Columbia University

Columbia University is a formative setting in two separate lives: Howard Thurman’s developing vocation and Thomas Merton’s passage from restless student life toward Catholic faith. For Thurman, summer study there helped turn academic ability toward ministry and reflective thinking; for Merton, Columbia College became a lively intellectual and social world in which friendships and teachers redirected his interests. The accounts do not bring the two men together. Instead, the university recurs as a place where education opens onto spiritual change by different routes.

A Place of Study and Redirection

Columbia enters the narrative through particular experiences rather than a general portrait of the institution. Thurman attended courses there during two summers while studying at Morehouse College. Merton enrolled later, after the difficult year at Cambridge and his return to New York. The episodes are distinct in circumstance and tone: Thurman’s account emphasizes a change in his intellectual habits and vocational purpose, while Merton’s begins with an energetic campus life and gradually turns toward theology and conversion.

In both accounts, the university’s importance lies in the people and encounters that made study consequential. A course could correct Thurman’s confidence or give him a lasting method for approaching problems. For Merton, teaching could disclose a coherent intellectual tradition, while a friendship or even entering the wrong classroom could bring him into contact with ideas he had not set out to find. Columbia is therefore presented less as a fixed backdrop than as a setting where academic life repeatedly unsettles an existing direction.

Thurman’s Summers and the Choice of Ministry

During his first summer at Columbia, Thurman did so well in his first course that success fed his ego. He later described himself as becoming a nuisance; one of his favorite Morehouse professors finally told him to stop speaking in class. The reprimand, the account says, seemed to cure the problem. Academic achievement here is not depicted as an uncomplicated triumph: it first magnifies self-importance, then a teacher’s direct intervention changes his conduct.

The second summer brought a different kind of influence. Thurman took a course in reflective thinking and learned to use reflection in solving problems. He regarded it as “the most significant single course he ever took.” The course mattered not simply as subject knowledge but as a way of thinking he could carry beyond the classroom. It gave his intellectual development a practical discipline, in contrast to the first summer’s lesson in restraint.

His Sundays widened the effect of his time in New York. Thurman attended Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, whose beauty and formalism made a strong impression because he had never been in a church like it. The summer minister, Dr. Hugo Black, impressed him through his manner, mind, and skill as a preacher. These experiences joined the influence of his Morehouse professors: by the beginning of his senior year, Thurman had decided that ministry would be his vocation. Columbia thus belongs to a larger vocational turn, not as its sole cause but as one of the places where study, worship, and models of preaching converged.

Merton’s Campus Life and Friendships

Merton’s Columbia years initially seem far removed from monastic life. At Columbia College, he became a conspicuous campus figure: he joined a fraternity, wrote for the humor magazine, tried out for the track team, briefly flirted with Communism, edited the annual, and played jazz loudly. A friend remembered him as “the noisiest bastard I ever met.” The catalogue of activities and the friend’s blunt description establish the force of his early campus presence; they also sharpen the contrast with the Trappist monk he would later become.

Columbia was also the setting for friendships that endured beyond student life. Poet Robert Lax became a lifelong friend and influence. Edward Rice later wrote the first biography of Merton, The Man in the Sycamore Tree. Brahmachari, a Hindu monk, encouraged Merton to read Augustine’s Confessions and The Imitation of Christ. Robert Giroux, another friend, later became an editor at Harcourt Brace, which published Merton’s early autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. The campus relationships therefore reach in several directions: toward spiritual reading, lasting personal influence, biography, and publication.

Merton himself contrasted Columbia favorably with Cambridge. He said that, compared with Cambridge, the “big sooty factory was full of light and fresh air” and had “a kind of genuine intellectual vitality in the air.” The image holds two qualities together: the university is physically described as sooty and factory-like, yet intellectually alive. His judgment helps explain why Columbia could accommodate both his noisy, varied student activities and a serious enlargement of his thinking.

Teachers, Theology, and Conversion

Dan Walsh’s theology course became a turning point in Merton’s search for knowledge about faith. What impressed Merton was Walsh’s presentation of Catholic theology as a whole rather than as competing schools and systems. In that account, theologians complemented one another, casting different light on the same truths. The course offered a model of intellectual coherence that helped draw Merton toward Catholic thought.

Merton was also attracted to Catholicism’s philosophical foundations. Étienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, with its emphasis on God as pure Being, helped him recognize that no idea or image could adequately define God. He later recalled gaining “an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and the Catholic faith.” This intellectual attraction did not make him a devotee of every theological approach: he was less drawn to the dialectical and speculative theology of Thomas Aquinas than to the spiritual, mystical way of Augustine.

Mark Van Doren influenced Merton through literature and through the circumstances of an accidental encounter. Merton signed up for a history course but went to the wrong room; finding Van Doren about to teach Shakespeare, he stayed. He considered it the best course he had in college because it brought him to what he regarded as fundamental matters: “life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity.” The episode makes intellectual discovery contingent rather than planned: a mistaken room leads to a course that helps define what learning can mean.

Although no one was pushing him toward conversion, Merton began to consider it. On reflection, he came to see that God had been moving him toward change for a long time, though he had not sensed it at the time. After hesitating, he walked to Corpus Christi Catholic Church beside the Columbia campus and took instruction. He understood baptism as the beginning, not the end, of spiritual life, and did not yet know how difficult the journey would be. Columbia’s proximity to the church gives the account a concrete threshold: the movement from classes and campus friendships to religious commitment takes place in the same New York setting.

Significance in the Two Narratives

The university’s narrative significance comes from this contrast between trajectories. Thurman’s Columbia experience is brief and summer-based, but it contributes to a vocational decision through reflective study, correction, worship, and exposure to a preacher. Merton’s enrollment produces a broader portrait of student life: friendships and varied pursuits accompany courses in theology and literature, while intellectual curiosity and spiritual reading accumulate before his decision to seek instruction in Catholicism.

Neither account treats education as a simple, uninterrupted ascent. Thurman’s early academic success feeds an excess of confidence before a professor checks it; Merton’s noisy campus reputation coexists with friendships and courses that turn him toward serious questions of faith. Columbia matters because these opposing textures—discipline and exuberance, formal worship and accidental discovery, intellectual inquiry and personal change—are allowed to meet there. The result is not one institutional story shared by Thurman and Merton, but two distinct accounts of how a university setting can become a point of redirection.