I have imagined a scene of which I am perhaps inordinately fond. The year is 1960 or thereabouts and the setting is the Hungarian Pastry Shop on West 111th Street in New York. A group of six to ten Columbia students are seated around a table. Some of them are wearing oversize sweaters and scarves, as it is the dead of winter. The windows are foggy. While the students are talking animatedly, the proprietor - the original one - is working behind the counter, studiously indifferent to the youths' loud declarations and accompanying gestures.
The students are debating some issue of the day, such as civil rights or the future of the newly independent nations. Or they are discussing what existentialism is or the merits of a title published by The Grove Press.
For argument's sake, let us suppose that with our hindsight we know that most of what these students are saying is jejune nonsense, because the point here is not that whether these undergraduates possess or lack perspicacity. What is noteworthy is that they are so engaged by ideas.
Today I'm not sure whether you could recreate this gathering and its intellectual ferment. I know you might say, first of all, that they might be too distracted by some sort of mobile device to maintain their engagement in a lengthy public discussion. That is as may be. What I wonder about far more is whether large ideas would hold anything like the same appeal to today's undergraduate patrons of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.
Of course, the Columbia student of today is most likely a somewhat higher "achiever" than his counterpart of fifty years ago. His degree of engagement with learning is equal, or at worst, only slightly less. Specific things - as it happens, very important ones - might inspire him: locally-grown food, alternative energy, penal reform, and so on.
But does the student of today embody the same amalgam of innocence, reckless intellectual enthusiasm, and lack of self-consciousness? More tellingly, does the broader culture, even at an elite university, foster far-ranging intellectual inquiry any longer in quite the same way as it might have 50 years ago? You might object and say it does, but I am afraid it does not.
The students are debating some issue of the day, such as civil rights or the future of the newly independent nations. Or they are discussing what existentialism is or the merits of a title published by The Grove Press.
For argument's sake, let us suppose that with our hindsight we know that most of what these students are saying is jejune nonsense, because the point here is not that whether these undergraduates possess or lack perspicacity. What is noteworthy is that they are so engaged by ideas.
Today I'm not sure whether you could recreate this gathering and its intellectual ferment. I know you might say, first of all, that they might be too distracted by some sort of mobile device to maintain their engagement in a lengthy public discussion. That is as may be. What I wonder about far more is whether large ideas would hold anything like the same appeal to today's undergraduate patrons of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.
Of course, the Columbia student of today is most likely a somewhat higher "achiever" than his counterpart of fifty years ago. His degree of engagement with learning is equal, or at worst, only slightly less. Specific things - as it happens, very important ones - might inspire him: locally-grown food, alternative energy, penal reform, and so on.
But does the student of today embody the same amalgam of innocence, reckless intellectual enthusiasm, and lack of self-consciousness? More tellingly, does the broader culture, even at an elite university, foster far-ranging intellectual inquiry any longer in quite the same way as it might have 50 years ago? You might object and say it does, but I am afraid it does not.
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