Mark Van Doren at Columbia (may 12, 1920 – aug 15, 1959)

Description:

date started needed; famous teacher: "For Mark Van Doren, the art of teaching was “the art of assisting discovery,” as he wrote in his 1943 book Liberal Education. He would engage his Columbia College students as equals, with real inquisitiveness, wanting to learn along with them. Adam referred to The Seven Storey Mountain, the memoir by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton ’38CC, ’39GSAS, who devoted a long passage to his professor, writing of “Mark’s sober and sincere intellect, and his manner of dealing with his subject with perfect honesty and objectivity and without evasions.”" (Paul Hond, https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/counting-van-dorens)

He had earned his PhD from Columbia in 1920 and immediately joined the faculty and was in the original band of teacher's of Erskine's new General Honors Course

"He guided the planning and helped launch of Humanities A in the Core Curriculum ("Lit Hum," a cornerstone of the Core to this day) and taught a section himself for 17 years, an experience about which he said in his autobiography "nothing I ever did with students was more fun." Upon his retirement from full-time teaching at Columbia in 1959, Van Doren told Newsweek: "I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds."" (http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/mark_van_doren.html)

Van Doren headed the planning committee for Humanities A and thereafter chaired the program during its formative phase, and continued to teach the course for seventeen years

In the 1930s, Van Doren joined Adler in establishing the Program at St. John's, serving frequently as a visiting lecturer.

Added to timeline:

Date: