Matthew Levey:

Roosevelt Montás’s memoir-cum-paean to the classics, is a timely and much-needed book. Montás directed Columbia’s Core Curriculum program for a decade. In an era when dismissing the canon signals a concern for the less privileged, Montás argues that restoring the great writers and thinkers to the pantheon is critical. “Far from a pointless indulgence for the elite,” he writes, “liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down.”

At the root of the decline of the liberal arts, Montás sees “a crisis of consensus among academic humanists about what things are most worth knowing.” He blames university leaders, “reluctant to reveal the values [they] hold” for fear of being judged “morally corrupt” or “complicit in larger systems of exclusion or exploitation” for failing their students. He acknowledges that “dead white men” influence the humanities but properly notes “the problems of representation . . . must be solved by means other than the abandonment of the textual traditions that underpin contemporary life.”

“Free” is at the root of the Latin word liber in liberal arts. You can’t define the liberal arts with a bumper sticker, but for Montás, his freedom certainly wasn’t free. He arrived in New York as a 12-year-old, joining his mother, who earned $3.36 an hour at a garment factory in Brooklyn. He moved frequently, used savings from his summer job to help pay the security deposit on their home, and treasured a gold-leafed copy of Plato’s Dialogues he found in the garbage next to his Queens apartment. Six years after leaving a rural town in the Dominican Republic, speaking not a word of English, Montás found himself standing before Columbia’s majestic Low Memorial Library, at the start of his freshman year.

While conservatives despair at Shakespeare’s cancellation and progressives demand ever-more gender- and race-based studies, Columbia University remains a bastion of liberal arts education, requiring four liberal arts classes grounded in the Western tradition, regardless of a student’s major, social status, or race. Whether they hope to become physicists or poets, students must share the experience of struggling with life’s fundamental questions, gaining an understanding of how writers from the ancient past to the present have been in dialogue with each other, pushing society to define a life worth living. Leading the class he once took, Montás now asks his students to consider, like Socrates, if there is an idea for which they are willing to die. That’s a question that shouldn’t be confined to classrooms.

New York City mayor-elect Eric Adams, who has noted how badly our schools fail to teach black boys to read, might consider paying Montás a visit. One thing Adams could learn from Columbia’s Core for literary instruction is the importance of internal coherence—all art, music, and literature is a reaction of the present generation to the ones that preceded it. Too often, our current curricula pretend that one story is just as good as another, failing to build students’ background knowledge and worsening the comprehension challenges for less privileged kids.