This time of year, as predictable as the grey overcast sky and the fog rolling in from the lakes, a pall of anxiety descends over Cornell students. No, it is not the inevitable hangover one expects after the frenetic excitement of a historic presidential election. Nor is it the case of post-birthday blues, felt by Carrie Bronsther ’10 and myself, but few others. Somehow, there is an eerie feel of familiarity to this anxiety, like an old friend knocking on the door: it is the stress of prelims.

Alright, prelims are a fact of life at Cornell. I guess the dark circles under the eyes of everyone in Libe Café (myself included) are, in a perverse way, badges of honor that attest to our ability to endure the academic rigors of Cornell. Of course, the unintended consequence of prelims is that learning and understanding are ditched in favor of regurgitation and memorization. For most students, the supreme objective is to get through the ordeal with the sacrosanct GPA intact — which means cram just enough facts and nuggets of professorial wisdom to do well on prelims, and then move on and do it all over again.

Of course, some students, although overstressed, are almost fatalistically resigned to this affliction. A friend of mine, when asked for advice on how to manage stress, shrugged his shoulders and remarked drily, “Consider transferring out of the Ivy League.”

To be fair, he may have a point. After all, we expect to be challenged at Cornell and we certainly do receive a rigorous education. We are all bright individuals, and we have demonstrated our capacity to cope with stress just by successfully navigating the process of getting into Cornell. But one might wonder whether that’s really the point. Maybe there is a better alternative; speaking for the College of Arts and sciences, I know there is.

Rather than prelims, term papers make far more sense as a means of encouraging students to think and write cogently in reasonable depth about a particular subject. Of course, requiring term papers in lieu of prelims does not mean that students will not be frantically rushing to complete those papers at the last minute. And granted, this is an option for some majors but not for all. But it does mean that affected students at least will have their creative juices flowing, because the emphasis is on insight, understanding and analysis, and not on the ability to trot out reams of facts from memory. It is indeed gratifying to note that a number of professors have dispensed with prelims altogether in favor of term papers.

Papers rather than prelims are a sure sign that we are being treated as scholars rather than wards that have to be ushered through a course like a flock of overage high school students. I suspect that A.D. White and Ezra Cornell would have been sympathetic to any effort to reduce stress while encouraging intellectual curiosity among students, which brings me to that other bane of Cornell undergrads — the distribution requirements. Here, a bit of history might be in order.

It was Andrew Dickson White who had the foresight and self-confidence to steer Cornell away from the stultifying standard college curriculum prevalent at the time of Cornell’s founding. The elective system that injected flexibility in the design of academic curricula, freeing students to choose their own pathways to intellectual exploration, was pioneered at Cornell under A.D. White’s leadership. Cornell was truly a trend setter — Harvard, our Ivy League peer and hockey rival, only followed suit in 1872.

Yet, rather than continuing on A.D. White’s pioneering path, we seem to have stayed put, afraid to venture further. Today, at Cornell undergraduates face a rigid set of distribution requirements, which force students to take courses in which they don’t have the slightest interest rather than encouraging them to take courses that appeal to them. The distribution requirement is ostensibly for the student’s good — broadening horizons and intellectual diversification. In fact, the ARts and Sciences distribution requirement, complete with its bureaucratic acronyms — KCM, SBA, PBS — sends a very different signal: that we are not intellectually mature enough to craft our own academic program.

Cornell students are always striving to expand their knowledge and seek links with other fields — the significant numbers of double majors is an indication of how serious students are in their intellectual pursuits. Indeed, the College Scholars program recognizes that distribution requirements can be an artificial constraint rather than a stimulus to intellectual exploration. It is for this reason that the distribution requirement has been waived for College Scholars. In a fundamental sense, all Cornell undergraduates are college scholars. It is time to liberate Cornell students and eliminate the distribution requirement.

In the meantime, prelims and distribution requirements will loom large — so take out those worry beads.

Sanjiv Tata is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be contacted at stata@cornellsun.com. The Vested Interest appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.