To the Editor:
Re “What Students Read Before They Protest,” by Ross Douthat (column, April 28):
Historians in the future are unlikely to attribute worldwide protests against Israel’s war in Gaza to the syllabus for Columbia’s required “Contemporary Civilization” course. Yet Mr. Douthat somehow suggests that a handful of anticolonial texts read in the yearlong course are fueling widespread antisemitism.
Mr. Douthat fails to explain how students go from Gandhi’s passive resistance or Bhimrao Ambedkar’s civic liberalism to condoning Hamas’s terrorism. Nor does Mr. Douthat account for the diversity of the authors’ views (Frantz Fanon’s book “The Wretched of the Earth,” which has been on the syllabus since the ’60s, is followed by Hannah Arendt’s powerful rebuttal, “On Violence”).
Even a course as expansive as “Contemporary Civilization” cannot cover everything. But this hardly justifies Mr. Douthat’s claim that the syllabus is narrowing students’ understanding of the issues of our time. “Contemporary Civilization” requires that students think critically about a wide range of ideological commitments, including classical liberalism, civic republicanism and Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought.
Before Mr. Douthat, the most vocal critics of “Contemporary Civilization” were those students who called on us to “decolonize” its syllabus — conflating the study of a text with an endorsement of its views. One can forgive a college student for not appreciating the distinction. Mr. Douthat should know better.
Larry Jackson
New York
The writer is associate dean of academic affairs for Columbia College and director of its Center for the Core Curriculum.
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat suggests that U.S. students are protesting Israel’s war on Gaza but are not as concerned about other wars and crises (in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Armenia, Myanmar, Yemen) because university reading lists are biased. The more likely reason is that the U.S. government is funneling billions of dollars in armaments to Israel, which are being used to kill thousands of Palestinians.
Joel Andreas
Baltimore
The writer is a professor of sociology, director of undergraduate studies and director of the East Asian studies program at Johns Hopkins University.
To the Editor:
Nestled among an otherwise well-reasoned and incisive argument from Ross Douthat lurks a puzzling observation: that academic syllabuses channel impulses “that anyone with eyes to see will notice all across the meritocracy, from big Ivies to liberal arts colleges to selective high schools and middle schools.” Such impulses, he suggests, may inform the mind-sets of students leading current protests at some of our nation’s college campuses.
Yet Mr. Douthat seems not to see the numerous events, teach-ins and civil debates occurring across the range of learning environments outside his cited meritocracy, where approximately three-quarters of those enrolled in higher education study.
Contrary to the curriculums Mr. Douthat bemoans, my own philosophy syllabuses at a public flagship university feature Robert Nozick as readily as Michel Foucault, Kwame Anthony Appiah as prominently as Frantz Fanon. But perhaps he does not naturally perceive students beyond the meritocracy as viable leaders of our collective future.
Mr. Douthat might consider widening the aperture on how he understands merit — and tomorrow’s leaders — should he wish to avoid being caught in the very trap he critiques: presenting one aspect of a diverse, complex landscape as the whole.
Cheryl Foster
Kingston, R.I.
The writer is a professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Rhode Island.
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat writes, “Climate change looms over everything, but climate activism is expected to be merged somehow with anticolonial and antiracist action.”
If there’s such as a thing as God’s own work in 2024, it’s ending carbon pollution. Those most at risk from climate chaos are disproportionately those least responsible for causing it, including people in Africa, Pacific island nations and the Asian subcontinent.
That said, activism divorced from political reality is not only futile but also counterproductive. One hard example is reparations for climate victim nations. The moral case is overwhelming, but in a U.S. presidential campaign, it’s a loser.
William Faulkner’s line about race in America still rings true: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But Mr. Douthat’s caution is well taken. Integrity and effective messaging are not mutually exclusive. Too often, progressive climate activists risk losing potential supporters and members of the broad-based movement we must have to succeed.
David Scott
Columbus, Ohio
The writer is a member and former president of the Sierra Club board.
To the Editor:
I taught 20 semesters of “Contemporary Civilization” (or “C.C.”) at Columbia — as a graduate student, lecturer and faculty fellow. I also served on the committee that proposed some of the curricular changes that Ross Douthat criticizes.
He builds his critique of this course on a perusal of the required texts posted to Columbia’s website and an imagined propagandistic teaching style.
Hardly an exercise in brainwashing, C.C. foregrounds texts of the ancient and early modern world that make it impossible to, as Mr. Douthat maintains, “simplify and flatten history” around 21st-century sloganeering.
My students would view Frantz Fanon’s arguments for anticolonial violence as a reflection of Plato’s call in “Republic” for mass infanticide in the name of Socratic “justice.” They considered topics like “sex and gender” not by regurgitating mantras from “Gender Trouble” but by weighing the views of its author, Judith Butler, against those of John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau.
Especially in my later years teaching the course, I often omitted Michel Foucault and included instead Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism,” one of Mr. Douthat’s suggested additions. Many instructors still teach Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” (long a required text) and Thomas Kuhn as critiques of modern technological progress. Some spend a day on Marilynne Robinson.
Mr. Douthat would find that many of Columbia’s instructors include the very texts and topics he wants to see taught there.
Charles McNamara
Minneapolis
The writer is a lecturer in the department of classical and Near Eastern religions and cultures at the University of Minnesota.