Columbia University. University Seminars

In the nineteen thirties, Professor Frank Tannenbaum had discussed with Nicholas Murray Butler the idea of ongoing groups of Columbia professors and experts from the whole region to explore matters no single department had the breadth or the agility to study. Butler liked the idea as a quick way to mobilize the intellectual resources of the University about suddenly emerging problems, but World War II supervened and it was 1944 before his successor, Frank Fackenthal, approved the first five University Seminars. Three of these Seminars still meet: Peace, Religion, and The Renaissance.

The Seminars have continued to serve Butler’s purpose, but they have also become an intrinsic part of the enterprise Columbia does better than any great university in the world, the ongoing education of its own faculty. Most of this education takes place within the academic departments, but Tannenbaum was continuing a tradition of General Education in a Core Curriculum that Columbia had been developing for thirty years. The Contemporary Civilization and the Humanities courses are famous for the breadth they give Columbia undergraduates, and astonishingly unrecognized as a boot-camp where econometricians acquire sophistication by conducting rough and tumble discussions of Plato.

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