Columbia exemplifies the failure of universities
Yesterday, with growing sadness, I read a wonderful book about teaching and learning, written by one of the great teachers of the past century. Why the sadness? Because the author, Gilbert Highet, was a revered professor at Columbia in the Fifties and Sixties. It is impossible to read his paean to learning, written a half-century ago, without weeping for what his university has become. When Highet wrote of learning, he meant absorbing from history’s greatest minds, from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, and teaching their lessons to students who wished to learn from them. Reading Highet’s words a half century later, we realize he was speaking of another time and place — virtually another university.
