Tuesday, November 17, 1998

Race, Writing and Manhood at Brown

Brown University has no core curriculum, and it has no requirements either. Students can take an unlimited amount of classes pass-fail. The theory is to allow students control over their own education; the effect is the propagation of a whole lot of ridiculous classes, with no educational or aesthetic merit but plenty of emphasis on political brainwashing.

Literature and Humanities at Columbia

What class is required, forces you to read dozens of books by dead white guys, meets for several hours at a time, and is universally loved by all the students who take it? Well, it's sure as hell not English 5. A better bet would be Philosophy and Literature 1, Columbia College's required introduction to the core of the Western Canon.

Between Schylla and Charybdis

These requirements are often confused with a Core curriculum like Columbia's, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. At Columbia, the Core is not some amorphous set of distributives; it is a very rigid curriculum and a key part of freshman year (even transfer students must complete it).

A Cultural Revolution for Dartmouth?

Every fall at Brown University, newly-admitted minority students arrive on campus four days before their peers. They spend that time in Brown's 'Third World Training Program,' an intense seminar focusing on issues of race, class, gender, assimilation, and identity. When the rest of the student body arrives on campus, they are forced to watch a film depicting a conversation between a black man and a white man. At the conclusion of the film, the white man breaks down crying from guilt.

Why the Republicans Flopped

The Republican Party failed in this off-year election because it could not chew gum and walk at the same time. (That is what Lyndon Johnson once famously said in denigration of Gerry Ford's intelligence, notwithstanding that Ford had degrees from Michigan and Yale, institutions superior to any attended by Johnson.)

Invoking Stalin Instead

When Benjamin Wallace-Wells, our esteemed Editor-in-Chief, told me the Review was planning on doing an issue on Communism in America, I instantly came up with an idea for a story— the father of one of my good friends holds a position of high rank within the United States Communist Party.

Eurotrash Invicta! The Brown Campus

I went to Brown on Friday. It was my first time visiting Providence, and my first road-trip in a long time. I didn't know much about it, just that half my high school went there, and it was supposed to be pretty weird, the Berkeley of the Ivy League.