Insistent Change: Columbia’s Core Curriculum at 100

Butler Banner Revisited

In fall 2019, 30 years after the original banner was hung, and in the midst of the year-long celebration of the Core Centennial, Columbia University students worked with Columbia Libraries to address concerns regarding the exclusion of female authors from the western literary canon. The resulting "inside-outside" exhibition included the fabrication and hanging on the façade of another banner, reinterpreted for today.

After sorting through more than 200 responses from fellow students about possible authors to include on the banner, the students leading the Butler Banner Project chose eight all female-identifying people of color writing from perspectives largely missing from today's official Core syllabi:  Maya Angelou, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Diana Chang (BC 1949), Zora Neale Hurston (BC 1928), Toni Morrison, A. Revathi, Ntozake Shange (BC 1970), and Leslie Marmon Silko.

New Translation of Homer's Odyssey

Emily Wilson's translation was added to the syllabus for Literature Humanities in 2018, replacing the Richmond Lattimore version that had been in use for over 50 years. Unlike most translators, Wilson kept her version to the exact number of lines found in Homer's original, preserving what she called the "nimble gallop" and simplicity of the ancient text. The first woman to translate the Odyssey in its entirety into English, Wilson was attentive to the ways in which earlier translations imposed language about gender and violence onto the text, which cannot be found in the original. On September 26, 2019, before an audience of students and alumni in a packed Miller Theater, Wilson spoke about her task as a translator. The MacArthur Foundation had announced her as a recipient of its "genius award" the day before. 

Suzan-Lori Parks and "Contemporary Core"

In fall 2019, Suzan-Lori Parks's trilogy was added to the fall Literature Humanities syllabus as a "Contemporary Core" text. Literature Humanities Chair Joanna Stalnaker describes the Contemporary Core as "a work that will change every year and will illustrate the diverse ways that contemporary authors continue to respond to and subvert canonical works from the past."

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Parks retells the story of the Odyssey during the American Civil War, focusing on a slave named Hero, who later changes his name to Ulysses, after the Union general. The play explores such themes as white privilege, freedom, betrayal, and the stories we tell again and again. "Old stories they guide us / Each its own North Star / You don't know them / And how could you?" asks the plays chorus. Parks spoke about her career and her work before an audience of students and alumni in the Low Library Rotunda on February 6, 2020. 

Patricia Williams and Seeing A Color-Blind Future

Patricia Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School.  She is a pioneer of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which investigates the relationship between race and the law.  Among the texts that have influenced the Black Lives Matter movement is Williams' Seeing a Color-Blind Future which is a required text on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus for 2019-2020.

Music Humanities Revised

Since 1947, Music Humanities has focused on the many forms of the Western musical imagination in art music, through works studied in their historical and cultural contexts. The course moves chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present, examining the choices and assumptions of composers, their patrons, audiences, and performers, and exploring what we can and can't know about how music of the past may have sounded. Today, in addition to works by Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, the official syllabus includes works by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, as well as by Hildegard of Bingen, Clara Schumann, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Kaija Saariaho, William Grant Still, Steve Reich and others.