Yesterday I took note of the Trump Department of Education’s investigation of five universities for their toleration of anti-Semitism. First on the department’s list is Columbia University and rounding it out is the University of Minnesota. I commented that Columbia should be razed and the ground beneath it salted — the Carthaginian solution. A prominent historian and teacher reasonably implored me:
Please be a little more moderate in your language. Making comments like “Columbia University should be razed” are painful to read for Columbia grads like myself, who are grateful for all we’ve received from that great institution of learning. In the spirit of Burke, I believe, we should think of institutions in terms of their whole historical life, as organisms that go through good periods and bad, but always have the potential for good. Bad periods are often necessary to begin reforms.
I don’t think Professor H. took me literally and he has a point. His comment asks us to consider whether a rotten institution may be beyond reform.
His mention of Burke struck a chord. My undergraduate mentor in the Department of English at Dartmouth was Jeffrey Hart. I took every course he taught and wrote a thesis on the rhetoric of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France under his tutelage.
Hart had been a star student of Lionel Trilling at Columbia and thought him one of the three greatest twentieth-century literary critics writing in English. Hart first took up teaching on the Columbia faculty as a protégé of Trilling.
At some point he told Trilling that he had written a book review for National Review. Hart told me that Trilling asked warily, “You didn’t send it in, did you?” or words to that effect. The implication was that he had no future in the department at Columbia.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Hart accepted an offer from Dartmouth, where he went on to teach for 30 years. Columbia’s loss was the gain of three decades of Dartmouth students.
Columbia withstood the madness of the 1960s sufficiently to elicit James Simon Kunen’s disapproval in The Strawberry Statement and to give birth to Sha Na Na. (I wrote about that in “Up from Sha Na Na.”) At the same time, Hart’s experience suggests that Columbia has been rotting from the inside for a long time.
Commenting on my immoderation Professor H. more or less concedes the rot but describes it as a recent phenomenon. Discussing the Columbia faculty, he wrote:
Most [of my Columbia teachers] were skeptics about politics, a few were socialists, and a few were conservatives. My mentor, Paul Oskar Kristeller, was a Jewish refugee from Nazism and a staunch defender of Western values. I don’t know of any students or faculty from my era (1977-85) who doubted the value of the Western tradition or American liberal democracy. The crisis of faith in Western values at Columbia is much more recent, mostly since about 2010.
Now what? Let me leave him with the last word here.
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