Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1996/05/15/letters_to_the_editor.php
Wednesday, May 15, 1996
Prof. Mirollo continues the debate
To the Editor,
I hope my response to your request will not try your patience with its candor. It is intended to be that rarity in current academia, a friendly debate.
I think your news reporting of the situation here at Columbia as regards the Core Curriculum and the recent demonstrations was on the whole quite adequate. On the other hand, the editorializing, and indeed the sarcastic editorial itself, were less welcome, and in truth quite disturbing. In granting the interview, I hoped to provide an objective account of our situation that might offset possible distortions. As I said to one of my shocked colleagues, even conservatives should have the truth: it might set them free, though I doubt it!
What arouses my doubt is that you seem so set in your paradigms, despite their historical dubiousness and intellectual sterility. I will be specific in a moment, but let me say here that while I (we) welcome your support for the Core or the idea of a Core, it is in the spirit of 'the enemy of my enemies is my friend,' that is, with a discomfort born on your insistence on seeing our Core as a liberal vs. conservative issue (one of your paradigms) and failure to notice its dynamism and growth.
As to your characterization of our campus radicals or 'left' as 'young liberals' on the rampage again, I must protest that this is a good example of what you would like but is not. Personally and politically I consider myself a conservative liberal, and as such regularly scorned by the 'right' and 'left,' though I wear that scorn as a badge of honor. You know that both extremes think my generation of liberals as sentimental, wishy-washy (what we consider to be a precious flexibility and openness vs. paradigms) and wrong-headed. But the demonstrators are not our children, except in some vague sense of similar, deep roots in the history of social thought. But if you go that deep, we are all children of Plato and Aristotle, as you would learn in our Contemporary Civilization course.
From my point of view 'young liberals' and 'young conservatives' sound remarkably alike in their totalistic thinking: you are either with me or against me; if you disagree you are wrong because I am always right; and I want change now. I am reminded of Dante's Inferno, Canto VII, where the Hoarders and the Squanderers push weights around a half circle and always meet in the same place to shout at each other: 'Don't Hoard! Don't Squander!' Transposed, my demonstrators say 'Don't hoard your cultural treasure,' and you guys say 'Don't squander it!' But an observer is bound to notice the futility of the encounter, its repetitive half circling, its endless shouting.
Obviously, if as you say you love great books and Dante certainly qualifies, you have to accept his analysis of how opposites are only apparent, that they are mirror images of each other, and that both are in Hell together because both are off center, which is where truth can be found. I love the center!
I used to think that Hell, with its appropriate punishments, would be, for me at least, an interminable department meeting. I have lately come to think that instead it might be an interminable shouting match between 'young conservatives' and 'young liberals': a pox on both your houses, say I, because you are boring me to death with your slogans and jargon and cliches and paradigms.
At my time of life I can bear only sweet reasonableness and some evidence that God's work is truly being done in this world.
So let's have that cup of coffee when you are next in town, but only if you swear not to bring any paradigms to the table. Following the dictates of the religion in which I was raised, I will continue to despise ideology but love the ideologue so you can count on sentimental, wishy-washy flexibility!
Sincerely,
James Mirollo
P.S. I wish you had been able to leave in my remarks about being opposed to the departmental structure for ethnic studies rather than to such studies per se, which I favor as long as they are inclusive and do not have a set agenda, i.e., the study of the oppression of minorities as the only topic. Also, having admitted that the six leaders of the demonstrations did not have unanimity of views, you could argue logically that the demonstrations were a massive and unified assault on the Columbia Core. The six leaders and their followers, as well as their faculty supporters, did not agree, and their views ranged from a distinct and radical minority that favored junking it to various views about, added up, to revising or expanding it, which, you will agree surely, is not the same as destroying it?— unless you want to think in terms of 'for or against.'
Tuck's Core Curriculum
To the Editor:
I enjoyed your three articles on Columbia's Core and the protest. I'm graduating from Tuck this year and graduated from Columbia in '89. Hence, I enjoyed the update on the protests at Columbia. The articles on the Core and the interview with James Mirollo were well done.
Incidentally, Columbia's program and Tuck's program are quite similar — barring the subject matter, of course — in that both have strong Core Curriculums in which all students take the same courses for the first half of the program — providing students with a common base of knowledge — and then take courses in other areas of interest.
Best regards,
Amy Perkel
Tuck '96