Call us Aaron Burr from the way we drop Hamiltons
I was in the second to last class that actually had distribution requirements. I remember one day in a literature class when a professor made a passing reference to something in the book of Revelation and was met with blank stares. Might want to glance at the Bible before earning a BA in literature. Even comparative literature.
I don’t agree with the whole article (for example, the part where he compares his colleagues to “crack-heads”) but it’s still a good read.
A liberal arts education truly educates, he stresses to administrators and anyone else within earshot, by instructing students in different approaches to the acquisition of knowledge, whether historical, philosophical, ethical, mathematical, or scientific. Hamilton College, with the blessing of the trustees, has followed Brown University and any number of other elite institutions in embracing an open curriculum, that is, a self-directed course of instruction with no subject or disciplinary requirements. Students enjoy maximum freedom to satisfy their predilections by choosing from a glossy menu with an ever expanding list of exotic entrées. Students can graduate without having to attend one math course, one science course, or one English course. The number of double majors has spiked in a few decades from next to none to almost 20 percent of the junior and senior classes. Since the typical major demands ten or more courses in a given discipline, a double major effectively means that graduating seniors in four years will take as many as two-thirds or three-quarters of all their courses in two disciplines, which could be as closely allied as English and comparative literature. In this wonderland of liberation from coherent requirements in the Western canon, the history professor can no longer take for granted that students in his seminars have so much as a nodding acquaintance with a Euclidean proof, the book of Genesis, or a verse from Shakespeare. Shallow and trendy programming driven by activist faculty proliferates. Neither the university nor the history department requires undergraduates to take a single course in American history or in the history of Western civilization, although history majors must complete—mirabile dictu —at least three courses in geographic areas outside the Western world. Distressing numbers of seniors, as our Hamilton professor well knows, graduate illiterate in their own heritage. If asked to explain the central event in the making of this country’s national history, for example, they cannot date the Civil War, much less give a coherent explanation as to what caused it.