Columbia Professor on the Core and Columbia's Activist Legacy

By James S. Panero | Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Editor's Note: James Mirollo is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has taught in their Core Curriculum program for a quarter century. He will officially retire from Columbia this December, but plans to still teach a few classes in the Core Curriculum come next year.

The Dartmouth Review: What is the principle behind Columbia's Core Curriculum?

Professor James Mirollo: Every September, incoming students have been told to read the first six books of The Iliad before they arrive. When they get here, they are all talking about The Iliad. That's the educational notion behind the whole Core. Students gain a common experience which they can talk about, and this creates a kind of intellectual excitement.

Review: Why was the Core Curriculum first established?

Mirollo: After World War I and before World War II, there was a feeling that somehow civilization was going into darkness. This might sound a little panicky at the moment, but at the time it was quite real. The feeling was that the best of Western culture had to be preserved. Columbia therefore began the Core in 1919.

Review: Is the Columbia Core unique?

Mirollo: It has been copied elsewhere, in a lot of places like St. John's College and the University of Chicago. At the City College of New York they have a humanities course that is very much like ours, except that it is not required of all students. It is very rare to find a place that does exactly what we do especially if they are larger than us.

Review: Could the Core have been started today?

Mirollo: The course with which I'm associated — the year-long Literature Humanities component — that course began with twenty sections in 1937. There are now last time I looked something like 52. If they had thought in 1937 that they would eventually have 52 sections, they would not have dreamed of starting this. If we were to try to start a core curriculum today, we couldn't. The Core Curriculum is expensive. In fact we have pressure here all the time to go to a system of large lectures intermixed with smaller discussion sections led by graduate students.

Review: Core requirements everywhere have come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons. Some argue that a core curriculum is too static and only teaches about the proverbial 'Dead White European Male.' Is this argument valid at Columbia?

Mirollo: I take it to heart when people accuse us of doing the same thing for 70 years. People who say that are simply not telling the truth. Because in fact we have innovated. Here in the Literature Humanities component, we teach The Ilad and The Odyssey in the fall. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter — a beautiful poem — was added to that list when we admitted women to Columbia ten or twelve years ago. We wanted to include something that was good and dealt with the theme of mothers and daughters, to go along with the usual fathers and sons that you have in some of these early texts. These texts therefore resonate with each other.

That is the first criteria for admitting any work to our list. Books must echo each other. Shakespeare's King Lear resonates with Sophocles and Oedipus at Colonus, for example. They work beautifully together.

The second criterion is that they be powerful texts and knock the students socks off. If they pass those two tests they get on our list.

Review: Is there some room in the curriculum for professors to bring in modern texts, or texts of their own choosing?

Mirollo: In the last two weeks of the Literature Humanities course, professors are given a choice — the only requirement is that they teach a nineteenth century and/or a twentieth century text or texts. Because you have 52 people teaching the course, you have quite a variety. Some professors teach Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, which is after all about a student who didn't get financial aid and went crazy. Some like to teach Toni Morrison's Beloved, for example.

I myself teach A Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia-Marquez, and I end the year very nicely with Derek Walcott's epic poem, published in 1990, called Omeros which means Homer, of course. It's a poem about the Carribean and memories of Africa but which makes use of Homer, The Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, and Dante. It's the perfect way to end the semester because it recapitulates everything by a living black author who did an adaptation of a classical work.

Other examples that come to mind are Garcia-Marquez. He used the Hebrew Bible in his One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are portions of Genesis in there and everything else. The same with Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching God. This book recapitulates Noahs' flood.

The notion that we are not changing or advancing is simply untrue. It infuriates me because there I am teaching this stuff and being told I don't include it. Some even say we don't have women authors in our course. It is frustrating because we obviously do.

We admit contemporary authors that pass those two tests I mentioned before. It muse add to the coherence of the course by resonating with the other texts. If a text really knocks people's socks off and open their minds, we would bring it in the course.

Review: How does a core requirement create a different atmosphere over, say, distributive requirements?

Mirollo: I read in the Harvard magazine last year that students there were complaining about the university's distributive system: too much specialization and not enough broad training. One of the students said 'My God! At Columbia they are reading St. Augustine and I'm reading this junk.' That is the great fault of the distribution system.

Review: What happened to Stanford's core requirement?

Mirollo: Stanford claimed that they didn't throw out the classics stuff but just gave students more choices.

Core curricula everywhere are always under pressure. If Columbia had a distribution system, there would be no problem. A core curriculum means that everybody has to take something. There will always be disagreement.

At Columbia, though, we have a feeling that goes back to 1917: the students should have a common intellectual experience.

Review: How do you ensure that students get that common experience?

Mirollo: The bulk of the Core still has a reading list that everyone follows. We have group final examinations so everyone takes the same final. The staffs of all four courses meet regularly. My group meets every Monday at noon for lunch and we hear a talk by the most expert among us or some guest on the text that we are teaching that week. We all teach the same schedule. We spend two hours talking about the book we are going to teach before going off to teach it. For the faculty there is a great bonus where you get to talk with other colleagues in an atmosphere that is free from departmental tensions. It's one of the few collegial things that happen. It provides an intellectual community, particularly for young staff.

We have a triple division: one-third of our staff is full professors, one-third assistant professors (non-tenured), and one-third highly qualified, carefully chosen graduate students. These graduate students are all part of a teaching apprentice program that I set up myself. They are given guidance and training before they go into the classroom and while teaching the course. Everyone who teaches has been prepared by experience and rank or training.

The other advantage for the professor is that the Core is interdepartmental. It is a program, not a single department. My background is in Greek and Latin, but I get to teach works outside of that which I would not have otherwise.

Review: On to recent events. How did this protest compare to Columbia's protests of years past?

Mirollo: I've seen them all since 1968. Other protests have involved a cause that resonated — the Vietnam war for example. I don't think this has the same resonance. The number of people involved wasn't great. It did not have any kind of universal student interest. No faculty member prominently associated himself with the protest. Some of the faculty addressed the group, but didn't do much else. This protest was brief as these things go; it lasted a couple of weeks.

Review: What did these protesters specifically demand?

Mirollo: The issue was not the question of ethnic studies, because we already have ethnic studies. The emphasis was on the Asian-American and the Latino ethnic experience or culture in America. In my own department, we are bringing someone in on Asian-American literature next year. There are more plans to hire more people in that area. The primary issue was to speed up the hiring.

The second issue was the more contentious. Some protestors demanded that the study of this ethnic experience be in the form of its own department and not continue to operate as a program within the American Literature department.

Review: How did this second demand sit with the faculty?

Mirollo: Students are transients, and sometimes administrators are, too. The faculty doesn't like to have its powers in curricular areas circumvented or leaped over. The curriculum belongs to the faculty. The administration puts the roofs over our heads. Faculty were not happy with a demand which not only specified in advance what structure this new curricular activity will take, but also its content — "Victimization" and so on.

The manifestos that the students put out also excluded Jewish-American, Italian-American, Irish-American and other ethnic groups and their experiences from the debate. Latino, Asian-American, African-American, Native-American could be united, the protestors claimed, as non-white and as victims of oppression. This immediately excluded a whole bunch of ethnic cultures, which, of course, to some of us who come from those cultures, was hardly calculated to garner our support. I come from an Italian-American immigrant home, so I didn't like being suddenly classified as somebody who never experienced any kind of prejudice.

Review: How did the protestors relate their demands to the Core Curriculum?

Mirollo: I saw disagreement among the various opinions here. The more radical students, in this sense, were fed up with reading all these authors and wanted to read others. The books they named generally would be classified as political texts which dealt with race and gender and so on, not literature. Others said they did not want to drop texts in the existing courses as tokens, and this was very comforting to me. Others said that they didn't want to replace anything that we do now; they wanted to add to it. There were still others however that wanted to replace what we do because it's Western and oppressive.

Review: How did the more radical demands strike you?

Mirollo: One of the things that has always been somewhat annoying to me is that when attacks have been mounted on the Core, nobody has ever to my knowledge come up with a counter model of what they would like. Give me a week by week syllabus, I say, and assume that we could institute it next year. If they showed me a model that passes my two tests of power and resonance, I might accept it. "We shouldn't have too much of this." "We shouldn't have that." "We shouldn't read Greeks," they say.

We get protests and slogans, and a lot of cliches about imperialism and oppression. People also want change to be "now." The favorite word of demonstrators is — "when do you want it ? Now!" The university doesn't work "now." I find all this to be irresponsible.

Review: Without concrete ideas, what then motivates campus protest?

Mirollo:The largest issue is what is a university. There are those that think the university should be the mirror image of the world, and you can change the world by means of the university. That is generally what will be considered the left opinion. It is also the fantasy of the left. The university is very safe place to practice; the real world is much harder. We're very gentle with protests in contrast to the outside world.

I guess there is a fantasy of the right, too, that the university should be a kind of cultural monastery where only the best is preserved from the past. Both of these are indeed fantasies because universities always engage in very delicate balance of doing two things: preserving the best of the past but moving ahead to keep with future. It is a very delicate balance. It is very hard to do. I'm not even sure we do it right. I think that's the context of these curricula issues.

Review: How do you find that middle ground?

Mirollo: I despise ideology. I look at it from the point of view of pedagogy. I ask myself what is good for my students, what will give them cultural empowerment and enhance their lives. The best is the feedback from students. For 25 years I've had students tell me that the Core made a difference in their lives. They feel their lives were enhanced. I'm a teacher. That's enough for me. If that's what we do, that's great.

Review: How about the response of Columbia alumni to this protest?

Mirollo: The alumni tend to be very conservative about these matters. They don't want the school to be messed up. They have a certain amount of nostalgia and so on. They tend to be apprehensive about the Core, first, and destruction to property, second. They're very protective of the Core because they believe in it. They got a lot out of it and they want today's students to have it, too. So they get nervous when you begin to hear protests against the Core. But the protests ended quickly and were low key.

Review: The protesters got a lot of media response...

Mirollo: It got a lot of media response, but you never saw thousands of students as in 1968. We're talking about bloodshed back then. Students of mine had bandages around their heads. This was nothing like that. It was always limited to one building or the other, and life went on here remarkably. An overwhelming majority of students were still going to class.

Review: Did most students just pass by without paying much attention to the protest?

Mirollo: They would stop to hear speeches made on bull horns, but I think most of the students didn't regard this as a cause. They understood it to be an issue.

Review: How about Columbia President Rupp's response to the whole event?

Mirollo: I thought he did a pretty good job on the whole thing. He was firm when he had to be, but he was also very focal. He listened and he replied and he had emissaries going back and forth.

I think he struck the right balance between listening and then, when things got to a point where an important building was being obstructed, issuing ultimatums that you cannot hold this building. Pictures were taken, everyone knew who they were. There is a whole apparatus of disciplinary procedures which we set up since 1968 which could lead to expulsion. I think that had something to do with the final decision.

Review: Is there a chance that the protestors will be expelled or face strong disciplinary action?

Mirollo: Well, most of them are graduating. These other students who will be put on warning, they can't do this again, because they'll incur penalties. That's my guess.

Review: Why does Columbia University seem to have a history or 'tradition' of activism? Why does this keep happening?

Mirollo: In 1968, we weren't unique, of course. Berkeley is really the grand-daddy of all of this.

I think the current college generation has been accused of being extraordinarily docile and interested only in careers. It's really a generation that isn't concerned with activism. I suppose this creates a bit of tradition at Columbia. Every spring, students feel that they have to prove somehow that they're worthy of the legacy left by Columbia's protests in the late sixties.

Except that I say, those were great causes in the past. In 1968, the faculty put itself between the students and the cops. There was a lot of sympathy on the faculty for the cause of Vietnam.

This time around, we saw no member of the faculty putting himself between the students and the police.

Columbia Professor on the Core and Columbia's Activist Legacy

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