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Happy Birthday, Jacques Barzun!
ACTA National Council member, eminent scholar and public intellectual Jacques Barzun turned 100 last Friday--and America is throwing him a wonderfully contemporary party. Toasted in the established pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion, Barzun is also being celebrated in the newer electronic corners of our public culture: a blog entitled "Barzun 100" contains numerous tributes from people who cherish their associations with Barzun, whether as students, colleagues, readers, or friends.
Born in France and sent to prep school in the U.S. by a father bent on securing the best opportunities for his son, Barzun studied at Columbia during the 1920s. Later, as a Columbia professor, Barzun taught for many years within the core. A specialist in history, he and literary scholar Lionel Trilling frequently co-taught the Great Books course for which Columbia is justly recognized.
In 2006, ACTA's Institute for Effective Governance published Barzun's essay, "The Columbia Core: A Look Back." Written, as Barzun put it, in response to "academics (and even more alumni) [who] have become alarmed by the narrow and politically tendentious courses that make up the whole offering at many colleges, including some of the reputed best," the essay describes how, in the wake of World War I, Columbia set out to create a curriculum that would "teach the new generations the ideals and history of Western Civilization in hopes that when they were leaders of opinion and makers of policy they might avoid the ghastly mistakes that had brought the Continent to self-destruction in total war." Today, the need for such curricula remains as strong as ever.
An eloquent advocate for common culture and "collective enjoyment" (his phrase for democratically shared delight in the arts), Barzun worked hard to make great works and great ideas accessible to all in his teaching and his writing. Barzun's expertise ranged widely--his forty books span literature, history, science, art, music (he is a renowned expert on Berlioz), and even sports (baseball, he declared, reveals the heart and mind of America). Able to reach both scholarly and lay audiences, Barzun ably translated what Sidney Hook called his "luminous common sense" into a readable idiom that has made him one of our most treasured public intellectuals.
Barzun's 1959 classic, Teacher in America, remains a timely and cogent critique of the American educational system. Despite Barzun's warning that "education is the dullest of subjects," the book delivers a wise analysis of issues that remain at the forefront of academic debates today, including the importance of academic freedom, the value of the canon, the art of teaching well, the danger to education posed by teachers who use the classroom to proselytize, and the danger to knowledge presented by scholars who are too narrowly specialized.
Barzun's lifetime of patient, interested study has culminated in a work that exemplifies the spirit of broad yet deep inquiry that he has championed throughout his life: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000) was widely hailed as a masterpiece of engaging, intelligent synthesis.
A prominent voice of the twentieth century, Barzun's is also a voice for the future.
Happy birthday, Professor Barzun, and thank you.
Posted by acta online on December 05, 2007 at December 5, 2007 11:11 AM
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