Pop Goes the Curriculum
Heilemann, John
Why Higher Education is Neither If college costs $18,000 a year, how come your kid's transcript is probably filled with courses like 'Poets Who Sing, 'Persian Carpets,' and 'Australian...
...The reign of academic specialization creates one more problem that the supporters of core curricula need to keep in mind: most members of today's faculty simply aren't prepared to teach the kind of sweeping courses required by a genuine core...
...Or European History 542: "Popular Religion...
...For the next thing you know, someone might be camping outside his office, demanding that he teach more courses too...
...Certainly the mirror of contemporary civilization, these days, would include Islam...
...But the school's faculty rebelled, stalling efforts at reform, then as now...
...Instead, the average faculty adviser will simply explain that, "If Western Civ is closed this semester, you can still meet your distribution requirement with 19th century Puerto Rican history...
...This cafeteria curriculum of loose distribution requirements doesn't provide a balanced educational diet," says Joseph Horn, the associate dean of the college of liberal arts at the University of Texas...
...Students could choose between "The Social Inheritance of Western Civilization" (emphasizing events) or "Western Thought and Institutions" (emphasizing ideas), but they still wouldn't graduate without knowing the basic foundations of their civilization...
...Dear Ms...
...Why Higher Education is Neither If college costs $18,000 a year, how come your kid's transcript is probably filled with courses like 'Poets Who Sing, 'Persian Carpets,' and 'Australian History...
...Nowhere is it written that if undergraduates didn't get admitted into a course by U.Va.'s computer registration, they should leave the instructor a note and show up in class on the first day...
...The reading list looks really interesting...
...The student who passes up Shakespeare for Beast Literature may have a difficult time when he reads a political column describing Richard Darman as George Bush's lago...
...It's easy to imagine such a course being rigorous indeed...
...and if the outsider is a parent, such lofty phrases as "academic freedom" may even accompany the indignation...
...One, there's the gut...
...Here, beyond the promises of coursebooks, is the voice of educational reality...
...In a case like that," he says, "you're forced to just sign up for any course that's open, whether you're interested in it or not...
...Ah—so that's what it "means to be broadly educated today...
...Yours Truly, A. Undergrad 228-91-6855 The graduate student didn't know what to do...
...Realizing that someone might catch on, Harvard built in an answer: the core seeks to convey not specific material but only "major approaches to knowledge...
...This year, the school is offering a voluntary core for about 150 of its 3,547 entering freshmen...
...If you're surprised that this powerlessness isn't better known, don't be...
...The blunt explanation: the system of faculty privilege triumphed again...
...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...
...Students take what they want and not for any of the reasons they should...
...The questions: If this overbooked course is deemed so important that it inspires desperate competition to get in, why is it being taught by a mere graduate student...
...Of course, such standards as Intro to Western Civ can still be found in the course catalogs of most major universities...
...Thus are born such fundamentals as U.T.'s study of gypsies, courses in which the professor, in effect, offers the student a trade: I'll give you one distribution requirement in exchange for your indulgence while I prepare my next conference paper...
...what kind of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist...
...On those rare occasions when a truly talented teacher tackles a broad and worthy subject, the competition for a spot is likely to be severe...
...But by combining New England Poets with another equally narrow course (for instance, "Whitman and Dickinson") the B.U...
...Please put me on your waiting list...
...how they are used, what their value is"—everything, that is, but the knowledge itself...
...Aphra Behn, were there...
...And if that leaves you feeling pissed at your alma mater—it should...
...What's more, if the core included, say, Shakespeare, it would strip the English department of its exclusive Shakespeare rights—a key way of attracting students into the department...
...The social sciences requirement, meanwhile, can be satisfied with the combination of "Comparative Family Systems" and "Folksongs and Social History...
...In the end, even the brightest students have transcripts with more holes in them than an 011ie North alibi...
...Professors] have great specialties and little general knowledge...
...Departments are free to indulge in courses that either stem from, or lead to, the professor's next publication...
...Such language is also conveniently vague—just right for reassuring gullible parents that their sons and daughters are mastering the basics of history, literature, art, and science...
...If, as a parent paying through the nose to educate your children, this makes you angry—it should...
...With books like those by Hirsch and Bloom on sale at every mall in America, the message about the woefulness of higher ed may be getting through to the general public...
...Swapping and trading About the best thing that can be said about today's curriculum is that it doesn't guarantee that students will graduate uneducated...
...If the average college president wants to add a course to his school's curriculum, about the only way he can do it is by going out and raising the money himself...
...When even the college deans admit that their curricula stink, an obvious question arises: why doesn't the situation change...
...Some of the notes came adorned with smiling little happy faces: . others were peppered with exclamation marks...
...And since most 18-year-olds arrive on campus thinking more intensely about members of the opposite sex than about either economics or witchcraft, this quality is somewhat rare...
...About 77 percent graduate without studying a foreign language...
...Solemn coursebook promises aside, distribution requirements ensure nothing "broad" at all but instead promote the opposite, a here-and-there dabbling as course openings and convenience permit...
...John's in Annapolis took the idea to an extreme, devoting its students' entire four years to the study of Great Books...
...The result...
...In 1945, James Bryant Conant, the university's president, issued a plan much like Columbia's—a mandatory regimen of basics before moving on to a major and specialization...
...At Columbia, for instance, every incoming freshman must take the school's vaunted year-long course in Contemporary Civilization...
...Ruffin Hall sounds as though he'll never get stuck in a fine French restaurant at a table by the kitchen door...
...Unfortunately, curricular reformers of the left sometimes insist on a pollster approach, that seeks to apportion great books along quotas of gender and ethnicity...
...The midterm for the latter consists of making a tape of folksongs—"not exactly a tough exercise," says one student currently enrolled...
...In their focus on their own needs above and beyond those they purportedly serve, universities are like a great many other modem institutions, including, for instance, the medical establishment and most agencies of government...
...Repeatedly shut out from her chosen department, "she kept taking classes in the broadcasting program...
...Observational Astronomy...
...The answers point to the bane of higher education: a con-job known as distribution requirements...
...Number them as they came in...
...Columbia's good fortune lay in having not only such a comprehensive curriculum but some of the country's best teachers to teach it, people like Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Jacques Barzun...
...This failure not only strengthens the hands of the entrenched faculty interests who will guard departmental privileges to the death but also leaves the idea of a core curriculum in the hands of those conservatives, who, as liberals fear, will fill it with a Western bias...
...After four years, she graduated with a degree in communications and a concentration in broadcasting—she was stuck with a degree in an area she had no interest in...
...Its reading list includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, J.S...
...There's a lot of this kind of swapping and trading and wheeling and dealing that goes on...
...If the knowledge being conveyed by the course is so fundamental, why are so many students getting shut out...
...Carolyn Kelley, a 1987 graduate of the University of Iowa, explains that, in her roommate's case, the difficulties of negotiating the system not only dictated the course selection but the entire major...
...A Harvard student can satisfy the three Literature and Arts requirements with the following: "Beast Literature," "Monuments of Japan," and "The Celtic Heroic Age...
...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...
...in music it would include the African-American tradition of jazz...
...and "Gypsy Language and Culture...
...almost 80 percent graduate without a course in Western civilization—and 37 percent graduate without any history course at all...
...By 1900, Harvard, for instance, had abolished every course requirement on campus, with the one exception of English composition...
...The outsider who questions this cozy arrangement will no doubt be denounced as a Philistine...
...To gauge the amount of dabbling now going on, consider the following report from the National Endowment for the Humanities: more than 80 percent of college students graduate without a course in American history...
...Even a course in Persian carpets has the potential to teach a student a great deal not only about carpets but about Middle Eastern history, politics, economics, and religion...
...Pressed on figures like these, educational administrators will adopt a more apologetic voice than the one employed in the coursebooks...
...In fact, with a great teacher and smart classmates, it's possible to argue that a student could leave the class in Persian carpets with more lasting insights into human spirit and endeavor than those provided by any other course in his entire college career...
...America but has been going on for more than 100 years...
...Including Adam Smith would pose the same threat to Econ...
...That's not to say that such survey courses will stand between that professor and his conference paper, however...
...While West African sculpture's place in the history of art should be secure, that of, say, pre-18th century women writers in the history of literature isn't...
...First, at age 18, the student must have the wisdom beyond his years to know that, in the decades to come, his life will be better served by a grounding in the essentials of economics than in U.T.'s "Magic, Witchcraft, and Sorcery," which fulfills the same social studies requirement...
...That's right...
...The University of Chicago installed a similar regimen, under the leadership of Robert Maynard Hutchins as president...
...The second thing to realize is that universities are run with the interests of the staff foremost in mind, not the interests of the students...
...on most campuses, no one checks...
...It sounded great until we realized we didn't have nearly the resources to implement it," he says...
...Persian carpets...
...it's that they can't graduate by studying only New England poets...
...Gut glut The problems with this system are familiar...
...therefore, what's important is to teach people how to think...
...But we've seen how a student can be said to have gained "functional and creative competence" in the humanities by cobbling together "New England Poets" and "Whitman and Dickinson" (that is, if the student passes by "Stalking the Wild Mind," a study of the occult whose readings include tea leaves and tarot cards and that also satisfies the distribution requirement...
...In some cases, having failed to negotiate the distribution maze in four years, the less conniving students will have to stay a fifth—which means, not incidentally, extra tuition for the school...
...B.U...
...The course, designed for 25, ballooned this year to 100...
...it just fixes the odds heavily in that direction...
...course book touts its rules: "The requirements for this degree are intended to introduce students to a broad spectrum of knowledge and to develop in them the skills and habits of learning...
...No one thinks the distribution requirement system is a system with great integrity," says Russ Edgerton, president of the American Association of Higher Education...
...But by refusing to delineate what, precisely, the students must study, the requirements don't interfere with the professors' research needs—the professors get the bodies, but the bodies don't get in the way...
...Boston University promises its distribution requirements will "achieve for the student a functional and creative competence in...
...Cutting Conant off, the faculty beat back the idea of a core and substituted a set of General Education choices instead—in effect, a set of distribution requirements...
...Similar courses cover the great traditions in art, music, and the natural sciences...
...By demanding that students take some courses in history (or English, or art, and so on), the requirements ensure the departments a steady flow of bodies...
...Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others...
...One excuse frequently made for such a flim-flam system is that while some courses, like "Folksongs," are open to all corners, others, like "New England Poets," are "upper-level" courses that therefore assume prerequisites—other, more central, courses...
...Editors at The Harvard Crimson know better...
...I am thinking about majoring in English, and your course will make or break the decision for me...
...Their authors were evidently desperate for—were, in fact, living for—a chance to take the course, which incidentally happened to fulfill the second writing requirement at the University of Virginia's School of Arts and Sciences...
...each major division of the curriculum...
...in art, it would include Chinese painting...
...We asked one prominent professor what he thought of a system that allowed a student to bounce around and graduate with one history course in, say, Great American Trials, and another in 19th-century Puerto Rico...
...Mundy (the notes typically ran, though a few presumed a first-name basis right away): I would like to enroll in your Contemporary Literature course but was not admitted in registration...
...Should Ruffin abandon his Machiavellian gifts and decide, say, to take a Gandhian approach—camp outside the president's office until he shames the department chairmen into creating more spaces—the faculty adviser will clear his throat and sagely advise against such imprudent action...
...Few, despite recent efforts to find them...
...According to a U.T...
...without, in fact, knowing anything about literature other than that produced by a handful of American poets...
...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...
...Or Astronomy 313, Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Most likely, the adviser will post hours as convenient as, say, 2:00 to 2:15 on alternate Tuesdays, and will be busily rubber-stamping the cards of the 18 people in line as you try to explain your educational aspirations...
...Thank you...
...That is, while most "teachers" feel acute pressure to polish their latest monograph, they also need to entertain the people who cough up the tuition...
...Now if Ruffin Hall's parents should happen to learn of this system, they are likely to respond in one of two ways...
...Such hokum is now the university norm...
...department secretary...
...The Core sure won't give you a coherent picture about Wesiern history, scientific advances, or philosophical thought...
...The bigger point is that it's all fine and good to study Persian carpets...
...How concerned about the fate of the student are the nation's great grey eminences, the men and women of letters who command huge campus respect...
...Thus by 1988 the "Core" had bloated out to include 145 courses in 10 different distribution areas...
...It's possible, but not likely, since, driven by the pressure to publish, his teacher may be more preoccupied with polishing his latest article than provoking his students, and most of his classmates care considerably less about the Middle East than they do about knocking off that Fine Arts requirement...
...Listen to the way the U.Va...
...Additional research and reporting for the article provided by John Heilemann...
...Universities are fragmented into departments and each faces a dual dilemma: one, its professors need to conduct the highly specialized research that allows them to publish and gain and preserve stature in their field...
...dean, fully half of the college's Fine Arts requirement can be met with a course on Persian carpets...
...I go with him to the registration table and get in line...
...By the mid-forties, Harvard began taking note of these reforms, and of its own moth-eaten curriculum...
...and most American universities raise a series of pointed questions to which higher education has no good answers—and which lead us, in fact, to suspect that what passes as higher education quite often is neither...
...Allan Bloom's attack, The Closing of the American Mind, earned him a nationwide best seller...
...The rest will face the same old system of distribution requirements, in which, Marscher explains, despite an attempted tightening, "courses of marginal educational value continue to arise and attract many, many students...
...Liza Mundy is a reporter for States News Service...
...The faculty insisted on being the one to build any changes from the ground up," explained Alan Marscher, chairman of B.U.'s academic policy committee...
...New academic fashions sprang up everywhere—AfroAmerican studies, women's studies, folklore and mythology—and each faction demanded that its courses, too, should satisfy the General Education requirement...
...What most universities aren't saying is that they couldn't care less what kind of history, art, or science the student tackles...
...How many, besides Mrs...
...Some...
...Sounds profound—but why can't a student's "major approaches to knowledge" be honed on Dante as easily as on "Beast Literature...
...The professor gets away with one or two lectures a week, while responsibility for such professionally unrewarding experiences as leading seminars and grading papers is usually left to graduate students...
...Every student must take Literature Humanities, which includes Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky...
...Gene Davis, another Carolina student, explains that drop-add week is more stressful than exams, since students who don't get into enough classes can lose their full-time status, and, with it, their financial aid...
...Pull them from a hat...
...His answer was stripped of all pretense and reflects the contempt the current system embodies: "Any student who's ass enough to make those his only two history courses deserves his fate...
...That's if you can get to the faculty advisor at all...
...in this case, it belongs to sophmore Ruffin Hall, the student government's director of academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "Let's say I want a certain course and my friend John wants to drop it," he says...
...The Social Sciences requirement can be met with two of the following three: "Sports and Society...
...Recognizing the incoherence of its program, Harvard in the mid-seventies again sought to institute a core curriculum...
...And many otherwise bright and promising people leave school with lifelong handicaps as a result...
...The goal is to cut across the narrow boundaries of academic departments, and lay the foundation for a student's later, more specialized study...
...and B.U...
...You do what you've got to do...
...The school's subsequent experience, on up to today, is useful to consider, since Harvard so often sets the tone for other universities...
...Nor will the faculty advisor tend to offer much counsel on bureaucratic manipulation...
...For professors, especially the younger ones, are the products of the same inadequate educational system they perpetuate...
...Or, as core champion Robert Maynard Hutchins once put it, "Every great change in American education has been secured over the dead bodies of countless professors...
...The wise student must then possess the bureaucratic skills needed to get in...
...Taking Jacques Barzun's idea of the goal of a core—"to take the student and show him a mirror of the world"—today's liberals should be working to ensure that the mirror reflects all the world's great traditions...
...The number of General Education courses exploded from 37 in 1964 to 120 in 1978, and included such basics in any undergraduate's repertoire as "The Making of Australia," "The Role of Women in Irish Society," and "The Classical Music of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh...
...William Bennett made curriculum reform a favorite bully pulpit subject during his tenure as education secretary...
...The initial damage was limited...
...In the end, half didn't show up at all...
...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 anythinggoes philosophy of the distribution requirement...
...And 45 percent leave school without ever taking a course in American or English literature...
...And what, perhaps, was more threatening still, someone would have to teach these ambitious interdisciplinary courses: a laborious endeavor that would take faculty away from their narrow and secure specialities (and, hence, away from the assurance of publishing, the key to career advancement...
...what figurehead administrator will take pains to acknowledge his emasculation...
...The high-brow elaboration of this decision goes something like this: alas, in today's rapidly changing society, any body of knowledge is both unfathomably large and subject to becoming quickly outdated...
...The rebellion against this fragmentation began most notably perhaps at Columbia, where, by the 1930s, a Great Books course begun by John Erskine had expanded into the kind of core curriculum that still exists there today...
...It is, finally, a form of contempt toward your kids...
...but, two, the department also needs to attract students to its courses, for without students its funding will wither...
...Or—hard to believe as it may be—if those courses are closed the student can try "Seminar in Japanese Buddhism," "The German World After 1918," or "Australian History...
...One is the old-fashioned "gut" course, the class of little substance that promises an easy grade...
...yet others addressed her formally, deferentially...
...They might also (rightfully) wonder why the hell the faculty advisors who are supposed to serve as curricular counselors don't do something about this madness...
...The answer begins with the realization that ultimate power over the curriculum rests, finally, with professors—especially tenured ones, who can't be removed...
...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...
...But what a striking difference there is between Columbia's promise of broad spectrums and those at U.Va...
...Put yourself in a professor's shoes and the reasons aren't hard to imagine: By defining some things as "essential," the core would tacitly label others as inessential—and what faculty member wants his life's work thus labeled...
...The second, and perhaps more pervasive, problem isn't the course's ease but its narrow scope...
...they recently warned students, "you could graduate from Harvard without ever having read Shakespeare, understood Newton, or thought about Plato...
...Iago who...
...Two, there's the potentially tough, but narrow, offerings that, taken together, comprise not a core but a sliver...
...What it got—and what remains—is a program that William Bennett calls Core Lite, a fake core that, in fact, is just another set of distribution requirements...
...but only when the student's interest is real...
...The parents who peruse their daughter's 1989 Introduction to the Core Curriculum will see it grandly touted as "an attempt to say what it means to be broadly educated today...
...A cop out" The point, of course, isn't that any of these courses are inherently worthless...
...By the 1960s, however, such demands fell into disrepute, and the enthusiasm for "relevance" arose...
...So did that of E.D...
...The once-classical core began to fragment with the rise of electives in the 1870s, and with the rise of the Ph.D., which elevated specialization and began parceling universities into autonomous departments...
...It's not that Columbia students can't go on later to study New England poets...
...lets U.B.U...
...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...
...Even a president as boisterous as B.U.'s John Silber—an insistent backer of a core—has had little effect on his school's curriculum...
...most folded neatly, nearly all dated with the precise time—each seeking a place on the waiting list for a course in Contemporary Literature...
...an introduction to the requirements for a vigorous life of the mind...
...If, as a parent who's bought this academic ruse, this makes you livid—well, it should...
...The note-writing and other game-playing that begin the semester at U.Va...
...Distribution requirements offer the perfect solution...
...Unfortunately, it's almost exclusively card-carrying conservatives who are aiming the gun...
...And worthy—Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are all on the reading list...
...Instead of satisfying the writing requirement with Contemporary Literature, she can knock it off with Physics 383: "Descriptive and Synoptic Meteorology...
...In New England Poets, for example, "The professor assumes the students have taken the background courses," explained the B.U...
...The faculty's interest in preserving the perverse status quo stems from two maladies: the system of campus budget allocation, and the primacy of the Ph.D., with its emphasis on specialized research...
...At U.Va., it turns out that the prudent student writes 10 desperate notes to 10 different instructors and simply enrolls in the first course that opens...
...The magic in this case is that Nur wallows in it...
...In a case like that, a single word can convey a world of understanding...
...But its history requirement can be fulfilled with "Great American Trials" and "Artists in American Society"—a combination that happens to omit such historical incidentals as the fall of Rome, the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the dismantling of the British Empire...
...It's a cop-out in the sense that an institution doesn't have any conviction about what courses are more important than others...
...Harvard's core lite Fortunately, the absurdities of college curricula have drawn an increasing amount of fire in recent years...
...At Berkeley, the student can meet fully half the natural science requirement with "The Age of Dinosaurs," whose main required reading is a set of prepared class notes sold in the university book store...
...Similar changes took place across the country...
...student can satisfy the entire humanities distribution requirement without ever hearing a symphony, reading a philosopher, or looking at a painting...
...and it's one in which the good guys usually lose...
...Prerequisites are as flimsy as the distribution requirements themselves...
...Falsely advertised as a university's way of guaranteeing educational coherence, distribution requirements are in fact no more than a smoke-and-mirrors curricular trick...
...Hirsch...
...some freedom to dabble can be the most wonderful part of a college education...
...To the department chair, distribution requirements mean guaranteed students, and guaranteed students mean money and power...
...But the prerequisites themselves are typically unspecified and routinely waived...
...A few years ago, U.T.'s Dean Horn was in charge of a committee that designed a proposed core...
...Hand-written, hastily scrawled notes on pink and yellow pages...
...But the rest, the great mass of perfectly bright but insufficiently wary students will simply surrender to the system, absurdly imagining that the school has their best interests in mind...
...Years of hotblooded hassling ensued...
...They would resist it because they'd have to prepare and gear up and alter what they normally do—they're just not prepared...
...And given the supposedly essential nature of the course, why are students permitted to take any number of scattered, often weak alternatives...
...In fact, any one of exactly 82 courses will satisfy the writing requirement...
...The University of Texas pledges its requirements will ensure "a meaningful pattern and coherent sequence...
...Students at UCLA last year could meet half of their science requirements with "Geology 150: The History of Los Angeles," once voted one of the country's 10 easiest courses...
...but somehow, mysteriously, some just knew to do it...
...rival departments engaged in pork-barrel politics to ensure that their own favorite offerings were included in the mix...
...The reasons for the reform's unraveling were familiar: the faculty fought tooth-and-nail against a plan that would require ambitious interdisciplinary teaching...
...Brown went even farther—abolishing all requirements outside the major...
...Everyone may have their pet omission: Where's Aquinas...
...Facts of life like those mastered by Ruffin get picked up on the street if they get picked up at all...
...Harvard's General Education Committee decided, in its words, to "let a thousand flowers bloom," and the pollen soon filled the air...
...I'll see you in class on Thursday...
...Such language is grand...
...The laxity takes two forms...
...Then when he drops his card—each card represents one space in the class—I'm right behind there to pick it up and I'm in...
...by Jason DeParle and Liza Mundy There must have been 20 of them that first morning...
...Mastering a great tradition does something else that's important, something that Harvard's "approaches to knowledge" tack doesn't do—it grounds the student in the common vocabulary of his society...
...Here's how the Crimson editors describe "Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East," which satisfies the core's foreign cultures requirement: "[Professor Null Yalman greeted the masses with a morsel of his winning wit: 'I know you're all here just because there's no final exam.' Most professors recoil at the thought of teaching a course rumored to be an amazing gut...
...Arriving on campus, the average freshmen still has a fighting chance, but he will need two rare qualities...
...But it's not getting through to most members of the liberal elite...
...Heartened to imagine that her course was considered so essential, the graduate student collected the notes and agonized over fair ways to rank them...
...While it's true that these offerings were more dominated by Western tradition than they should have been, still they demanded that the student master a broad intellectual framework...
...At Boston University, students can satisfy fully half of their humanities requirement with a course on "The New England Poets...
...They might (rightfully) be proud of their son's fine promise as a man able to negotiate the world...
...The BrOntes...
...Second, it isn't enough to have decided, of one's own volition, to pursue basic economics...
...Plato to Philosophy, Mozart to Music—they're ours, you can hear the department chairs growl...
...There are always a few students both wise and wily beyond their years, who can master the bureaucratic tricks...
...What's unfortunate is that while the conservative 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...
...Nothing could have been more heartening to the anxiety-ridden graduate student teaching it than such a sight, distracting her as it did from her feelings of woeful incompetence and lack of training as a teacher...
...At Harvard and elsewhere, students were on their own...
...Archaeo- and Ethno- Astronomy of the Americas...
Vol. 21 • October 1989 • No. 9
