David Brooks Essay Highlights Roosevelt Montás on Campus Freedom
David Brooks published an essay on May 19, 2026, arguing that something big is happening on campus and pointing to Roosevelt Montás as one of the teachers shaping it. The piece was updated at 10:53 a.m. ET and presents humanistic study as a path to freedom, not just job preparation.
Montás, a Columbia educator and center leader who is now starting a center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College, said, “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom.”
Roosevelt Montás at Columbia
Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic, and two days before his 12th birthday his mother flew him to New York after finding a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. When he was a sophomore in high school, neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books, and he found a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues among them.
A high-school mentor later helped him get into Columbia, where students confront the great books of Western civilization in the Core Curriculum. At Columbia, he encountered the writings of St. Augustine, later led the school’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and now is starting a center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College.
Humanism on campuses
The essay says Brooks visits about two dozen campuses every year and meets at least a few teachers like Montás at each one. It places those teachers at Ivies, community colleges, big state schools, and small liberal-arts colleges, suggesting the pattern reaches across different kinds of institutions.
Brooks defines humanism as a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature. In the essay, that means seeing people as both deeply broken and wonderfully made, with longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth.
What the essay argues
The article says true humanistic study can change lives, and it describes teachers who want to walk with students through questions of who they are, what they might become, and what world they find themselves in. It also says cultivating those longings can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.
For readers trying to understand the campus debate, the practical point is that the essay broadens the argument beyond degrees and careers. Brooks is describing a network of teachers and programs that treat citizenship, reading, and moral formation as part of the college mission, with Montás as the clearest example.
