Columbia's continued enlightenment

In an article published last Thursday Stephen Wu decried the fact that “Columbia has institutionally abandoned the religion—and consequently the idea of universal truth—on which she was founded.” His point was interesting, eloquently expressed, and, ultimately, very, very wrong. For Columbia to instill in its students the Anglican morals of its founders would be to betray both the principle of intellectual freedom that is the basis of the modern University and the concept of a liberal arts education embodied by the Core Curriculum.

As Wu pointed out, Columbia was indeed founded as an Anglican institution in 1754 with the motto “In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen”(“In Thy light shall we see light”). But Wu seemed to ignore the following 256 years of both intellectual history and the history of Columbia in drawing his next conclusion: “If indeed the school needs theology and God in order to attain truth, as our motto proclaims, then the University has a mission, and indeed a duty, to promote certain values.”

Setting aside the fact that a motto is poor grounds on which to base the assumption that an institution “needs” religion to attain truth, it is worth noting that the second charter of Columbia—granted by the state legislature of New York after the Revolutionary War—prohibited the use of any religious tests in hiring faculty. It is therefore evident that, at the time when King’s College became Columbia, the institution was already moving away from its Anglican roots. Granted, this move came at the behest of the legislature—a body outside the University—but one can see why a law-giving body in a new nation intent on religious freedom might want to divorce religious prejudice from an institution receiving state funding. It was this great intellectual principle of the era—a principle that we study in Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization—that motivated the first step toward secularism.

Of course, it would be wrong to assume that Columbia embraced the notion of religious freedom simply because of a slight change to its charter. In 1854, the University was investigated by the New York State Senate for violating that charter by refusing to hire Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, a graduate of Columbia, because of his Unitarian faith. Soon after, the Christian Examiner in Boston described the college as “good in classics, weak in sciences; very few distinguished graduates.” Gibbs would have been a professor of chemistry, but rather than improve a weak department, the closed-minded board of trustees turned a distinguished candidate down because he was not Anglican.

Obviously, Wu was not suggesting that the modern University, were it to re-embrace its Anglican roots, should engage in similarly prejudiced hiring practices, but it is not hard to imagine that a university deciding to “present some dominant version of truth consonant with her founding principles” might deter countless bright teachers and students who possessed alternate principles.

It is here that Wu’s argument is weakest. Leaving aside ethnic diversity for a moment, his proposal leaves no room for intellectual diversity, which is the true heart of the modern University. He condemns the Core office for saying that “students should not expect Lit Hum to teach them what these texts are about.” But in saying that Columbia does not want students “to learn about the central themes and issues presented” or “to have some sort of evaluative framework by which to judge and favor one value system over the other,” he is missing the point. Lit Hum instructors—at least, all the ones I have heard of or been taught by—do their best to teach what each text says and nothing more. They help students see the textual basis for religions like Anglicanism, but they do not preach the tenets of Anglicanism, which are nothing more than interpretations of the text in front of them made by other men. As for an evaluative framework, this is precisely what Lit Hum and CC look to provide. In exposing students to the history of Western thought, these courses give us a context within which to judge any ideas that we might encounter—the same context in which those ideas were formed.

In “What Is Enlightenment?”—a text read in many CC classes—Immanuel Kant opens with the following: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” He proclaims the motto of enlightenment to be, “Have the courage to use your own understanding!” Columbia has granted and continues to grant thousands of students this courage. To go against that now, to encourage students to accept “guidance from another,” would be the worst kind of regression and would be shameful.

Neil FitzPatrick is a Columbia College junior majoring in creative writing and East Asian languages and cultures. He is a former associate editorial page editor. Excuses and Half-Truths runs alternate Mondays.