Why higher education is neither - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1989 by Jason DeParle, Liza Mundy, John Heilemann

The cure is the core--the core curriculum, that is--a few carefully designed courses that all students must take and that ground them in the world's great books, events, and ideas. The goal is to cut across the narrow boundaries of academic departments, and lay the foundation for a student's later, more specialized study. While definitions of what to include will of course vary--Milton may be in on one list, out on another--still the result will almost certainly be impressive, and infinitely better than the anything-goes philosophy of the distribution requirement.

At Columbia, for instance, every incoming freshman must take the school's vaunted year-long course in Contemporary Civilization. Its reading list includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others. Every student must take Literature Humanities, which includes Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky. Similar courses cover the great traditions in art, music, and the natural sciences. Everyone may have their pet omission: Where's Aquinas? The Brontes? But what a striking difference there is between Columbia's promise of broad spectrums and those at U.Va. and B.U. It's not that Columbia students can't go on later to study New England poets; it's that they can't graduate by studying only New England poets.

Yet only a handful of American universities are built upon a true core, while hundreds, ranging from Harvard and Yale down to the average state university, let their students settle for the hit-and-missness of distribution requirements. It's, as a parent paying through the nose to educate your children, this makes you angry--it should. The reasons for it lie in the bureaucratic incentives of the modern university, where power over the curriculum is lodged in academic departments more concerned with their own interests than with those of their students. To the department chair, distribution requirements mean guaranteed students, and guaranteed students mean money and power. If, as a parent who-s bought this academic ruse, this makes you livid--well, it should. It is, finally, a form of contempt toward your kids.

In fact, whether you have kids or not, there's a good chance that you, gentle reader, wasted much of your own college time in similar fashion, mastering the Beats but knowing nothing of Aeschylus or Augustine, Byron or Burke. And if that leaves you feeling pissed at your alma mater--it should.

Harvard's core lite

Fortunately, the absurdities of college curricula have drawn an increasing amount of fire in recent years. Unfortunately, it's almost exclusively card-carrying conservatives who are aiming the gun. William Bennett made curriculum reform a favorite bully pulpit subject during his tenure as education secretary. Allan Bloom's attack, The Closing of the American Mind, earned him a nationwide best seller. So did that of E.D. Hirsch. What's unfortunate is that while the conservtive reformers have diagnosed the ailment correctly--curricula diluta--they've tended to offer a suspiciously narrow cure: a canon composed almost exclusively of Western, and male, influences. Liberals have responded by dismissing the idea of a core altogether--ceding leadership to the Right--rather than working to institute their own core, one that preserves greatness as the standard but doesn't stop at William Bennett's borders.