust of his administration in the last
half of the 1990s and the first years of the new century, and Lit
Hum clearly benefited from this push. To recognize and support
teaching, he created a set of eight Core chairs for senior faculty
who taught Core courses and also established incentives for junior
faculty who taught in the Core. In addition, the College instituted
a Core Lecturers program, so today the Lit Hum and CC
staffs are augmented by a handful of postdoctoral scholars who
receive highly competitive two-year appointments with faculty
rank and teach two sections per semester.
Valentini is working to take this to the next level. For the past
year, he has been making plans to start an endowment for the
“The value of technology is to expand the
experience, to extend the interaction that students
have in and out of the classroom.”
Core — a financial foundation that will propel and enrich the
Core’s future. As indicated in the Dean’s Message on page 3 of
this issue, this multi-year campaign is beginning now, and the
first focus of the campaign is to provide the resources to enhance
and enrich the experience of faculty and students in Literature
Humanities and Contemporary Civilization.
Lit Hum, CC and the other Core courses now are housed in the
sleek, burnished Witten Center for the Core Curriculum, made
possible through the generosity of former University Trustee
Richard E. Witten ’75. Located off Hamilton Hall’s main lobby,
the center is a vastly improved resource as well as a clear testament
of the Core’s central place in the College.
According to Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Roosevelt
Montás ’95, ’04 GSAS, the center’s director, the center has become
a vital meeting ground for the Lit Hum faculty. “It is a space
where conversations happen,” he says.
The College has sought to expand conversations about the
Core in other ways. The most dramatic has been the Core Scholars
Program, another Mercer initiative, which was launched in
the 2010–11 academic year. Each year the program invites any
student who has completed a Core course to create a Core Reflection.
The program encourages students to analyze, question,
dramatize and interpret materials they encounter in the Core.
Authors of exceptionally creative, well-executed reflections — as
judged by a student-faculty committee — are honored as Core
Scholars, with their reflections posted on the Core Curriculum
website (college.columbia.edu/core/scholars). Last year’s winners
included a “Triptych For Ovid” by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
’12 and “The Ecstasy of Sonya” by Marian Guerra ’14, a reflection
on a scene from Crime and Punishment.
Other efforts to enhance the Lit Hum experience include staging
a classical Greek play every fall and having Art Humanities
instructors give guided tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to students.
Despite these enhancements, at its core, Lit Hum remains
about small groups of students reading and discussing books
that have stood the test of time. “The texts remain front and center,”
says Williams.
“The course will thrive as long as those texts are animated by
bright 18-year-olds arguing about them,” says Yatrakis, adding,
“It’s a wonderful foundation for the work they’re doing for the
following years.”
Mercer puts it more simply. “Lit Hum is awesome,” she says.
Timothy Cross ’98 GSAS, a former CCT associate editor, is the advancement
communications officer at Columbia Engineering. His
history of the Core Curriculum, An Oasis of Order: The Core
Curriculum at Columbia College (1995), is available at college.
columbia.edu/core/oasis.
Faculty Find Lit Hum
Challenging, Fulfilling
“The course is a marriage of methodologies and
the idiosyncrasies of the individual instructor.”
B y Shira Boss ’93, ’97J, ’98 SIPA
The year-long Literature Humanities seminar is in many ways an exercise
in ambition: Take 22 first-year students through 21 or so foundational
texts of Western literature — by Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky, Woolf — at the rate of about one book per week.
The purpose isn’t only to focus on plot points and comprehension but
also to change how these 17- and 18-year-olds read, think, see the world and, in the years
to come, reflect upon their own life dilemmas.
Margo Rosen ’11 GSAS, a Core lecturer, compares
notes with Richard Sacks, an adjunct associate
professor of English and comparative literature
and one of a corps of mainstays who have taught
Lit Hum for decades.
PHOTO: BRUCE GILBERT
“Lit Hum gives students a couple
of dozen models of how to think about
a problem — the problem of being human,”
says Margo Rosen ’11 GSAS, a
lecturer in Literature Humanities based
in the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures. “You get Homer’s world
— it’s a great way to start; he works by
repetition and juxtaposition. Plato does
it dialogically. St. Augustine goes inside
the individual — it’s an inward journey
versus an outward journey. Every approach
gives you more tools, and by the
end students have so many ways to deal
with this problem of life.”
A crown jewel of the Core Curriculum,
Lit Hum was founded in 1937 as Humanities
A. Its goal: to explore major works
of literature as a companion course to
the existing Contemporary Civilization,
which features philosophic works. The
syllabus has included The Iliad, Oresteia,
Oedipus the King and Inferno every year
since its debut, with a slightly shifting
cast of other classic works. All are chosen
for their enduring relevance to modern
life. “We talk about injustice, rage, family
ties, identity, power — so many issues we
deal with today come up over and over
again in the Lit Hum readings,” says Jo
Ann Cavallo, associate professor of Italian,
who has taught the course continually
since the early ’90s. “Even though
the texts are very far from us in terms of a
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