In today's paper, Gina Lee and Casey Tolan report that Jacques Barzun, valedictorian of the class of 1927 and one of the fathers of the core curriculum, has died at age 104.
Barzun entered Columbia at the age of 15 and began teaching here immediately afterward. According to Spec's obituary, Barzun taught the first Colloquium on Important Books class, which was the precursor to Lit Hum. He served as Provost from 1950 to 1968, and didn't stop there. From the article:
Barzun remained interested in Columbia until the end. In 2011, he wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal criticizing Columbia’s exclusion of ROTC and relating it to Pericles’ funeral oratory in Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War.”
Barzun was never shy about voicing his opinions when it came to Columbia, or anything else. Today we dig through our archives to see what insights we can glean about this influential figure.
He wasn't afraid to criticize the administration. As he was getting ready to leave Columbia in 1975, he told Spec just what he thought about some of Columbia's previous presidents. On Nicholas Murray Butler:
"...he created a lot of problems because during the last decade of his administration he did not do much to modernize the university."
