New Colloquium Course Will Combine East and West

Four teachers. Fifteen students. One new course.
Next semester Columbia College will offer Nobility and Civility, a small team-taught course, which will examine the ideas of leadership and citizenship in classical periods in the East and West.
A Continuation of the Core
The course, approved by the Columbia College Committee on Instruction at the end of November, is intended for juniors and seniors who have completed Literature Humanities, Contemporary Civilization, and either Asian Humanities or Asian Civilization.
"Right now you have separate courses, but they aren't integrated in any way. What we're trying to do is establish a set of courses that bring the major traditions together to discuss what we call core issues," said William Theodore de Bary, director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, John Mitchell Mason Professor Emeritus of the University, and Provost Emeritus.
The Core is often criticized for its western focus. This course, de Bary said, will attempt to bring together East and West. In addition, during 2003-2004 there are plans to add two more team-taught, interdisciplinary courses that will form a sequence that explores nobility and civility in medieval and modern periods in eastern and western traditions.
De Bary, who has been one of the driving forces behind the courses, will also be one of the professors teaching in the spring. He will be joined by Peter Pouncey, Professor Emeritus of Classics and President Emeritus of Amherst College, Columbia history professor Richard Bulliet, and Gary Tubb, Senior Lecturer in Religion and Middle Eastern Studies.
The College would usually not be able to fund a course with four instructors because of the expense. Because de Bary and Pouncey are emeritus professors, they are being paid small stipends through the Heyman Center, not the College.
Professors at the Heyman Center spurred the initial development of the course. In May 2002 the center was awarded a $309,000 grant. It is using the grant money to fund three workshops that set the curriculum for the three planned courses. During the first workshop, which took place last summer, members of the faculty drew up a preliminary syllabus for the course. The second workshop will create a syllabus for the medieval period class and will be held May 27 to June 13, 2003.
A Continuation of the Past
All three courses are being modeled on courses called colloquia that were taught for decades beginning in the 1930s. The original colloquia courses turned into Lit Hum, but courses designated as College Colloquia, which were limited to a few students and team-taught by two professors, were taught sporadically up until a few years ago.
Currently, Nobility and Civility is listed under "colloquium" in the online bulletin but is not intended to be a revival of the old college colloquium course, said James Mirollo, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, who taught colloquia in the past and is one of the senior scholars who helped plan the course.
"[A colloquium course] met once a week, and there were two professors. It began late on a Wednesday evening, and it would go on until everyone fainted from lack of sleep," Mirollo said.
Nobility and Civility is scheduled for a similar time slot--Wednesday evenings from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. De Bary said he cannot speculate what student interest will be in the course, especially since the course was announced after many students had already planned their spring courses. But he suggested the course might have a second section if there are enough interested students.
David Bornstein, CC '03, was interested in the class even before it became official. Bornstein, who has been one of de Bary's students for three semesters and plans to major in philosophy, was one of two undergraduates who participated in the planning workshop for the course last summer.
"I think that the class will be of great interest to those who are searching for a broad education, who want to transcend the bounds of the Core Curriculum and of the Western canon," Bornstein said.
He also praised the professors. "The richness of talent that's going to be sitting in that room. ... The students could just sit back and listen to those scholars, and that would be an education in itself," Bornstein added.
But students will not be able to sit back. They will already be particularly familiar with some of the course's texts as the class will reexamine relevant parts of works from Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, like the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, St. Augustine's City of God, and other works they have seen in Asian Humanities or Asian Civilizations--the Ramayana, the Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita, Confucius' Analects, and Mencius.
The students and professors will be examining texts together, including many prepared in translation by the Committee on Asia and the Middle East. In addition, the professors hope to bring in other scholars whose work is relevant to particular lectures.
"This is going to be a workout for everyone," de Bary said.