For a Core

The Achilles heel of the Cornell experience is our lack of a core curriculum.

This emerging truth is being confirmed and reconfirmed from inside and outside the University by a flurry of evidence that can no longer be ignored.

While many of our competitors are embracing core curricula with greater intensity, we are backing away from a nucleus of essential knowledge. Columbia hails its core curriculum as the “cornerstone of a Columbia education”; Yale’s Directed Studies program is overflowing with more applicants than it can hold; and next year, N.Y.U. will offer General Studies as a major in its Arts & Sciences School for the first time.

Yet on The Hill, we balk at a core set of knowledge. Forget Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, we’ve got Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup, the single work of required reading for the entire freshman class this year.

American colleges and universities were once defined by their core curricula; the evolution of knowledge contained in the Western canon was studied to answer, above all, the fundamental question of the meaning of life, according to Yale Professor Anthony Kronman, who argues that higher education has forsaken this critical pursuit.

“In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom,” Kronman wrote last month in the Boston Globe. “In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself.”

Nowhere is this trend more apparent than at Cornell, where pre-professional majors, research-oriented facilities and the hard sciences are dominating our once-renowned humanities fields.

In the place of a core curriculum — which, at Columbia, contemplates studies of civilization, literature, writing, art, music, science, culture and language and includes readings from the great philosophers, the Old and New Testaments and the ancient Greek sagas — Cornell proffers a laughable “depth and breadth” requirement.

Thus, in the place of fundamental studies of basic human knowledge, we send students to required classes with titles like “Physics of the Heavens and the Earth”; “Oceanography”; and “Why Is the Sky Blue?” These filler classes — what our parents’ generation refer to as “guts” — are favorites of Cornell students, who easily circumvent these inane requirements.

The stark results are shamefully evident: too many of us at Cornell have not read any of the essential works of Western civilization. The intersection of our respective majors reveals this intellectual imperative: the English major undertaking Ulysses studies The Odyssey in the Classics Department; the film major viewing The Matrix reads Plato in philosophy; and the aspiring biologist studies Darwin in the History Department. These junctions speak to a core set of ideas that precede and permit further studies, without which we cannot begin to discuss underlying principles in this new globalized world.

As Boston University Professor Alan Wolfe was quoted in a recent New York Times article, “Everyone’s read Things Fall Apart, but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

Cornell, like other institutions, divorced itself from the Western canon in the 1960s, when critical elements in academia denigrated the core curriculum as paternalistic and hackneyed, inspiring Cornell professor Allan Bloom to defend the Great Books in his 1987 study, The Closing of the American Mind.

The programs that emerged in the post-1960s world were “much more like a supermarket,” according to N.Y.U. historian Tony Judt, where “kids can take pretty much any course they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Perhaps this view is pessimistic, but how else can we explain the recent survey that ranked Cornell dead last in a civic knowledge review of 50 colleges nationwide? Our rock bottom ranking in the Intercollegiate Studies Institution report was the startling result of Cornell seniors actually having less knowledge than they had as freshman (in the language of numbers, we “lost” 4.95 percent of civic knowledge over four years).

I’m not asking for engineers to dissect Dostoyevsky, or for fine arts majors to memorize the Periodic Table; it’s about a common denominator for intellectual engagement. Journey where you will during your four years here — contemplate the universe or uncover its beginnings — but recognize a common point in higher education: the most basic texts, works of arts and formulas that quite literally make the world go ’round.

Yes, we’re 13,000 students in seven schools with nearly 80 academic majors — but I’d challenge anyone to point to one field of study that is not informed by the great works of history. Challenge the claims of these oeuvres, or even the “dead white males” who fashioned them, but let that debate be open and contested — and let it be the first step in building Cornell’s core curriculum.

Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbfishman@cornellsun.com [1]. Agree to Disagree usually appears­ Tuesdays.