Van Doren joined the Columbia faculty after earning his PhD here in 1920, and was among the original band of young scholars who taught John Erskine's General Honors course. Over subsequent decades, he would open the world of ideas and poetry to Columbia students, among them alumni poets Louis Simpson, Richard Howard, John Hollander, John Berryman, Thomas Merton, and Allen Ginsberg. He guided the planning and helped launch of Humanities A in the Core Curriculum ("Lit Hum," a cornerstone of the Core to this day) and taught a section himself for 17 years, an experience about which he said in his autobiography "nothing I ever did with students was more fun." Upon his retirement from full-time teaching at Columbia in 1959, Van Doren told Newsweek: "I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds." After he retired from teaching at Columbia in 1959, he continued writing. Today the students of Columbia College honor great teachers with the Mark Van Doren Award.