Why is education at Columbia so dull, despite the prestige of the degree—while learning in a yeshiva felt richly rewarding?
An unexpected realization dawned on me toward the end of my first semester at Columbia University. For months, I had been noticing certain oddities in seminar discussions, especially in my core literature class. Sporadically, a fellow student would make a stray, weird comment—confusing one central character with another, or misunderstanding key moments in the plot. They might mistake Hector for Agamemnon, or casually forget that Dulcinea del Toboso was of less noble lineage than Don Quixote claimed. These comments would be followed by awkward pauses, before the discussion resumed as normal.
In some classes, professors started having us read key passages of the text together, either aloud or during quiet in-class reading time. I joined them, at first imagining that a second read was a deeper read. Asked to analyze together, I might notice that my group partner had no understanding of Descartes’ ontological argument. I tried to ignore it, so as not to seem unkind.
As our final exam neared, my classmates’ study habits came into sharp relief: They seemed to be learning the material from scratch, scrambling to flip through entire swaths of the Western literary canon in a single week. It was then that I understood that, for the past few months, I had been participating in a show class, in which I was one of the only students who actually bothered to read any of the books. Apparently, the opportunity to explore the supposedly foundational texts of Western civilization didn’t matter as deeply to my peers as I had expected.
