Columbia College—my alma mater—is celebrating 100 years of its Core Curriculum—a long list of required general education (GE) classes on philosophy, literature, the arts, music and science. Columbia is famous for its core curriculum, and to mark the core’s centennial, Columbia is asking alumni to write about their core experience. Well as college students all over wrap up another grim semester of Zoom classes, I figure I will share my remembrances of that time long ago when I met my own GE requirements.
But first some context. From the time I immigrated to New York at 14 until I entered Columbia at 18, I attended school for only about a year and half. I lived with my mother, but both my parents were alcoholics and my mother was also addicted drugs. She and I moved constantly between rooming houses and basement rentals across Queens, and I even got deported for about 9 months because my mother incorrectly completed my green card application. As a result, I ended up missing a lot of school; I even attended Newton High School in Corona Queens for one day and I am probably registered somewhere in NYC’s Board of Ed as a high school dropout.
So reading Plato’s Republic in the first week of freshman year blew my mind. The metaphor of the cave, and the idea that there are perfect concepts, but people only perceive an illusion resonated deeply with my own deeply fractured world view. It showed me that despite what was around me, there were ideas deep and true just beyond my grasp. The “delusion of knowledge” is the other big idea that blew my mind that week and has stayed with me. It was riveting to read both how cocksure the arrogant big wigs were of their knowledge, and how easy Socrates caused them to contradict themselves. After graduate school, I worked in Washington D.C. for about 15 years, and I am now a professor. What was true in Greece 2500 years ago is still true today. With very few exceptions, knowledge and wisdom is inversely related to rank and status.
Later in my senior year the core required me to take a non-western humanities class. I took Asian Civilization. I am ethnically Indian. But as you might guess from above, in between poverty, drugs and alcohol, very little of Asian civilization got passed down to me. So the Bhagvad Gita was another shock in my senior year. The ideas of duty and detachment were a revelation. October of my freshman year, my mother gave birth to a little boy, who was immediately placed in foster care. Four years later, I was now about to graduate college. Yet my mother remained an addict and New York City, after keeping him in foster care for four years, was now going to place my younger brother up for adoption. Reasoning through the ideas of duty and detachment from the Gita, I decided to become his foster parent, and eventually my then girlfriend and now wife adopted and raised him together.
GE courses can be boring, especially when disembodied on Zoom and against the backdrop of a pandemic. But some of the ideas in these classes have been around for thousands of years, and are a great source of comfort and guidance when the night is long. I know personally that I took away virtually nothing from my 10 years of higher education except the ideas I picked up in the great books of the core—I still have all those books. The rest you can easily learn along the way.