a history of knowledge charles van doren

He also threw undergraduates off balance by announcing a doctrine about paper writing that I have tried for a lifetime to unlearn: Don't make your main point at the beginning, but work your way to it by the end. He began each subsequent session with a question that was similar to that initial one in that it proposed we take as problematic an aspect of a book that a cursory reading would not notice as constituting a problem. The taking of the roll completed, Van Doren administered a quiz on the Iliad and began discussion of the book with a question: 'What is god-like about the Homeric gods?' The question took by surprise both those of us who thought ourselves literary sophisticates and those who did not. Any actor, then or now, would admire this gift for externalization. I do not know whether that display of his thinking process was only theatrical or also genuine, practiced like his television performances or also his natural way of learning and being. He strode into the room, not having to announce his name, and then, I still remember, looked at each of us for an extended moment to associate our faces with the names he was writing down on his seating chart. That episode, I think, suggests why Robert Redford was overly glib in his handling of the Van Dorens in his movie Quiz Show, whose appearance, some twenty years ago, reminded me of events that, until the movie, I had remembered with sadness rather than anger.Ĭharles Van Doren was my teacher in the first class I ever had at Columbia College. It was the opinion of many undergraduates that looking through the window slats at someone's national humiliation was not a moral way to earn a living, much less to further one's career. Pressman said that it was his job to cover the story. Pressman was surprised to see how protective the students were of Van Doren.

Gabe Pressman, then as for a very long time after that a reporter for WNBC-TV, came up to Columbia University in 1959 to interview undergraduates, of whom I was one, about Charles Van Doren and the quiz show scandals.

A history of knowledge charles van doren