As is often the case, this post was prompted by the confluence of a several things, a few of them originating online. The most recent of these was this Twitter thread (actually two nested threads) about “Great Books” curricula, which someone shared into my timeline yesterday:
This reminded me that I had this Timothy Burke post on core curricula open in a tab, which itself is a response to this Chronicle of Higher Ed essay extolling the virtues of Columbia’s core program (which you will not be surprised to learn was written by Roosevelt Montás, who both used to run Columbia’s program and has a book about the value of “Great Books” to promote). The biggest factor, though, is that the faculty at Union just voted to approve a new Gen Ed program (we may officially be calling it “Common Curriculum” these days, but it’s colloquially “Gen Ed” to everyone, so I’ll stick with that).
This might seem like an example of synchronicity, but “Core Curriculum” is the free square on the Academic Discussion Bingo card— at any moment there are dozens if not hundreds of academics out there somewhere debating or at least pondering the merits of a core curriculum. It rivals “Why can’t I get a parking space closer to my office?” on the list of perpetually evergreen faculty topics.
They come at it from very different angles, but Montás, @JMC and @suzy_schneider are all making a case for some sort of core experience in which every single student at a given institution reads and discusses the exact same books. Burke is a little more questioning of the idea, but basically acknowledges the attraction, while raising a number of logistical concerns that I find very valid. I’m much more conflicted on the question— I sympathize with some of the arguments for it, and see some of the appeal of the idea, but to a large degree I find myself thinking it’s not worth the headache.
This is in large part due to the kinds of logistical concerns that Burke raises— while it’s hard to deny that giving all students a common foundation is an attractive idea, having served my time as a department chair, one of my first worries is “How are you going to staff this?” In some ways the “core course” model is a relic of the days when 400-student lecture classes were considered acceptable, and you could offer the entire entering class a reasonably uniform experience because you only needed a bare handful of faculty to teach it (backed by a small army of TAs, of course…). A class meeting the standards expected of elite institutions in the present day is going to require a huge number of small sections, with a huge number of people to teach them. Montás tries to wave this off, but it’s a genuine problem for an institution that can’t readily hire a shitload of teaching faculty for the sake of one course.
And even if you do manage to hire or coerce people into teaching a core course, as Burke notes it’s very difficult to make it approximately uniform across the huge number of sections required. You can address this to some degree by setting a common reading list, but that increases the difficulty of finding people to teach it, both because of the lack of expertise Burke mentions, and just because people get bored teaching off a set syllabus. It all just seems like a positively enormous headache for whoever has to administer the program.
I’m also not sold on the benefits of this experience, which all seem pretty nebulous. Montás nods in this direction when he repeats the quip that upper-level instructors at Columbia “know exactly what each student has forgotten,” but if anything that under-sells the ability of students to compartmentalize. I’ve been at this more than twenty years now, and I’m still regularly surprised by the degree to which students can fail to remember material that was covered in a prior course in their major that was taught in the immediately previous term. This leaves me deeply skeptical that a core course taught in the first year or two will produce much of lasting value for students who don’t go on to major in something directly related to one of the works they read.
And, of course, that brings us around to one of my biggest problems with the whole idea, which is that these courses and the discussion around them tend to focus rather narrowly on “the humanities.” The works in question are literature, history, and philosophy, with maybe a smattering of early social science. They tend not to explicitly include science, which means they are implicitly excluding a vast swathe of human experience. (This is why “humanities” gets scare quotes above— I hate the term for its implication that the sciences are inhuman— and I try to write around using it as much as possible.)
Now, there are good reasons to avoid a “great books” approach to science subjects. There are very few classic works of science that stand up all that well today— Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the only one that really comes to mind as a classic that’s still valuable to read in its original form. Most of the great works of the past are rooted in concepts that they helped make outdated, and can be explained more clearly and effectively through more modern treatments. That’s not to say there aren’t interesting things to be gleaned from tracing the arguments of, say, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems or Newton’s Opticks, but there’s a conceptual infrastructure there that needs reframing to a far greater degree than would be required for literary works of similar vintage.
Now basically every Gen Ed curriculum requires at least some science at some point, so it’s not completely ignored, but those courses tend not to have any consistency— it’s a grab-bag of a course or two in whatever discipline(s) a student finds congenial. This puts core curriculum models in an awkward place, though, holding that it’s critically important for every student to have a true common foundation of works from one domain of human activity, but it’s perfectly fine for another broad domain that is just as fundamentally human to be only patchily covered. (I should note that Columbia’s program does appear to require a common science course, which I think is probably a better approach than a lot of what’s out there.)
That mismatch then leaves me wondering about the central claim of the core course approach. That is, if it’s okay to leave the coverage of STEM open to individual student choice and interest, as opposed to requiring coverage of a set curriculum of essential topics, why shouldn’t we do the same with literature and history and philosophy? I’ve read my share of classics in all of those fields, and a lot of them are a slog, in much the same way that I suspect science is for a lot of literature majors grudgingly taking astronomy. And that’s the case even when I’m selecting particular topics that I’m already interested in. (I haven’t had to labor through a book I had absolutely zero choice in since high school, and I don’t recall the experience fondly.)
So in the perennial Gen Ed debates, I tend to come down much more on the side of a “distribution requirement” than a core curriculum specifying certain courses covering specific classic works. I definitely believe in liberal arts education— every student should have to take courses in as broad a range of disciplines as feasible— but also favor giving students agency. I think that if you let students select the specific topics they study themselves, the end result will be a more meaningful experience for them than they’d get by being pushed through a set curriculum of works chosen because they’re deemed “classics” by somebody else.
This, unfortunately, tends not to be a widely shared approach these days, so we tend to end up with systems that are overdetermined and needlessly baroque for my tastes (the newly-approved system at Union is another such). But in my ideal world, we’d spend a lot less time worrying about core reading lists, and offer students more choice. Also, the walk from my car would be a whole lot shorter…
As usual, a lot of thinking-via-the-keyboard in here. But at least I managed not to wander into sharing details of internal debates that would get me in trouble at work, so that’s a win. If you’d like a front-row seat for when I inevitably screw that up, here’s a button:
and here’s one if you want to pass this on to somebody else:
and if you want to argue about Gen Ed curricula in general (heh), the comments will be open.
I did my undergrad in Canada and had a couple postdocs in Europe. I am now in the math department at a state university in the US, and part of my job is advising undergraduates. I find the whole thing with gen ed requirements to be very confusing and frustrating. I presume this is because I didn't "grow up with it" and therefore find it very foreign. That said, I feel like I have met two types of students: the ones who really want to do math, and who therefore game the gen ed system to do as little non-math as possible, and the ones who are doing math because they have to major in *something* who then really pile on the gen ed classes while doing the minimum necessary to get the math degree.