"Great Books Education: Two Millennia of Corrupting the Youth and Challenging Authority"

A Lecture by Roosevelt Montás, Columbia University

Friday, April 1, 2022, 7:00 p.m., Great Hall

This lecture is part of the Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature

Livestream available here.

Roosevelt Montás was eleven years old when he came to New York City from the Dominican Republic "with a head full of lice and a belly full of intestinal parasites." After a chance encounter with Socrates, he went on to study at Columbia University and later lead its Center for the Core Curriculum. Describing how four authors-Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi-had a profound impact on his own life, Montás drives home what it's like to experience a liberal education and why it still matters. 

Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In this call-to-arms, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University and the former director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum (2008-2018). He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager, where he attended public schools in Queens before entering Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. In 2003, he completed a Ph.D. in English, also at Columbia; his dissertation, Rethinking America, won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award. In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and in 2008, he received the Dominican Republic’s National Youth Prize. He regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in the Columbia Core Curriculum as well as seminars in American Studies. He is also director of the Center for American Studies’ Freedom and Citizenship Program, which brings low-income high school students to the Columbia campus to study political theory and then helps them prepare successful applications to college.