On the first day of Lit Hum my professor arrived a minute late and wrote on the board: "What's the point of war?" None of us knew. break An Achilles soliloquy was subjected to exegesis: was immortality better than temporal happiness? The debate was so spirited because the question was so meaningless. And this state of affairs would last the entire year. Our facilitator would theatrically scrawl in chalk a sweeping question; its universality guaranteed its superficiality. "Can you ever return home?" was The Odyssey; "Why do Americans hate the French?" was Michel de Montaigne. The books themselves were immaterial: some of my most productive days of "contributing" to class were those when I had deliberately spurned the reading. We neglected structure, ignored style, shirked genre, and made no connections. Things reached their logical conclusion at the midterm review session when a coeval of mine said: "Lit Hum has taught me to live more in the moment." I rejoined gravely, "It has taught me to live less in the moment." Two days later I would be prompted to write an essay explaining the importance of narrativizing my weekend. I said it was a brilliant means of relating to my own life what I learned in Lit Hum. It was the right answer. For my efforts I received an "A." * The books in Lit Hum are works of art, and in this way they are no different from poems, movies, operas, or concerts: their point might have something to do with war or home or the French, but their purpose is to be entertaining. Criticism, then, should first and foremost seek to answer the question: is the work of literature entertaining or not? Is it beautiful, hilarious, gnomic, or wise? Did I enjoy reading it? And yet there is a tendency in Lit Hum to ignore this all-important inquiry. My professor, a kind and nurturing man, was a history Ph.D. We started from the premise that the works are great, without even believing it or trying to answer why. When aesthetics are taken for granted, feeling is obliterated and meaning becomes meaningless. * On the last day of Lit Hum my professor strolled in and wrote perfervidly: "What is the meaning of life?" The answers varied only in their specifics—from "work" to "love"—but were constant in their shallowness, for we'd disregarded a much more important prerequisite question: "What is the meaning of reading?" What we were doing, like the canon we'd read and the reasons we'd read it for, had been accepted unquestioningly while we turned to armchair philosophy. The institutions had propagated themselves; what was good was good because it was good. I'd read everything and experienced nothing. * What's so insidious about the current Core Curriculum is that it breeds this kind of complacency. "What's the point of Frontiers of Science?" I once asked David Helfand, and he uttered a tautology: "It's good because it applies the methods of the Core to science." Everyone who's taken it knows Frontiers sucks, but on its own terms it is unassailable. The Core is shot through with this ethos. A Major Cultures professor of mine told me not to relate the texts to what I had read and learned and done, but to accept them as is—in other words, not to think critically. Art Hum and Music Hum canonize the canon. "What's the meaning of Lit Hum?" "It teaches you the meaning of life." "Why Critical Reading, Critical Writing?" I asked last year of a new requirement in the English department. "It's the next step after Lit Hum," said David Damrosch. Damrosch, a professor of English, thought very highly of himself, higher still of his brainchild: it was its own Platonic ideal. It's hard to establish things, harder still to dismantle them, but very easy to keep them going; in Lit Hum's case, minor reforms like adding The Metamorphoses or removing The Metamorphosis keep criticism at bay. Here's a cyclical fantasy: working hard in private school to work hard in college to work hard in work and send your kids to private school. "Correct" ideas become as undiscerning and shot through with groupthink as adulation of Obama; people like, or profess to like, the right things, but for the wrong reasons. This cosmopolitan campus acquires a fixed, suburban feeling. "There's nobody more provincial than a native New Yorker," said a friend of mine; self-perpetuation is self-justification and self-presentation and self-deception; we lose self-awareness and become ignorant of our ignorance. It is thus that Lit Hum weakens white European civilization, Major Cultures undermines pluralism, Frontiers of Science bowdlerizes science, Art Hum turns people off of art, Music Hum turns people off of music, and the Core loses itself in itself. * Lawrence Lessig, writing in the book Free Culture, says that education ought to be concerned with the "creation of meaning," and without taste and aesthetics—deciding what it is that matters to us—there can be no meaning. A middle school teacher in the HBO series The Wire says of his street-wise charges: "We can't lie, not to them," but as things are one can lie to Columbia students, and Columbia students can lie to themselves: we have no choice but to be successful. Until the Core amends itself (I like CC and P.E. as is) or becomes optional, it will continue to be the same hollow exercise in self-justification and self-congratulation for its students that it is for itself. Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat runs alternate Thursdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com