Brown Columbia Dartmouth

[i_wanna_be_Brown]

I definitely did not satisfy the Columbia Core. Let’s look at some course descriptions. (https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/classes)

Contemporary Civilization

Founded in 1919 as a course on War and Peace Issues, the central purpose of Contemporary Civilization is to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities – political, social, moral, and religious – that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities; the course is intended to prepare students to become active and informed citizens. While readings in this one-year course change from time to time, the factors that lead to adoption of a text always include historical influence, the presentation of ideas of enduring importance, and the demonstrated ability of a text to provoke productive discussion.

Looking at the syllabus (https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/sites/core/files/pages/CC%20syllabus%202014-2015.pdf) I didn’t read a single thing on it at Brown.

Literature Humanities (whether or not I read it in college in bold)
quote has been part of the Core Curriculum of Columbia College for seventy-five years. Some titles have never left the required reading list: Homer, The Iliad; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Sophocles, Oedipus the King; everything before this, nothing mentioned afterwards and Dante, The Inferno. Others have rotated on and off. Today’s Literature Humanities includes works ranging from The Holy Bible and Augustine’s Confessions to Montaigne’s Essays and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

[/quote]

I did not take any class that sounds like any version of the University Writing course

ENGL C1010: University Writing is designed to help undergraduates read and write essays in order to participate in the academic conversations that form Columbia’s intellectual community. The course gives special attention to the practices of close reading, rhetorical analysis, research, collaboration, and substantive revision. By writing multiple drafts of essays typically ranging from three to ten pages, students will learn that writing is a process of forming and refining their ideas and their prose. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, the course teaches writing as a unique skill that can be practiced and developed.

Art Humanities

Part of the Core Curriculum since 1947, Art Humanities teaches students how to look at, think about, and engage in critical discussion of the visual arts. The course focuses on the formal structure of works of architecture, painting, and other media, as well as the historical context in which these works were made and understood. In addition to discussion-based classes, all sections of Art Humanities make extensive use of New York City through field trips to museums, buildings, and monuments. Like Music Humanities, Art Humanities evolved from the Humanities B optional music and fine arts requirement of 1937.

So my classics courses did touch a little bit on this stuff, but certainly only from that era, which would mean 1 of the 12 units in the class. Additionally my focus was very heavily on the socio-political and very little of anything else.

Music Humanities

Since 1947, Music Humanities has awakened in students an appreciation of music in the Western world, it has helped them respond intelligently to a variety of musical idioms, and it has engaged them in the debates about the character and purposes of music that have occupied composers and musical thinkers since ancient times. Like Art Humanities, Music Humanities evolved from the Humanities B optional music and fine arts requirement of 1937.

I’m going to assume reading greek religious hymns (with no music obviously) doesn’t count as studying western music like this course does.

For frontiers of science

Frontiers of Science is a one-semester course that integrates modern science into the Core Curriculum to challenge students to think about questions of science and about the world around them. The course’s focus is the commonalities of the scientific approach to inquiry, as these are expressed in four disciplines. On Mondays throughout the semester, leading scientists present up to three lectures in each of the four modules. During the rest of the week, senior faculty and Columbia post-doctoral science fellows (research scientists selected for their teaching abilities) lead seminars to discuss the lecture and associated readings, to undertake in-class activities, and to debate the implications of the most recent scientific discoveries. Together with two additional science courses in any natural science department, Frontiers of Science satisfies the science requirement for Columbia College.

I did not study any astrophysics or earth science at Brown. (mentioned as part of the course here: http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/frontiers/)

I would have obviously fulfilled the Science Core requirement with my Biology concentration

There is one classics class in the Global Core approved list and it’s about comparing Plato to Confucious (yawn). In other words, I did not satisfy that core.

I would have satisfied with foreign language requirement

I’m assuming I could pass the swim test and fulfilling the physical education requirement would have been easy enough although I would not have been able to walk onto the Columbia fencing team (as it’s much better than Brown’s)

TL;DR: I would have satisfied the distribution requirements at many schools but my coursework would NOT have satisfied the Columbia Core and therefore, according to Columbia, my college education was inadequate. (My MD/PhD program begs to differ)

[fenwaypark]

Then let me make my point (and maybe lb43823’s point) this way.

The magic of the Open Curriculum is that it allows a student to:

1. Be well-lopsided by choosing to take courses in a single or a few related disciplines
2. Be well-rounded by choosing to take courses in a wide variety of non-related disciplines
3. Achieve the functional course-requirement aspects of a Core Curriculum, since Brown has identical or similar versions of the courses that comprise the Columbia and Chicago cores, for example (even though--my mistake--you did not precisely do this). And yes, I realize Brown can not provide that Columbia experience where the entire freshman/sophomore class is discussing the same chapters of the same book that everyone read on the same day.
4. Achieve the functional course-requirements of a Princeton (just one example) distribution requirement since Brown has equal or close equivalents of the courses that comprise those distribution requirements.
5. Map a curriculum that is otherwise completely unique, subject to some course availability limitations that might exist in some specialty areas (such as accounting or nursing, for example) at Brown.

This, to me, is the magic and beauty of the Open Curriculum.

Responses welcomed, especially from anyone who would disagree with any of these observations.

[i_wanna_be_Brown]

I disagree with 3.

I think the very definition of a core curriculum vs. distribution requirements is the requirement that students take specific courses - not simply topics (the latter being what distribution requirements are about). For schools with core curricula it is unfair to them to lump distribution requirements and core curricula into one concept. It sounds to me that “functional course-requirement aspects” of a core curriculum is doing precisely that.

There are many ways to skin a cat so even taking courses where one covers similar topics or readings to a Core Curriculum is not taking a “Core Curriculum.” At Brown I read several classical pieces in more than one course (e.g. the Iliad 3 times, Oresteia twice) - each time the focus was different and as such I learned and appreciated different aspects of the work based on the focus of the professor/course. The very theory upon which Columbia’s curriculum is based is that the school knows exactly what is best for its students and everyone must take those specific courses (e.g the music and art classes are only about western music/art - what about middle eastern, african, or far eastern?). Not just courses that cover those topics (that would be what distribution requirements are), but that exact, specific, set of courses. Look at how much pride they have in how old these courses are and how much of it has been consistent over that period of time. Columbia is not a school that says “Come to Columbia where we want you to take courses of interest in various fields of study to get a broad education.” Columbia says “Come to Columbia and take these specific ‘time tested and proven’ classes that many generations of Columbia students before you also took and that we know will make you the best person possible.”

By the very definition of it - you cannot achieve Columbia’s core curriculum anywhere but Columbia.