When I was a college undergraduate 25 years ago, the fancy school that I attended offered what it styled as a “core curriculum” that was really nothing of the sort. Instead of giving students a set of foundational courses and assignments, a shared base of important ideas and arguments, our core assembled a grab bag of courses from different disciplines and invited us to pick among them. The idea was that we were experiencing a variety of “approaches to knowledge” and it didn’t matter what specific knowledge we picked up. Against the belief that multiculturalism required dismantling the canon, Columbia insisted that it was still obligatory to expose students to some version of the best that has been thought and said. That approach survives today: The Columbia that has become the primary stage for political drama in America still requires its students to encounter what it calls “cornerstone ideas and theories from across literature, philosophy, history, science and the arts.”

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Persons: Helen Vendler’s, ” Organizations: Women Writers, ”, Columbia University Locations: Imperial China, Columbia, America