I got my BA and PhD from Columbia, and I am sickened by what is happening on campus today.
When the history of the Woke Humanities is written, it will start with Columbia, not of 2024, but in the 1980s, and especially in the English Department where I got my PhD.
I studied the modern novel with Edward Said, the concert pianist who claimed Palestinian birth, and was confidante to the founder of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat. Said groomed the current generation of Humanities professors for this moment at Columbia (and campuses throughout America), their students for the Palestinian Liberation Zone. Last spring, a masked student held up the sign: ‘COLUMBIA, Why require me to read Prof. Edward Said if you don’t want me to use it?’
Today the intersectional alliance are unanimous in their politics of grievance, hat-tip to Said, and in focusing their wrath on the Jewish State.
Columbia, Before Times
In graduate school, I took courses on Renaissance Literature with Margaret Ferguson. She advocated for academic boycotts against Israel, and eventually resigned as President of the Modern Language Association because of a bill banning BDS and discussion of Palestinian rights. (The MLA, recall, is an association of professors of literature.)
But thankfully, Said’s Marxism (always just a front for his Palestinian nationalism), was just one of the things on offer.
Back then there was no unanimity of perspective: the English Department boasted structuralists, deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and psychoanalytic and feminist cultural theorists.
I took courses with all of them.
But today, their toxic amalgam – ensuring the critical nuance of each is lost – is the only thing on the menu.
I did learn from Said and Ferguson, and also the junior faculty (all hired with at least Marxist Lite credentials) about the relation between poetry and history. I learned that great works of art are written in history, and that various contexts (though not just economic as Marxists claim) are indispensable for understanding.
I learned other things from Marx, perhaps most strangely on the subject of theology. Orthodox Marxists (for whom Marxism is a religion), predict the eventual triumph of the proletariat – the saviors of the story – in a utopian socialist future. In graduate school, I found in Milton’s Paradise Lost the same faith in a future. Later, I would discover that both versions of history come from the Hebrew Bible, compared to which the Marxist version is just a materialist fairy tale.
When I was at Columbia, Marxism was part of what was a genuinely counter-cultural style. We wore black coats (I still have mine), and went to see bands writing song with Marxist lyrics. Yes, I was a privileged kid from Long Island, but it was my first way of being an outsider – both to myself and to the world in which I grew up. I learned to read against the grain, to not take meaning for granted. An important and necessary first step in my critical thinking, fortunately, for me, it was not the last one.
Death of Western Culture
In my years at Columbia, the Humanities were not yet entirely in the grip of those who would eventually seek to destroy them.
Back then, I studied American Literature with Sacvan Bercovih and Andrew Delbanco; Modernism with Jeffrey Perl; and Victorian Literature with Stephen Marcus. For Milton, Edward Tayler – who taught me how to read – and also Stanley Fish.
Like every Columbia undergraduate, I took pride in knowing that I knew more than friends at other institutions because of Columbia’s vaunted Core Curriculum. But that curriculum, like the facade of Butler Library, has been colonized by the critics who in their teaching undermine it.
Thankfully, at the ground zero of the Woke Humanities, there was still the possibility of reading works to understand them. My timing was great at Columbia: I got both the love of literature (and reading) and the critical perspective.
One difference between now and then: even those dismantling the canon still read the books. Today’s professors, however, deprive students of the education they enjoyed – in which literary traditions give students tools to read, write, and even rebel.
Today, however, reading is not about encounter, but making a checklist of the writer’s sins (never one’s own).
The inverse of the neoconservative “values” version of the Great Books – where authors offer messages (aka “civilizational lessons”) – post-humanists turn everything into footnotes to their ideology. Everyone including reader and author are determined by external identity markers. Books are reduced to categories of sexism, racism, or colonialism.
This is knowledge as a form of affiliation, reduced to its most cliched form, politics.
This is what the Death of Western Culture looks like.
