Thirteen years, one curriculum, built from nothing

The standard defense of liberal-arts education appeals to skills: critical thinking, communication, analytical reasoning. I don't object to this, exactly; I think it is true, as far as it goes. But my experience at Columbia College taught me that the most important thing I needed to do was to get my students to see why any of it mattered. The best answer to the question of whether a liberal-arts education is "worth it" is to make sure the question doesn't arise.

I designed each of my Columbia courses to center on a particular skill — schematizing arguments from philosophical texts, illuminating data with theory and revising theory in light of data, thinking about the potential ramifications of legal precedents, etc. In the first sessions, I modeled what that skill could do. Then I broke it down into constituent parts and practiced them with students, celebrating each advance. I found that this approach produced not just better written work but livelier discussion: students who had a framework for what they were doing engaged other ideas more thoughtfully and contributed more conscientiously.

I also worked constantly to connect the material to the world my students already inhabited. I played oral arguments from the "Muslim ban" cases and asked students to pose questions as judges. I showed clips from Fight Club and asked students to interpret them through Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I showed a documentary about Buddhist violence against Muslims in Myanmar and asked whether the category of "religious violence" held up.

Before I came to Columbia, I would have regarded this as pandering. I was wrong. Finding the parallel between a big idea and something in the world is itself a skill — no less than constructing an argument — and cultivating it is part of cultivating the ability to see the world more richly. Which is, finally, what a liberal-arts education is for.

Much has been made of the death of the paper, since AI. But it was always an instrument in the project of education, not its object. I have said to my students many times: I did not ask you to write this because I thought you would revolutionize anyone's ideas about Kant's understanding of God. I've been thinking about this much longer than you have. Many people know more than the two of us combined. (Most of them are dead.)

When I asked you to write the essay, I wanted you to read carefully. I wanted you to inhabit a different way of seeing the world. I wanted you to organize your thoughts and reconsider your positions as you worked out exactly what you wanted to say. I could have assigned debates about vacuums in the early Scientific Revolution, the portrayal of Mary's breasts in late medieval altarpieces, anime fandom as religion. The topic didn't much matter. You were learning how to think, and I gave you a focused way to do it.