Roosevelt Montás
WSJ, Nov. 4, 2021
“… many people today, even academics, take the study of the classics to be elitist and exclusive. Of course, a curriculum weighted toward the past and therefore toward “dead white males” invites questions about diversity and inclusion.”
In 1985, a few days before my 12th birthday, I left the Dominican Republic for New York City. The flight was only three and half hours, but the distance I traveled that day was in many ways incalculable. I didn’t speak English and had never even been close to an airplane. The city that greeted me and my older brother was the menacing New York of the 1980s, and like many other Dominican immigrants, we arrived poor, disoriented and with little notion of what would happen next.
I also traveled a great distance from learning English as a second language in the overcrowded classrooms of Intermediate School 61 in Corona, Queens, to enrolling as a freshman at Columbia University in 1991. Besides a fervent immersion in biblical exegesis, and what I had picked up as a child from my father’s self-education in Marxism, I was probably as ignorant of the world of letters as any student in Columbia’s nearly 250-year history.
—Mr. Montás is director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University’s Center for American Studies. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” published Nov. 16 by Princeton University Press.
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