What Students Read Before They Protest
When I was a college undergraduate 25 years ago, the fancy school that I attended offered what it styled as a “core curriculum” that was really nothing of the sort. Instead of giving students a set of foundational courses and assignments, a shared base of important ideas and arguments, our core assembled a grab bag of courses from different disciplines and invited us to pick among them.
The idea was that we were experiencing a variety of “approaches to knowledge” and it didn’t matter what specific knowledge we picked up. There was no real difference between taking the late Helen Vendler’s magisterial “Poems, Poets, Poetry” survey class or taking instead a course on “Women Writers in Imperial China: How to Escape From the Feminine Voice.”
At the time I looked with a certain envy southward, to Columbia University, where the core curriculum still offered what the name promised: a defined set of important works that every undergraduate was expected to encounter. Against the belief that multiculturalism required dismantling the canon, Columbia insisted that it was still obligatory to expose students to some version of the best that has been thought and said.
