Cannon, Culture, and Curriculum

By James S. Panero | Wednesday, June 12, 1996

In the beginning of April, a group of students at Columbia University organized a protest. They occupied University buildings, they went on hunger strikes, and they attracted some media attention. On the surface, the protestors were drawn together by a common demand for ethnic studies. There was little substance behind their request, though, and the protestors differed markedly in the depth of their convictions. Some only desired an autonomous ethnic studies department, or more minority professors. Other decried Columbia's Core Curriculum program outright, shouting, "One, two, three, four, time to change the racist Core!"

The Columbia protest prompted this paper to explore the rationale behind the demands. It gave us the opportunity to examine Columbia's Core Curriculum — perhaps the most well-known set of required freshman classes in academia — under the light of modern skepticism. We contrasted the Columbia system of core requirements with the Dartmouth system of distributive requirements. A core curriculum ensures that all students are exposed to specific texts and ideas. Core curricula traditionally have focused on Western civilization, and put together the required texts became known as the "Western Canon."

With distributive requirements, Dartmouth students are required only to take classes in certain subjects. This paper showed that a student could graduate Dartmouth without having taken a single class in the Western tradition. A poll demonstrated that Dartmouth students also know little about Western civilization. The Dartmouth Review then showed how, through a well-selected set of courses, a student could still be exposed to the texts and ideas of the West.

The questions which surfaced went to the heart of the meaning of a liberal arts education. Through a series of interviews, the fourth, fifth, and sixth issues of this term sought to bring discussion to the fore. The following are excerpts from those interviews.

—James S. Panero

Professor James Mirollo on the Columbia protests and the Core Curriculum

Editor's note: When the Columbia protests of this spring began to find national press, The Dartmouth Review contacted Columbia Professor James Mirollo. Discussion ranged from specifics about the protest, to his experiences with Columbia's Core Curriculum, to his personal ideals of a liberal-arts education.

James Mirollo is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has taught in their Core Curriculum program for a quarter century. He will officially retire from Columbia this December, but plans to still teach a few classes in the Core Curriculum come next year. This interview ran in our May 1 issue.

The Dartmouth Review: What is the principle behind Columbia's Core Curriculum?

Professor James Mirollo: Every September, incoming students have been told to read the first six books of the Iliad before they arrive. When they get here, they are all talking about the Iliad.

That's the educational notion behind the whole Core. Students gain a common
experience which they then can talk about, and this creates a good deal of intellectual excitement.

Review: Core requirements everywhere have come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons. Some argue that a core curriculum is too static and only teaches about the proverbial "Dead White European Male." Is this argument valid at Columbia?

Mirollo: I take it to heart when people accuse us of doing the same thing for 70 years. People who say that are simply not telling the truth. Because in fact we have innovated. Here in the Literature Humanities component, we teach The Iliad and The Odyssey in the fall. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter — a beautiful poem — was added to that list when we admitted women to Columbia ten or twelve years ago. We wanted to include something that was good and dealt with the theme of mothers and daughters, to go along with the usual fathers and sons that you have in some of these early texts. These texts therefore resonate with each other.

That is the first criteria for admitting any work to our list. Books must echo each other. Shakespeare's King Lear resonates with Sophocles and Oedipus at Colonus, for example. They work beautifully together.

The second criterion is that they be powerful texts and knock the students' socks off. If they pass those two tests they get on our list.

Review: How does a core requirement create a different atmosphere over, say, distributive requirements?

Mirollo: I read in the Harvard magazine last year that students there were complaining about the university's distributive system: too much specialization and not enough broad training. One of the students said "My God! At Columbia they are reading St. Augustine and I'm reading this junk." That is the great fault of the distributive system.

Review: As for the recent protest, how did it compare to Columbia protests of years past?

Mirollo: I've seen them all since 1968. Other protests have involved a cause that resonated — the Vietnam war for example. I don't think this has the same resonance. The number of people involved wasn't great. It did not have any kind of universal student interest. No faculty member prominently associated himself with the protest. Some of the faculty addressed the group, but didn't do much else. This protest was brief as these things go; it lasted a couple of weeks.

Review: How did the protest demands sit with the faculty?

Mirollo: Students are transients, and sometimes administrators are, too. The faculty doesn't like to have its powers in curricular areas circumvented or leaped over. The curriculum belongs to the faculty. The administration puts the roofs over our heads. Faculty were not happy with a demand which not only specified in advance what structure this new curricular activity will take, but also its content — "Victimization" and so on.

The manifestos that the students put out also excluded Jewish-American, Italian-American, Irish-American and other ethnic groups and their experiences from the debate. Latino, Asian-American, African-American, Native-American could be united, the protestors claimed, as non-white and as victims of oppression. This immediately excluded a whole bunch of ethnic cultures, which, of course, to some of us who come from those cultures, was hardly calculated to garner our support. I come from an Italian-American immigrant home, so I didn't like being suddenly classified as somebody who never experienced any kind of prejudice.

Review: What motivates campus debate against a Core Curriculum?

Mirollo: The largest issue is "What is a university?" There are those who think the university should be the mirror image of the world, and you can change the world by means of the university. That is generally what will be considered the left opinion. It is also the fantasy of the left. The university is a very safe place to practice; the real world is much harder. We're very gentle with protests in contrast to the outside world.

I guess there is a fantasy of the right, too, that the university should be a kind of cultural monastery where only the best is preserved from the past. Both of these are indeed fantasies because universities always engage in a very delicate balance of doing two things: preserving the best of the past but moving ahead to keep with future. It is a very delicate balance. It is very hard to do. I'm not even sure we do it right. I think that's the context of these curricula issues.

Review: How do you find that middle ground?

Mirollo: I despise ideology. I look at it from the point of view of pedagogy. I ask myself what is good for my students, what will give them cultural empowerment and enhance their lives. The best is the feedback from students. For 25 years I've had students tell me that the Core made a difference in their lives. They feel their lives were enhanced. I'm a teacher. That's enough for me. If that's what we do, that's great.

Dr. Steven Balch on trends in curricula

Editor's note: The examination of Columbia's Core Curriculum brought Dartmouth's own system of distributive requirements under scrutiny. The Dartmouth Review spoke with Dr. Steven Balch about the two systems and his own research into historical trends of college curricula.

Steven Balch, a Ph.D in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, has been President of the National Association of Scholars since 1987. The NAS is the nation's largest higher education reform group, made up of academics, located in Princeton, NJ. The NAS has just released their results from a four-year long study of historical trends in liberal arts curricula. This study, called The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993, can be obtained from the NAS for $12. This interview ran in our May 15 issue.

The Dartmouth Review: What are the arguments for distributive requirements over a Core Curriculum?

Dr. Steven Balch: One argument I hear is that the most important thing about education is not learning a particular content, but learning how to think. The best way to encourage critical thinking and sharpen thinking skills is to allow students to study the subjects that they like best. An open curriculum affords that possibility.

Others feel that education should be tailored to the individual, that there are all sorts of learning styles. There are differences in learning style, the argument goes, differences in learner interest, and a non-structured curriculum is more likely to accommodate these differences.

It's obvious, at least to me, that an unstructured curriculum has lots of advantages for institutions. The first advantage is that it makes life easier for students. It's also more accommodating of professorial interests. One of the things that's been happening since the middle of the century is the shift away from advancement on the basis of being a good teacher within your institution. Now the goal is to become a member of a wider professional group and to be a good researcher. If career success depends on research accomplishment, then faculty have a strong incentive to specialize. In order to specialize in research, it's certainly easier if you are specialized in teaching.

Review: How do you counter these arguments for distributive requirements?

Balch: First is student need. Most of our students, and I think that this is even true at elite institutions like Dartmouth, come in with nowhere near the preparation they really need. For the most part I think they have a good deal less preparation in terms of academic strengths than they had thirty years before. We are preparing people at our leading institutions to go forth into the world and to be leaders. I don't think we can feel very secure in the realization that our future leaders, whatever walk of life they may happen to find themselves in, are not going to understand the fundamentals of their society and their civilization.

But even if you set all that aside, that kind of a traditional gentleman's concept of a liberal education, we have to produce a generation of people who can sustain our society. Prosperity, security, freedom, are not the norms for human existence in this world. They are aspects of life that have been brought to a very high peak of development in the Western world in the last few centuries. Even if it gave nothing to individual satisfaction, I think it would be very important to ensure that we had an adequate liberal education, one that provided this essential framework. Just for that reason alone.

Review: At Dartmouth we now have a more specialized faculty than ever. Students have more courses to choose from than ever. Why isn't this better? Won't students have more to talk about with other students if they take different courses?

Balch: For common ground, it seems to me you have something to talk about if there is a common experience. You're really giving the mirror image of one of the common arguments for a Core. Discussion seems to take place among people who share some ideas and some interest, and some fund of knowledge. I would think a healthy mix of core curriculum and specialization would allow students to develop that base in common and then go on to develop their specialties.

Review: Do you think we should revert to a more structured Core Curriculum?

Balch: In general, yes. I think there has to be more emphasis on the heart and soul of education, the liberal education.

Professor William Scott on the Canon

Editor's Note: When the focus turned to Dartmouth, this paper talked with Dartmouth Professor William Scott about his experiences in the classics dartment and thoughts about curricula. His experiences in academia have taught him that students should not be forced to take certain classes, and he favored a distributive system over one of core requirements.

William Scott is a professor of classics at Dartmouth. He attended Princeton as an undergraduate and remained at that institution to earn his Ph D. He began teaching at Dartmouth in 1966 and is now in his 30th year at the College This interview ran in our May 22 issue.

The Dartmouth Review: Should students be required to read particular books, like the Republic or the Odyssey, before they graduate?

Professor William Scott: There are certain authors that do not turn students on; it is the truth. Homer happens to be one of them. If a student isn't turned on by Homer, that student should not be required to read Homer — if he can find some author that does turn him on. It could be a very Homer-like author — Joyce for example.

I think it is important for us as teachers to offer a huge spread of courses from Plato, the deadest white male around, to very modern philosophy. We really want students to know it all, don't we? But, there is a time problem that makes this impossible.

So the theory on my part is to read; reading is the answer. Read anything that you can get your hands on. I would try to make sure that the author has something to say. Take a wide selection of authors: old, new, prose, poets, novels, epics, and all that stuff. Take it and read it with interest. Think about it and find something to talk about.

Review: One hears the word "canon" used quite frequently. Is there a canon of books?

Professor Scott: If you mean defining a bunch of authors, difficult as it is, and then shoving it down people's throats, I'm not much for a canon. A lot of throats aren't going to take it. I think that's bad education. We can't live up to the theoretical definition. Are you happy with 80% of the students enjoying that experience and 20% thinking "this is terrible. I never want to read another book again?"

Review: Is there a common intellectual experience for students throughout the liberal arts?

Professor Scott: I'm going to use the word teach — that's a funny word today — but we all teach students a massive body of material to get some sort of mastery of it, pass a judgement, and defend it. The material can be the Iliad, it can be a knowledge of the Civil War, it can be Eastern religions of some kind.

Basically, I feel I can't teach you anything. What I can do is organize some material that may seem wildly complex when you first take a look at it. I've been working at it for such a long time I can at least organize it. You can go home and teach yourself how to get control of it. But if you didn't want to go home and get control of it, there just isn't much I could do about that. I could present the class. I could throw an act. I can tell jokes and try to be stimulating. I can organize the books. If you don't want to learn it I can't do anything about it.

You've got to be interested in it if you are going to get through to what that text means. I don't want someone to say "Gee, I'm interested in an author and I read it just on the surface level, and passed my eyes over the words, and I think they are beautiful words and I moved on." I dread that. I don't think the person has thought much about it or understood it. So if we are going to say interest is necessary, then you have to do the hard work. We're going to give you model books to show you how to do it, to find them, but if you are going to do it well you are going to have to do it on your own. That's the secret to education. You have to do it on your own.

Cannon, Culture, and Curriculum

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