The hills of Mycenae, hills of Agammemnon (photo courtesy of the author)
The Core Curriculum has a simple job: condensing thousands of years of human thought and culture into 8 semesters of coursework (or really 6, if you don’t count University Writing and Frontiers of Science). One of the many things that makes the Core—and Columbia—unique is the dense intellectual web it cultivates: historical figures from one course will reappear in another, and debates that took on a particular character in Literature Humanities will recur in Contemporary Civilization, but in a modified form that incorporates new perspectives and methodologies. By the end of your four years in the College (and to a lesser extent, SEAS), you will have assimilated a huge range of texts and ideas. They might sometimes feel like a bit of a jumble, but over time, the intense intellectual experiences fostered by the Core will settle into something endlessly rewarding: a base of references that will help you navigate more and more of the academic universe. What initially looks like a closed, self-referential system will soon reveal itself as the entry point into an untold number of books, films, albums, and live performances.
Here’s an instructive example. I just started an internship at the United Nations, where I support a team that focuses on conflict resolution in Central Africa (one of the perks of going to Columbia—you can work part-time at places like the UN!). To prepare myself for the role, I have been reading up on a lot of African history and historiography. One recent text that caught my eye was Mamadou Diouf’s Africa in the World’s Time. Diouf is a professor in Columbia’s MESAAS department, where he specializes in West African urban, political, and intellectual history. His book offers a broad and provocative reinterpretation of the region’s history, with a special focus on the way various mediums and methodologies (traditional academic history, oral history, film) have disrupted and subsequently reimagined the Western concept of linear time.
One part of the book stood out. In a chapter on ‘Orality and African Sources’, which focuses on the importance of oral and archaeological sources that “would permit the writing of an African history outside the gaze of the West” (75), Diouf introduces a mid-20th century debate between the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and the public intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. While Du Bois analyzed African-American life and culture through the social-scientific prism of academic history and sociology, Hurston “proposed an approach more literary and performative than analytic,” realized most vividly in works of narrative fiction such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (80). Hurston urged that her method was better at capturing the “‘distinct aesthetic sensibility’ of Black people, characterized by stories, spirituality, drama, poetic language and humour” (82), especially when it came to spirituals—improvisational music developed by African-American communities in response to and in light of their social circumstances.
This debate—between Du Boisian scientism and Hurston’s focus on creative improvization—was already familiar to me. Just weeks earlier, we had covered it in my section of Music Humanities, during a module on the 19th-century African-American roots of 20th-century American popular music. While Diouf, a historian, presumably came to the topic independently of the Core Curriculum—debates between Du Bois and Hurston are a familiar touchpoint in African-American and African historiography—my previous immersion in a topic (musicology) that had little to do with my major (philosophy) made the transition to yet another field (African history) less intimidating, providing me with a springboard into an intellectual tradition that I had barely explored as an undergraduate. This is the real magic of the Core: it appears and reappears where and when you least expect it to, offering a guiding hand as you move far beyond it.