Jacques Barzun, Historian and Educator, Is Dead at 104 HarperCollins Jacques Barzun in an undated publicity photo. Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104. Donal F. Holway/The New York Times Mr. Barzun in 1971, at City University of New York's Graduate Center in Manhattan. His death was announced by Arthur Krystal, Mr. Barzun's friend and editor. Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon. Mr. Barzun stood beside Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling as among the mid-20th century's most wide-ranging scholars, all of whom tried to reconcile the achievements of European culture and philosophy with the demands and tastes of American intellectual and cultural life. He wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, "From Dawn to Decadence," is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of decline. Mr. Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man of letters and - he was proud to say - of the people. In books and in the classroom he championed Romantic literature, 19th-century music and the Western literary canon. He helped design the influential "great books" curriculum at Columbia, where he was one of its most admired figures for half a century, serving as provost, dean of faculty and university professor. As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined "bazaar" of miscellaneous studies. But he was also a popularizer, believing that the achievements of the arts and scholarship should not be divorced from the wider American culture. Writing for a general audience, he said, was "a responsibility of scholars." To that end he served as history consultant to Life magazine and as a critic for Harper's. His articles appeared in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post as well as The Atlantic, The Nation and The New Republic. In 1951, he joined Trilling and W. H. Auden in founding the Readers" Subscription Book Club, which sought to make serious scholarship and literature widely available. His fascinations extended to mystery fiction, which he surveyed in the anthology "The Delights of Detection" in 1961. Another was baseball, an American institution he considered with a scholar's eye. In a 1953 essay, "On Baseball," he wrote: "The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experienced in the fall of "51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers, from whom the league pennant was snatched at the last minute, give us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like." Unlike many of his colleagues, Professor Barzun showed little interest in taking overtly political positions. This was partly because he became a university administrator and had to stand above the fray, and partly because he approached the world with a detached civility and a sardonic skepticism about intellectual life. "The intellectuals" chief cause of anguish," he wrote in "The House of Intellect" (1959), "are one another's works." If Mr. Barzun kept the political issues of the day at arm's length, he nonetheless developed a reputation as a cultural conservative after the student protests at Columbia in the late 1960s. He later argued that the "peoples of the West" had "offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere." An earlier version of this obituary misidentified Arthur Krystal as the executor of Mr. Barzun's estate. He is actually Mr. Barzun's friend and editor. That version also misidentified Mariana Lowell as Amy Lowell's niece rather than her cousin. And that version incorrectly said that the curriculum Mr. Barzun designed consisted of literary and philosophical texts, not literary texts, and that it is still required of all Columbia University freshmen, not all Columbia College freshmen