The Intellectual Dark Web of Morningside Heights

Meet the public intellectuals, heterodox thinkers, and polymaths of Columbia that are keeping the spirit of intellectual wonder alive.

Jonas Du/Columbia Sundial

Many of us arrived in Morningside Heights with some idealized vision of “the great Ivy League professor.” We would meet John Keating from the Dead Poet Society or Terence Fletcher from Whiplash—rigorous, challenging, and somehow always awe-inspiring. The Core, the great books, and the ivy-covered walls would provide the necessary decor.

Yet after a few semesters, disillusion dawned. There were many late nights at JJs, but what happened to the promised eclectic escapades, intellectual tirades, and literary salons? Where were the iconic courses co-taught by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, each throwing intellectual spears in a joust of the minds? What room would host the next legendary debate between Chomsky and Foucault, Hart and Dworkin, Baldwin and Buckley? Perhaps this was all an illusion, cruelly propagated by Hollywood script writers and make-belief nostalgia. Perhaps—you might begin to wonder after a few semesters of endless meandering—it never existed at all.

I come bearing good news: This rich tradition is alive and well. It is simply hidden in plain sight, there for all those who seek it. This article hopes to draw a map for the curious and the eager, to help them venture into the intellectual universes hidden underneath the tunnels of Morningside Heights. Beware, a return to safety is not guaranteed.

These great intellectuals are no monolith. They include lawyers, linguists, and physicists. Some are staunch liberals, others lean conservative, many more are apolitical; some call the College home, others teach an older crowd, and one even dwells beyond the campus gates; several are household names, others are well worth the discovery. All, however, are united by a burning passion for the pursuit of truth.

Three criteria in particular set them apart. First, they are public intellectuals, whose ideas reach further than the pages of niche journals and whose teachings travel beyond the walls of the ivory tower. Second, they are heterodox thinkers who revere disagreement and honor divergences, unafraid to push back against prevailing sentiments. Lastly, in a world of increasingly narrow academic subspecialization, they are polymaths who refuse to be boxed in by the disciplinary boundaries of technical academia. They are the last remnants of a rare species of Renaissance men and women that has otherwise gone extinct.

Nathaniel Peters

NATHANIEL PETERS: Bringing The Core to Life Outside the Classroom

My first exposure to this world, ironically enough, was outside the castle gates. A few blocks past 116th, through a gothic church and a side elevator lies a small wooden door with an owl insignia. When it opens, the first thing anyone notices are the endless books. Shelves overflow with the classics in philosophy, theology, politics and literature. A wooden table sits in the middle with a few chairs by its sides. As I entered for the first time during my first semester on campus, a Columbia historian began to talk about Christopher Lasch and his book, The Culture of Narcissism. Dinner in hand, students interjected, listened, and debated. In the weeks that followed, dinner topics covered linguistics, Mozart, metaphysics, and organ transplants; professors, judges, and deans lectured; PhDs and freshmen alike traveled together to the opera, the Met Museum, and Lincoln Center.

Amongst this small crowd, Nathaniel Peters is king. As the director of the Morningside Institute, the Catholic theologian has a dream job: to make the Core come alive. Through fostering intimate discussions and close intellectual friendship, the institute hopes to allow students to “experience the humanities not as dead or oppressive but rich and vital, a source of personal fulfillment and a resource for answering life’s most important questions,” according to its website.

“We want to provide a kind of intellectual community that helps students and professors get to what really lies at the heart of liberal education: approaching the text not from an adversarial stance but together, united by a desire to better understand the human condition and ourselves,” Peters told me.

It can be valuable to have an intellectual space where the pressures of traditional classrooms are removed or diminished. No laptop in sight or grade in mind, the self-selected cohort isn't here to game their GPA. “Morningside is very deliberately structured so that you can’t add a line to your resume by coming,” Peters said. “It is something you do because you are genuinely interested in these texts, in the world of ideas, or simply in that one professor speaking that night.”

No image better symbolizes the spirit of Morningside better than the drawing of a small hedgehog that marks the room. The artwork calls back to Isaiah Berlin’s classic tale in which “the fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one big trick.” Like Berlin’s hedgehog, Nathaniel Peters and the students who pass through his door seem animated by a never-ending desire to tie together different branches of knowledge. In contrast to the specialized nature of research universities which teaches students to zoom in, Morningside hopes to “form hedgehogs who have a sense of how everything could fit together as a whole, pointing towards the good life,” Peters explained.

Katja Vogt

KATJA VOGT: Asking the Big Questions Which Make Life Worth Living

Back in the classroom, philosophy professor Katja Vogt carries forward this tradition. Vogt publishes on ethics and epistemology, often engaging with ancient scholars. Yet recently she has undertaken a monumental project: helping to unshackle academia from its sticky adherence to niche subdisciplines. She co-taught a class in fall 2024 tackling topics no less ambitious than “Living, Dying, and the Meaning of Life.” A semester should be enough. Taught jointly with the medical school and the dean of religious life, the class covers everything from how to prepare for death, whether faith can be rational, and the purpose of friendship. The best way to describe her broader project, however, is not as an academic exercise but rather as an effort to help us recapture the childish wonder we lost in adolescence: to ask the big questions, to make us conscious shapers of our life project, and to rekindle a sense of awe and encourage us to marvel at minute details which we once held so intuitively.

This past semester, Vogt did it again. In co-teaching her newest course, “AI in Context,” the polymath raises the question: how can we understand technology through the lens of music, literature, engineering, art, and philosophy? Her goal is to “create opportunities for research and teaching that reaches not just beyond departments, but beyond schools,” she told me.

“It’s not clear to me why researchers in Medicine and Philosophy shouldn’t share ideas and values, or why philosophers shouldn’t have things to talk about with computer scientists,” she said. Thales, Aristotle, and Leibniz were philosophers, but also scientists, mathematicians, and political thinkers, and it is through these interactions that their genius was crafted.

Professor Vogt’s goal is to bring back this lost tradition. Today, she spends her time at her newly founded ValuesLab with the goal of eliciting and influencing the moral values embedded in tomorrow’s AI systems. When I asked her what her next project would be, Vogt simply answered, “I’d like to make it easier for students who love philosophy and something else.”

Mark Lilla

MARK LILLA: The Quintessential Public Intellectual of Morningside Heights

There is perhaps no Columbia professor more enigmatic and shrouded in mystery than Mark Lilla, professor of humanities. He is the source of wonder, whispers, and rumors. He is somehow always in the room where it happens. Although Lilla is a political liberal, the most accurate way to describe him might be aesthetically conservative: an almost extinct breed of intellectuals whose temperament is reminiscent of a time that never quite used to be, but has somehow always existed in our shared nostalgia. A way of thinking, dressing, speaking, and being which looks around and finds itself abandoned by the tides of the past. He is part of those who look back at history, and smile. “I want a liberal democracy that is safe for, and cultivates, ‘high brows,’” he told me. On this long intellectual march, he finds companionship with fellow travelers, from Auden and Augustine to Niebuhr and Berlin.

Yet in the classroom, what truly sets Lilla apart is not his mystique, but his depth. In a school where students only read books superficially and where the Core pushes students to cover Kant in a week and Plato in two, Lilla pushes back. Like a clinician, he takes on a new patient every semester. Rousseau. Tocqueville. Pascal. Montesquieu. Mann. Montaigne. Every page is scrutinized, every sentence is cut open, every word is dissected. The goal is not only to understand their argument, but to climb inside the thinker’s mind: to enter their intellectual universe, to understand what moves them, their passions, their worries, and their existential dread.

“The master human science,” he tells me, “is not philosophy, but psychology—especially the psychology of the philosophers.” By reading great books in this way, we see in them not a political treatise, but a way to discern universal traits at the depth of human emotions; they become a manual for the soul. Yet this kind of deep moral wrestling is hard. It requires effort. It strains the muscles like a sport, and it is increasingly threatened by the pre-professional attitude of the “research-industrial complex,” as Lilla put it, which has slowly crept up to take over the minds of college students.

Decades later, Lilla is still in contact with many of his former students—“my kids,” he says with a smile. He speaks of them as an extended intellectual family of sorts. They send him thick envelopes with their first manuscripts, long emails with rambling manifestos, and every once in a while they knock back on his door, weary of corporate servitude and “asking to come home.” It is this paternal spirit of deep care and mentoring throughout intellectual adolescence that has earned him a cult-like following amongst an esoteric niche of Columbia undergraduates.

John McWhorter

JOHN MCWHORTER: The Unapologetic Iconoclast

John McWhorter likes to go against the grain. He is simultaneously the progressives’ favorite antiprogressive, and the conservative’s favorite self-professed “cranky liberal Democrat.” In many ways, he is a political paradox, an abnormality that shouldn’t exist under the dogmatic partisanship of our times.

At his core, McWhorter is a linguist who has made it his career untangling far reaching questions about the political significance of language. How do words become cast as beyond the pale? How does the same phrase change meaning to cover up new political realities, and to what degree does language condition culture?

But he is also openly skeptical of bien-pensant liberals and their desire to Say The Right Thing™ by repeating the same canned virtue-signaling phrases, devoid of any substance. He has, as a black man, repeatedly argued against the policing of the N-word and believes that “third-wave antiracism is a pseudo-religion” harmful to black progress. Doing so has earned him many scorns and enemies in the New York Times bubble, where he writes a weekly newsletter, and in the ivory tower of academia. He has been called despicable, disingenuous, and dangerous. Yet nonetheless, he persists. In the immortal words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

What is most admirable about McWhorter, however, is not this contrarian streak but his ideal of the civic intellectual. The original academia was founded by Plato as a political institution serving a public purpose. Its goal was not just to further the frontier of research, but also to form intellectuals who could then enlighten the broader populace. There was a citizenship component tied to scholarly practice, an honor associated with bridging private discovery and public knowledge. The modern university often forgets this lesson, teaching to an increasingly insular crowd of self-reproducing elites. McWhorter belongs to a select group who refuses this practice. He is a tenured professor, not a career journalist, but has a column in the New York Times, is a regular at The Atlantic, and a constant guest on NPR and The New Republic. He approaches public topics through a scholarly lens and introduces broad audiences to niche academic feuds, examining race through linguistics and tying political performativity to deeper accounts of social evolution.

PHILIP HAMBURGER AND BERNARD HARCOURT: The Godfathers Of Political Revolutionaries

Our intellectual heroes are not always peaceful. Across Amsterdam at the law school, two scholars are engaged in a violent and bloody battle of ideas. Philip Hamburger and Bernard Harcourt are the respective godfathers of clashing political traditions. One reactionary, the other revolutionary.

Philip Hamburger

Hamburger’s project lies in dismantling the administrative state, intellectually, legally, culturally, and politically. To do so, he is not afraid to use every means. Beyond publishing voraciously, he runs a real underground pipeline for conservative-adjacent students at Columbia. At the Galileo Center, he brings leading voices on academic freedom to campus. Through the Federalist Society, he cultivates a pipeline of talent for the future of the right. And at the Center for Law and Liberty, he helps fund their most ambitious ideas. When he’s not at the law school, Hamburger can be found behind the closed curtains of Serafina’s back room on 105th, where he co-organizes the monthly meetings of the Columbia Academic Freedom Council. There, about 30 of the University’s most acclaimed professors and trustees meet in a dimly lit room to discuss ways to bring back intellectual diversity and academic freedom. In his spare time, Hamburger leads the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an activist Supreme Court shop that has reshaped the scope of administrative powers by bringing forward a litany of cases that eventually overturned the landmark Chevron precedent (the cornerstone of the modern administrative state). In many ways, he is the closest thing Morningside Heights has seen to a bookish Leonard Leo or an American Don Corleone. Young, hungry and ambitious right-leaning students line up to kiss the ring for placements amongst DC’s elite conservative intelligentsia.

In the same building rules another don. Bernard Harcourt’s intellectual roots could not be any more different: He draws from Foucault rather than Hayek, Arendt over Friedman, and the French and Frankfurt Schools over Chicago’s. He and Hamburger disagree over everything from the purpose of our laws, the legitimacy of our government and the morality of our traditions. Yet for all their differences, the two have a profound common ground: a shared vision that academia is no mere theoretical exercise, but fertile ground for praxis, the practice of applying theory to the real world.

Bernard Harcourt

For Harcourt, that takes the form of the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, where he argues for the subjectivity of truth and knowledge as mere objects of power; the Institute for a Just Society, where he puts these ideas into practice; and the 13/13 Seminars, where he lectures on topics like Marx, abolitionism, and revolutions. Harcourt seems to be fighting every injustice. He leads litigation against the death penalty and life without parole. He defends the indefensible in Guantanamo Bay. He fights back against the abuses of violent policing. He is the academic voice for Columbia protesters. He gives clandestine lectures on Foucault. Anywhere remnants of the ancien régime show their heads, Harcourt somehow spawns, ready to bring out the guillotine. For revolutionaries, Jacobins, and utopians alike, Professor Harcourt opens the window of progressive résistance.

Brian Greene

BRIAN GREENE: Physicist, Poet, Philosopher and Everything In Between

Columbia’s great public intellectuals do not only hide in the humanities. They populate the sciences too. Not far away in Pupin Hall, Brian Greene is working to demystify the hidden secrets of the universe. When he is not on a talk show with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, lecturing at TED, or speaking at Davos, Greene works on quantum supersymmetry in an age-old search for a unifying theory. His work ties together the micro and macro: questioning the origins of the Big Bang, the existence of other universes, the link between entropy and evolution, and the composition of dark matter.

His book The Elegant Universe has become a rite of passage across campus. More than anything else, Greene stands out for his effort to bridge the sciences and humanities, taking observations about the expansion of the universe to raise philosophical questions around absurdity, meaning, and purpose, in addition to relating discoveries in quantum physics to age-old discussions on free will. His immensely popular course running every fall, “Origins and Meaning,” epitomizes this phenomenon: exploring why galaxies, stars, atoms, the first cells, life itself, consciousness, language, and culture arise, and how these phenomenons interact and help explain one another. There is an unbounded curiosity at the root of Greene’s academic career, a desire to merge the great history of the universe into understandable patterns and interactions—this familiar yearning to become one of Isaiah Berlin’s famous hedgehogs. Simultaneously a physicist and philosopher, Greene is a key to the intellectual jungle of Morningside Heights.

Reflections on the Dark Web

These thinkers do not exist in a vacuum. They constitute a web, not a monolith. Katja Vogt and Mark Lilla speak at Nathaniel Peters’ institute. Peters co-hosts dinner debates with Philip Hamburger. Hamburger clashes with Harcourt in publications. Almost all, I suspect, read John McWhorter’s columns. Together, they have profoundly influenced how I see and interact with the world—and for that I am forever indebted.

Yet as I prepare to part ways with Columbia, I can’t help but look back. More than at any other point in history, the University and its very ideal is under attack. “Serious teaching no longer goes on there,” critics proclaim. “Only the radicalization and corruption of the youth occurs,” they shout, as Socrates rolls in his grave.

Not so. The university is alive and well. It is flourishing. Blooming. It is there for all to seize. So for any freshmen or underclassmen who read these words: Cherish these moments. Explore the Intellectual Dark Web of Morningside Heights. Use this list as your guide. Own it and make it yours. The professors I have listed are only a small fraction of a much larger record, so go out and find the next name. Too many of us will leave alma mater without having discovered all of her secrets. I hope that you will take the leap of faith, and explore.

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Mr. Darmon is a 2025 graduate of Columbia. He majored in philosophy and government in the dual degree program between Columbia and Sciences Po Paris. He is the founder of the Civic Dialogue Fellowship.