On a Facebook page for her class year, a Columbia student recently claimed that one of her required philosophy courses, Contemporary Civilization, was detrimental to her “health” because she had to study prejudiced, oppressive texts with a white professor. Her post was not a parody.
Then she specifically targeted white students with people-of-color professors as those who should switch sections with her. Bewilderingly, her post received nearly 100 likes, with “100%” emojis dotting the comments section in approval and solidarity.
When a classmate pointed out that no one was forced to attend Columbia — where we have a core curriculum explicitly based on the Western canon, and where the syllabus is released online for applicants to see — the caustic replies showed that no one wanted to think about the privilege of attending an Ivy League institution.
After one student asked if minority professors even existed, another replied that they do, but they’ll cut anyone (regardless of race) to shreds anyway, because they’re only loyal to the ivory tower that feeds them.
Such are identity politics at college campuses across the country, and especially at high-ranking schools. Princeton students just stormed their president’s office demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from buildings.
Yale went into crisis over an email that insinuated undergraduates could choose their own Halloween costumes responsibly without advice from the administration.
Now, William & Mary co-eds are sticking Post-it notes about slavery and sexual assault on Thomas Jefferson statues, and everyone and everything from the past is emblematic of some injustice, removed just enough from the present day to be politicized.
Well, let me address a few of these student “activist” concerns.
I’m a junior at Columbia. When I took Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, Columbia’s yearlong core seminars, I had Irish and French professors. The Frenchman was a specialist in colonial Africa, obsessed with ideas of subjection and emancipation, and he insisted we study Aimé Césaire even though he wasn’t on the syllabus.
The Irish lecturer added texts by Sappho, Christine de Pizan and Tony Kushner to represent unheard demographics and gave students a class to pull together favorite excerpts from alternative authors whose voices we thought should be heard. He was also an advocate for the addition of Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” to the Literature Humanities curriculum, a reform that eventually passed.
At every opportunity, both pushed their students to engage with the reading. Our professors challenged us to think about our own identities, but also to defy the selfish self-reflection popularized by identity politics so we could use our knowledge for more than our own gain.
Despite my positive experiences in these courses, I still agree that we need more minority academics. But there’s an element of hypocrisy among students who criticize their professors for their ethnic backgrounds.
They’re the same people who tell me that I’m not Mexican because of the gradation of my skin, never mind that I grew up in a biracial, bilingual household in the South when their childhood took place in New England or California suburbs. And they’re the types who, even in the ’70s, called Chicano intellectual Richard Rodriguez a “coconut” — brown on the outside but white on the inside — because he didn’t want to lead a seminar on “minority literature.”
The truth is, people of color are multifaceted, so much so that grouping them into one category seems racist in itself. Your pigment doesn’t define your teaching methods, or your subjects of interest, or your beliefs.
And then there’s history. Unless we only study contemporary works, we’ll encounter opinions that we find antiquated.
For example, at Columbia, we read both Mary Wollstonecraft and W.E.B. Du Bois. Neither is a particularly revolutionary or radical thinker in the context of the 21st century, and yet both fought for rights when it was unpopular to do so, when identity politics weren’t even part of the public consciousness.
Like them, all of the philosophers and authors included in Columbia’s core classes were innovators, and more generally, our nation’s collegiate syllabi list certain titles for a reason.
Most of the people whose names ended up on buildings did something of note as well. Perhaps some of their actions prove problematic today, so let’s unpack that. But to ignore what we don’t wish to address and to polarize good and evil are the greatest follies any college student can make.
Instead, we should study, learn and consider how what we discover as we read impacts not only us, but also the people who didn’t have the privilege to attend one of the best colleges in the world.
Alexandra Villarreal is a junior at Columbia University and a freelance writer.