" patience was not just a manner, it was the very form of seminar teaching. Columbia’s core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. Till this moment, I never knew myself. . . . Vanity, not love has been my folly! "

― David Denby , Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World