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The Path of Least Resistance

By Kale S. Bongers | Thursday, June 2, 2005

James Wright's recent equivocations aside, Dartmouth proudly proclaims itself to be a liberal arts college. Though Dartmouth's core curriculum has been long abandoned, the College claims that its system of distributive requirements will provide a sufficient, broadly-based background in the foundational thoughts of the West, the cornerstone of a true liberal arts education. Yet, as seen below, this is not necessarily the case.

Indeed, quite often the system of distributive requirements, and sometimes even entire majors, fall woefully short in this regard. Noted historian David McCullough has a favorite anecdote about a seminar he once taught at the College. On the first day, McCullough sat down and asked the 25 students in his seminar who George Marshall was. Not one could answer, until after several minutes one student falteringly queried if Marshall might have had anything to do with the Marshall Plan. After four years of studying American history, this group of honors students could muster only a delayed, wavering response to McCullough's basic question.

Such problems, sadly, are not confined to the history department. It's quite possible to graduate from Dartmouth with an English degree without reading any Shakespeare. And, as shown below, it's easy to graduate without even the most rudimentary understanding of the Western culture one will be entering after Commencement. Though it's highly unlikely that a single student will ever graduate with the below-mentioned four-year curriculum, what is worrisome is that many students will take at least a few of these classes and graduate with a thoroughly disjointed knowledge base. The end result is fragmentation, an intellectual foundation built on sand. One cannot truly begin to critically interpret modern fiction without knowledge of Shakespeare, Homer, and others, nor fully comprehend the workings of the United States without knowledge of its history, nor understand anything of modern biology without an understanding of Darwin, nor have a grasp of government or polity without reading Locke, Rousseau, and others. However, the College apparently believes that Jewish Studies 15, "Judaism, Sexuality, and Queerness" will fulfill its distributive requirement for Philosophy, History, or Religion (PHR) and educate its students with the same effectiveness as History 4, "Europe since 1715," or Religion 15, "The Christian Tradition." In Dartmouth's curriculum, the broad, the basic, and the necessary have been replaced with the esoteric, the unimportant, and the hollow.

The sum total of a Dartmouth education should not be the ability to parrot arcane and useless tidbits of knowledge. Rather, the College should ensure that its students receive a coherent, broad base of knowledge so as to function as a responsible and thoughtful citizen of the Republic. A former Dartmouth philosophy professor, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, claimed, in a quote echoed by Ronald Reagan, that "The goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization." Yet this ideal is far from being realized. Too many current students strive to be counter-cultural without knowing the culture they're rebelling against; too few students understand the value of a broad knowledge base, upon which they can then (and only then) build a more specialized education. As an end result, few students learn the concepts of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences needed to comprehend and live in a culture fundamentally based upon the traditions of the West. And Dartmouth is content to abide their ignorance.

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