History

In the 1930’s, Professor Frank Tannenbaum and Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler discussed the idea of creating ongoing groups of Columbia professors and experts from the region to explore matters no single department had the breadth or the agility to study. Butler saw the idea as a quick way to mobilize the intellectual resources of the University to confront suddenly emerging problems, but World War II supervened. It was 1944 before Butler’s successor, Frank Fackenthal, approved the first five University Seminars.

Aaron Warner began his teaching career as a lecturer at Columbia in 1946 while working on his doctoral dissertation on trade unionism in post-war Britain. He completed the Ph.D. in 1954, receiving tenure as associate professor of economics, and devoted his scholarship over the following decades to labor-management relations, workman’s compensation, salary structure in U.S. companies, industrial organization and full employment. During the 1960’s, he conducted studies on labor-management problems in the East Coast maritime industry for the U.S. Commerce Department and on manpower policy for the U.S. Labor Department.

Robert L. Belknap began teaching at Columbia in 1956, and served as interim dean in 1975, and director of the Harriman Institute from 1977 to 1980. He was director of The University Seminars from 2001-2010. A scholar of Russian literature, he specialized in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, notably on The Brothers Karamazov. His work is considered as one of the best studies on Dostoevsky produced by the present generation of scholars.

When Tannenbaum died in 1969, there were fifty seminars. He and his wife, Jane Belo, left The Seminars a donation, to be invested and reinvested as a dedicated part of Columbia’s endowment. Tannenbaum wrote a charter to “protect the spontaneity of The Seminars from an unstructured situation [in which] interference is inevitable, because the desire for general rules and uniformity is irresistible.”

Robert Pollack, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences, majored in physics at Columbia University, where he graduated from the College in 1961. He received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Brandeis University in 1966, and subsequently was a postdoctoral Fellow in Pathology with Howard Green at NYU Medical center, and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel with Ernest Winocour. He was then recruited to Cold Spring harbor Laboratory by James Watson to establish a research program on reversion of cancer cells. He became a tenured Associate Professor of Microbiology at SUNY Stony Brook Medical Center, before returning to Columbia in 1978.

In the four decades since Frank Tannenbaum’s death, the number of seminars has grown to over 95. Three of the five founding seminars are still meeting: The Problem of Peace, Studies in Religion, and The Renaissance.

Alice Newton retired after 18 years of distinguished service at The University Seminars, where she worked with three directors and was herself Interim Director for three years (2019 -2022). From 1968, while a student at Rutgers University, and later at New York University (where she completed a bachelor’s degree in history), Alice participated in the anti-war, anti-racism, environmental justice, and women’s movements. Social justice activism continues to be a central part of her life. Alice later earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs with a specialty in human rights and Latin America.

Susan Boynton is a professor of music at Columbia University. Since joining the Columbia faculty in 2000, Susan Boynton has been a member of The University Seminar on Medieval Studies, which she chaired from 2007-17. She joined the Advisory Board (now Executive Committee) of The University Seminars in 2012 and has co-chaired The University Seminar on Religion and Writing. Boynton’s research and teaching interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism; manuscript studies; music in the Iberian peninsula; music and childhood, and the history of education; intersections of music with the visual arts; and the history of religion. She has written or edited eight books. Susan was appointed Director of The University Seminars in January 2023. Read more on our Director’s Page.

The University Seminars continue to serve Tannenbaum’s and Butler’s purposes. The Seminars have also become an intrinsic part of the enterprise that Columbia excels more than any other university: the ongoing education of its own faculty. Most of this education takes place within the academic departments, but Tannenbaum was continuing a tradition of General Education in a Core Curriculum that Columbia had been developing for thirty years. The Contemporary Civilization and the Humanities courses are famous for the breadth they give Columbia undergraduates, but the demands of teaching such wide-ranging material are astonishingly unrecognized for imparting rigor and sophistication to the professors themselves: at few universities would one find an economist teaching Plato.