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GOOD CHEMISTRY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
GOOD CHEMISTRY
ing students more directly as in financial aid. That’s a tough position
to put faculty in. And that’s why I argued that the financial sourcing
of financial aid should be matched to the social responsibility — it’s
an institutional responsibility.
You mentioned the restructuring that involved the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences. Let’s turn to that relationship, which is
a complex one but an important one for the College. Can you
describe the relationship, and how it might change with your
being part of the new three-person Arts and Sciences executive
committee?
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was created about the time I came
to Columbia. It’s kind of an odd structure, and I use the word
“odd” carefully. We have a collection of schools [Columbia College,
the School of General Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
the School of the Arts and the School of Continuing Education]
that have students and deans but no specific faculty, and then
we have this body called the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which
contains all the faculty but no students. It’s kind of a curious thing.
This kind of separation between schools and faculty, organizationally,
suggests difference and separation that functionally doesn’t
really exist. I mean, if people go into a classroom and teach, you
don’t really think about
whether the students are
in the College or General
Studies or wherever. You’re
a faculty member teaching
a bunch of students and developing
a faculty-student
relationship. The fact that
as a faculty member you
are a member of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences, while
the students are enrolled in
a school and not enrolled in
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
doesn’t really come
into play. It only comes into
play when you talk about
how you make decisions; it’s an administrative dichotomy that
is not really a functional dichotomy.
And the deans of all the schools have reported to the vice president
[of Arts and Sciences]; that’s what it says in the statutes of
the University. That has certain complications. It inevitably leads
to certain kinds of differences of opinion about what should be
done and how things should be done, because there are different
representations. The vice president represents a different set of interests
from the deans of schools, so there are always going to be
disagreements about what should be done. The structure didn’t
allow for the most effective way to make decisions. So now we’ve
created an Executive Committee of Arts and Sciences, which consists
of the Dean of the Graduate School, the Dean of Columbia
College, who is also the Vice President for Undergraduate Education,
and the Vice President of Arts and Sciences, who also is
the Dean of the Faculty. In my view, that’s a much better way to
make decisions because it combines representation of the three
major constituencies in our enterprise. We have faculty interests,
graduate student interests and undergraduate student interests
— they’re not in opposition, but they’re not identical. So you put
them all together and that group of three people has to come
up with decisions about how to deploy resources, about faculty
appointments, capital projects, budgets, development efforts —
Students learn as much or
more from one another as
they do from professors.
You don’t want everyone
in the College to be alike.
You learn by being around
people who have different
points of view, different
life experiences.
all the major things that you need to decide are now made by a
group of people who can effectively represent all the points of
view of all constituencies who make up this part of the University.
That’s a much more effective way of making decisions.
It’s been functioning since mid-April, so we don’t know exactly
how it will work out, but so far it’s worked out pretty well.
It might be transitional, it might last only a short time or it might
last well beyond my tenure as dean. Something else will replace
it someday, something else always does. But I think this is much
better than what we had.
It always struck me as odd that the Dean of the College couldn’t
hire a teacher in the College …
Yes, it is odd, isn’t it [laughing]? Well, we started out with a college
and then we added these other schools, and each of them
had a faculty. Functionally, faculty were teaching different students
but had an appointment in one school. That was kind of
awkward, so we created this one overall faculty. And that was
awkward, too. There were dichotomies that were artificial and
we tried to correct those by having something else that’s slightly
artificial. But you’re gradually trying to remove artificialities. I
have a 170-year-old house in New Jersey that I’m working on all
the time, trying to make it a more functional house. The challenge
isn’t that it’s 170 years old, it’s that people have added things or
changed things all along that weren’t always done so well, so you
gradually try to go back and make it right. That’s essentially what
we’re trying to do here.
One thing that’s lasted for a while, with changes and additions
along the way, is the Core Curriculum. It’s the College’s signature
academic sequence and a bond among alumni. What is
your vision of the place of a core curriculum in a liberal arts
education, and how do you see Columbia’s Core evolving?
I’ll answer the last part first. The Core, with a capital “C,” has
existed for almost 100 years but it hasn’t existed for all 100
years in exactly the same form. When Contemporary Civilization
started, it used a textbook, written by people at Columbia,
which included parts that dealt with industry and agriculture.
Today, we don’t teach anything about industry and agriculture
in Contemporary Civilization, yet everyone views the Core as a
permanent part of the Columbia educational experience. And it
is. The idea that there is a certain intellectual experience that every
undergraduate is going to have and it’s going to represent a
collection of ideas that the faculty feel is really important. That’s
the permanent part.
Exactly what those ideas are and what form that takes have
been evolving. I mean, that CC textbook is really interesting. It
is contemporary civilization of 1919; contemporary civilization
of 2012 is a different thing. I think we ought to teach something
about industry and agriculture, but that’s just my view because
students don’t know anything about that and it’s still part of life.
But the curriculum has evolved and it will continue to evolve. We
try things; some don’t work and we replace them. The names get
changed. There was Humanities A and B, this became Art Hum
and Music Hum, this changed, that changed. There was Major
Cultures and that led to the Global Core, Frontiers of Science was
introduced, there was Logic & Rhetoric, now we have University
Writing. Intellectual life moves forward, we learn new things and
new things develop.
The Core, fundamentally, represents a commitment to an idea
that at any one time there is a kind of collective intellectual experience
and a body of knowledge, information, ideas, that we want
Professor at heart: Valentini chats with students outside Low Library this summer including (top, left to right) Annel Fernandez ’16, Xi
Wang ’16 and Lorenzo Gibson ’16.
PHOTOS: LESLIE JEAN-BART ’76, ’77J
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FALL 2012
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