Ignorance and Conviction at Columbia

Darializa Avila Chevalier—upper Manhattan’s new congressional candidate, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and endorsed by Mamdani—is shaping up to be one of the most dangerous students I overlapped with at Columbia University. Although she graduated from our alma mater in 2016, she later returned to become a key presence on campus as a leader of the Gaza encampment, which took place during my senior year. After winning her primary election in June, she is practically guaranteed to enter Congress, bringing to the national conversation policy positions ranging from barring all aid to Israel to abolishing prisons and national borders. 

Her opinions are shared by many of my fellow alumni. At graduation, my entire class stood up to applaud the tentifada leadership. My peers—supposedly among the best and brightest young minds in the country—overwhelmingly believe in a set of absurd and repulsive anti-Semitic ideas. What is it about our shared education that might be priming these young minds for such damaging patterns of thought?

Like many courses in Columbia’s Core Curriculum, Literature Humanities 1001 was held in small seminars of about twenty students. Class participation made up a significant portion of the final grade. Some students were too shy to speak up and accepted the grade penalty rather than risk embarrassing themselves. One particular classmate, a member of our baseball team, was careful to offer precisely one contribution each session. What was remarkable was this: Somehow, in that one contribution, he invariably succeeded in proving to the entire class that he had not read a single page of the assigned texts.

My athletic classmate’s idiosyncratic seminar contributions were just one visible example of a pervasive phenomenon in our classrooms. We were all playing the same game, to varying degrees, as he was, only most of us were better at it. At every seminar, the twenty of us would sit around a table, each with the same goal: to fool the professor into believing we had read the assigned material. To achieve this, we would attempt to expound on texts in a manner that appeared profound and reasonable without revealing that we actually had little to no idea what we were talking about.

Like any high-stakes, limited-information game, there were plenty of risk-reward tradeoffs to consider. Should you point out a flaw you noticed in John Stuart Mill’s free speech absolutism when he may have addressed it explicitly later in the same chapter you did not read? Should you comment on how Shakespeare’s dialogue sheds light on the curious relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia when you cannot remember if they were siblings, spouses, or cousins? The more detailed the comment, the higher the risk of revealing the ploy; make the comments too vague, and they cease to be meaningful contributions.

I knew that this was not the way a seminar ought to function, but I made peace with it. For four years, I drank thirstily the education I could receive from the experience as it was and did not give too much thought to the strangeness of it all.

Today, with the benefit of two years of hindsight, I have come to believe that this game lies at the heart of what has gone wrong at America’s top institutions of higher learning. When college seminars reward students for speaking confidently about topics that they do not comprehend, the students learn to become experts at doing just that. Our best and brightest minds, by repeatedly engaging in the performance of pseudo-seminars, have trained themselves to be comfortable with only partially understanding ideas. They have learned to repress questions and contradictions that might demonstrate a lacuna in their knowledge. Worst of all, they have been taught to associate surface knowledge with real understanding to the point where they cannot always distinguish between the two.

We as a nation are witnessing what happens when the very same game my classmates and I played in our seminars is performed on the national stage. Chevalier does not understand the fundamentals of national policy any more than my classmates understood Homer, Kant, or the Middle East, but, like my peers, she does not let her lack of knowledge on a topic prevent her from speaking about it with unbridled passion and conviction. She has been trained to speak confidently about matters that she does not understand. Unfortunately, her misinformed positions are also incredibly dangerous.

One is tempted to blame the students for their own miseducation. Why did they choose to enact performative seminars instead of engaging in them seriously? Why did they refuse to find time to sit with the texts they were assigned and read them before class?

But these students did not come on their own to the conclusion that grounded reading and research were unnecessary for scholastic success. The much deeper issue lies in the university’s infatuation with critical thinking as the singular focus of its educational project.

I recall one illuminating moment in my art history class, when our professor showed us a slide of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii and asked for analysis. Since neither I nor my classmates knew anything about who the Horatii were or what the painting was meant to depict, what ensued was a series of thin observations about the use of color or the emotion of the painted characters. Similarly, in music class we were tasked with writing essays on various musical masterpieces even though most of us had never been taught basic music theory. The message was clear: Critical thinking is king, even in the total absence of serious study. It was only natural that students would start to devalue reading the material before showing up to class.

Aside from the Sisyphean absurdity of attempting to think critically about topics one does not really understand, a more fundamental flaw plagues this pedagogy. The foundation of knowledge is the knowledge of self-ignorance. Critical thinking, as essential as it is for an education, can only arise from a deep humility within the human spirit, a character trait built through repeated, serious encounters with our canon’s greatest minds and works. Too often modern educators seek instead to fill their pupils with unearned self-esteem and self-importance, and to convince them that their isolated critical thinking should suffice for any topic. We are witnessing just the beginning of the destructive results of this misstep.