Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/11/17/between_schylla_and_charybdis.php
Tuesday, November 17, 1998
Dartmouth. Columbia. Brown. Three schools, three wildly different takes on academic requirements. So, for a nation obsessed with rankings (everything from Colleges to dishwashers to Small Towns to movies), here's my pick for academic requirements:
1. Columbia
2. Dartmouth
3. Brown
Dartmouth's requirements are typically complicated and convoluted, so bear with me. To graduate you have to take two courses of 'Social Analysis' and two courses of 'Natural Science,' along with one course classified as 'Arts,' 'Literature,' 'Philosophical or Historical Analysis or Religion,' 'International or Comparative Studies,' 'Quantitative or Deduction Sciences,' and 'Technology or Applied Science.' One of the natural science courses must have a laboratory component.
Among the above distributive requirements, at least one must be in each of three 'World Culture' divisions: 'North American,' 'European,' and 'Non-Western.' Each student must also take one course designated as 'Interdisciplinary.' Whew.
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).
The Core is built around four courses— two dealing with literature and the humanities, and the other two with philosophy and the humanities.
While different students have different professors for each course, the content is standard and professors' personal preferences are not taken into consideration. Even if Stanley Fish taught there, he'd have to submit to teaching the Western Canon.
Dartmouth's answer to the Core is a combination of English 5 and the Freshman Seminar. Both courses are built around methodology, rather than material.
They are designed to improve students' writing ability, and offer nothing in the way of consistency. English 5 is theoretically required for all freshmen, but a high enough verbal SAT or English AP score is sufficient for credit. Even those students who do not place out of English 5 read material of their individual professor's choice. There are few general guidelines from the English Department or anyone else. The teachers aren't held to any sort of standard curriculum — some students are stuck with tired race-gender-identity political novels for the entire term.
Freshman seminars are even more scattered. Taken by every freshman, they are offered in all disciplines, from Government to Women's Studies.
Other than being nominally writing intensive they share no common components. Indeed, they are not even uniformly rigorous, as a simple look at the course descriptions makes clear. Recent seminars have included groundbreaking work on topics like Star Trek (Sociology 7).
The closest Dartmouth comes to the Core is Humanities 1 and 2. Taken freshman fall and winter they fulfill the Freshman Seminar, Literature and Interdisciplinary requirements. Humanities is essentially a 'Great Books' course.
When I took them the reading list included Dante's Inferno, Don Quixote, Oedipus Rex, and other more recent works — collected stories by Borges, for example. The course was, and I assume still is, a brilliant one.
The material is superior, and provoked enlivened and intelligent discussion. Few courses I have taken since engaged me as much as Humanities. However, only students who place out of English 5 are eligible to take the course, and only a relatively small percentage of them get in. While Humanities 1 and 2 provide the nucleus of a Core, they are in no sense a substitute.
Dartmouth's Distributive Requirements allow students greater liberty in shaping their own education. Each requirement can be filled through any number of courses, some bearing only a remote similarity to one another. For example, the Literature requirement can be satisfied by English 24: Shakespeare I.
Alternately, students can take this course from world Shakespeare authority Peter Saccio or opt for the absent-minded stylings of nutty professor Lynda Boose. This course analyzes approximately ten of Shakespeare's plays. Alternatively, it can be fulfilled by Environmental Studies 72: Nature Writers. This course, according to the College course guide, has students 'relate their own experiences in the natural world, and...express their personal vision of it through
their papers.'
Therein lies the greatest flaw of Dartmouth's academic requirements. Easy courses of dubious value provide a way around them. No requirement is free from this. In fact, the problem is even more severe in the Sciences than in the Humanites or Social Sciences. I experienced one of the more egregious examples my freshman fall when I took Mathematics 5.
At that time (it changes every term), Math 5 was entitled 'Chance.' Essentially it was a basic statistics and probability course that borrowed heavily from real world examples.
The math involved was stuff I had first encountered in pre-calculus my freshman year of high school.
Moreover, grading in the class was based on homework, class participation, and a weekly journal. No tests, no quizzes. One day we counted M&M's and discovered the probability of getting each color. Then we ate the M&M's.
Students taking Math 5 learn little or nothing about mathematics. But it is sufficient to fulfill the QDS requirement. And each department has their own version of Math 5. Biology has 'Biology and Society,' Physics has a lab course on the 'History of Physics.'
By a careful investigation of the ORC it is possible for students to fulfill all of Dartmouth's requirements without knowing anything of substance when they are done. Granted, this kind of academic bankruptcy is not the norm at the College. But the mere fact that it is possible points out basic weaknesses in the requirement system.
Columbia's Core is supplemented by requirements similar to Dartmouth's distributives. However, they are both more extensive, and more rigorous. Math 5 and its ilk exist at Columbia, but few actually fulfill requirements. A student can get credits and good grades for them, but cannot have a schedule exclusively composed of them.
Dartmouth is at a crossroads. The most publicized choice to be made is between remaining a liberal arts college or becoming a research university. Yet which path we follow in the academic grounding we impart to our graduates must also be decided.
We can go the way of Brown, where students may learn whatever they wish regardless of its academic importance or relevance. Or we can turn to a Core, with all its attendant benefits. The Core is the better path, better than Brown's, and better than what Dartmouth currently practices.
The College may well have become too wedded to its own system to embrace the Core, but the least it can do is shore up the leaks. Nature writers are not Shakespeare, and the History of Physics is not hard science. Maybe its time Dartmouth stopped pretending that they were all the same.