Columbia History Class Puts the Pedal to the Metal

When Kenneth T. Jackson began teaching his course, " The History of the City of New York," 37 years ago, he decided to take his students out of the classroom to grasp the full impact of the urban environment. He first thought of daylight walking tours, but the streets were too crowded. So he settled on a nighttime bike ride with 10 to 15 students, the better to see New York in all its glory.

“If you’re studying history,” said Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History, “especially the history of a city—and it’s here and you can feel it and experience it—you ought to get out of the classroom and not just read about it, but go look at it.”

Today Jackson’s course is one of the most popular in the University, and the bike ride attracts so many students that it now requires a permit from the New York Police Department. This year’s ride, which took place Sept. 22, included some 250 bikers, who were trailed by an SUV with volunteer mechanics and a University ambulance, which fortunately proved to be unnecessary.

Meeting at 11 p.m. at the sundial, the bikers started moving out just shy of midnight, wending their way downtown through Central Park and Times Square, past Gramercy Park, the West Village and around Battery Park City, pausing along the way for Jackson to deliver lessons on a megaphone. The ride ended near 6 a.m., after riders walked their bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge and reached the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The weary bikers took the subway back to Columbia’s campus.

Jackson, a native of Memphis, Tenn., came to Columbia as an urban historian, drawn here because he wanted to live in tall buildings in a real city before continuing his academic career in the hinterlands. “But I took to New York,” he said. “I love the city, its density, its mysteries, and the fact that you can go down a street and you have no idea what you’re going to see.”

Artist Xu Bing talks about the Square Word Calligraphy Classroom exhibition , which features English words resembling Chinese calligraphic characters. (2:40)

Albert J. Weatherhead III , an industrialist and philanthropist who endowed Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, died Sept. 20 in Cleveland at age 86. A business executive who took over his family’s automobile parts business in 1956, Weatherhead also founded Weatherchem in 1971, which made products used to dispense food and medication. In 1999, Weatherhead made an $18 million gift to Columbia from the Weatherhead Foundation, which had been founded by his father in 1953.