Core Impact

Below is an excerpt from the April 1994 Anniversary Address on the 75th Year of the Core, given by Judge Jose A. Cabranes CC’61 and U.S. Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit Court.

Cabranes, born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx and Queens, attended New York City public schools. Prior to his appointment to the federal bench in 1979, he served as Special Counsel to the Governor of Puerto Rico, director of the commonwealth's office in Washington, D.C., and general counsel at Yale.

Education is about choices--about hierarchies of choices established by reason, by experience, and by the good sense of our teachers--and about teaching students how to make choices with informed and discriminating (as opposed to discriminatory) judgment.

The installation and continued vitality of the Core Curriculum reflects a series of choices--the choice of the lasting over the ephemeral; the meritorious over the meretricious; the thought-provoking over the merely self-affirming.

The Columbia faculty makes these initial choices for our undergraduates, so that they, in turn, can make their own choices.

Columbia not only exposes students to works and ideas that have stood the test of time--what Matthew Arnold famously described as "the best which has been thought and said in the world"--it supplies them with a foundation for common discourse, and equips them with benchmarks for a lifetime of thought and judgment. In particular, Columbia attempts to ward off the siren song of unrestrained relativism.

Let us recall what the Core Curriculum is not about.

• The Core Curriculum is not about conscripting students into particular viewpoints. The act of requiring the reading of a text does not amount to an endorsement of the view expressed.
• The Core Curriculum is not about politics. The commonly heard obfuscation that "everything is political" should not be serviceable as grounds for the faculty's abdication of responsibility to make choices and to aid undergraduates in making enlightened choices for themselves.
• The Core Curriculum is not tantamount to a repudiation of other cultures. Exponents of a Western Civilization curriculum at Columbia and elsewhere have not suggested that such a curriculum results in the exclusion of the study of other cultures or the contributions of all our people--and, least of all, that it forecloses the study of our various sins and imperfections. Columbia College, for example, long ago pioneered area studies and a famous undergraduate elective sequence on Asian Civilizations and Asian Humanities.
• Finally, the Core Curriculum is not about self-affirmation and self-esteem--although surely it does empower the individuals who gain an understanding of our civilization. As the student body becomes more diverse, Columbia's mission remains constant to teach its students the intellectual history of the culture in which they all live; to train its students to tackle problems with analytical rigor; and to outfit students with the requisite vocabulary for critical inquiry.

This enterprise often produces discomfort, particularly when the questions outnumber the answers, when the concepts veer off the map of familiarity. But it is the successful grappling with this discomfort that yields true self-esteem--a self-esteem which should not be confused with the fleeting psychic comfort of hewing to charted territory.

Columbia's Core Curriculum is of special value to those of us who emigrated to these shores or whose families were newcomers or have been marginalized here.

Indeed, I am prepared to defend the proposition that one good reason to preserve Western Civilization programs is to benefit and liberate minorities.

Columbia teaches us that a student's religious, racial or ethnic identity is no barrier to entering the ranks of the educated. Columbia does not define its academic program on the basis of our backgrounds.

It invites us all, regardless of our origins and with full respect for our origins, to join in the common study of our shared Western heritage, and to do so with an appreciation that criticism and reform of our institutions is an integral part of the tradition we describe as "Western Civilization."