My column, Excuses and Half-truths, is all about not being an expert—it’s about being a 20-year-old college student who doesn’t know anything yet, and about trying to figure out a few things. And it’s that perspective which I think makes this Sophomore Wisdom different, and worth writing.
Blasphemous though it may be to admit this in the Spectator, I love Bwog’s series “Overheard.” I love it because 1.) it makes me feel better about my own penchant for eavesdropping, and 2.) it provides us with such gems as this:
“Little kid, maybe 13 years old, wearing a backpack walking with classmates. With a concerned look at the ashtrays outside of Hamilton: ‘I know there’s a lot of peer pressure at college, but why does everyone have to smoke so much?’”
I was in Austin, Texas over spring break attending the South by Southwest music festival and I came to the conclusion that Columbia (specifically the Core) ruins you.
All Columbia undergraduates have to take them—the required classes that constitute our early years. But do they go on to constitute part of us? This week, four students assess the foundations of our education. Jennifer Fearon examines what it means to re-read classics in Barnard’s First-Year English, Joseph Rozenshtein writes off University Writing, Sarah Ngu suggests it simply needs a few edits, and Neil Fitzpatrick merges the practical and the pedantic in his position on Literature Humanities.
Much has been said about the Core: It provides a firm grounding in the western canon; it contains too many dead white males; it is a perfectly good impetus for a hunger strike; it is one of the reasons many students (including yours truly) came to Columbia.
