Roosevelt Montás was a boy in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic when his mother brought him to New York two days before his 12th birthday. She had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. Years later, as a high school sophomore, he spotted a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues among the books neighbors had thrown out of his apartment building. He has said Socrates changed his life.
That turn carried Montás to Columbia, where a high-school mentor helped him get in and where he met the great books tradition of the Core Curriculum. There he encountered St. Augustine, and Augustine gave him, in his own words, a language to approach his interiority and a model for exploring the emotional wilderness of coming to adulthood in America. The experience also did something more surprising: Augustine stripped away Montás’s Christian faith and left him with a faith in philosophy instead.
Montás went on to lead Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and now he is starting a center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College. The story matters today because Montás is not treating humanistic education as a relic. He is making the case that it remains one of the few forces capable of changing lives and, by extension, the culture that shapes them. The piece was updated at 10:53 a.m. ET on May 19, 2026.
David Brooks says he visits about two dozen campuses every year and meets at least a few teachers like Montás on each one, at Ivies, community colleges, big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. What links them is a belief that true humanistic study can still move a life. Montás put the point plainly: what he gives students are tools for a life of freedom.
That claim sits at the center of a larger argument about democracy and education. The article says democracy begins to crumble if society does not offer deep humanistic education, because humanism starts from a hard truth: people are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. Humans can be cruel, fascist and barbaric in ways no other mammal can match, but they also carry longings for beauty, justice, love and truth. That tension is not a slogan. It is the reason the books still matter.
The unresolved question is not whether Montás’s path was extraordinary. It was. The question is whether institutions can keep producing teachers who see humanistic study as a civic necessity rather than a decorative extra. Brooks’s answer is that they already are, and that the work now is to recognize them before the culture forgets what they are for.
