<p>Okay, okay…I’m wrong. I bow to superior knowledge. I just really have never met an applicant to Columbia College who was a math/science person. And I do know a fair number of them. I guess it’s just coincidence.</p>
<p>I agree it’s important to correct the thread. My understanding is incorrect and it should be corrected.</p>
<p>^^I seem to remember some minor physics/chem project named after the Island (Manhattan Project) was started at Columbia, no? :)</p>
<p>skrlvr (post#136), well said.
In light of your comments, I’d be interested your views on whether you think an open cuuriculum or distribution requirements can effectively promote that encounter with “great works, great thinkers, and great ideas”. The introspection to which you refer can easily go down a lot of blind alleys or, at best, reinvent the wheel if not informed by some structured exposure to those “great works, great thinkers, and great ideas”. Doesn’t that argue for a core? </p>
<p>I don’t know the answer to that question and different students may well benefit from different approaches. One thought that hasn’t been mentioned so much in this thread is that liberal education also consists in finding the interconnectedness of different areas of knowledge. So, even though a student in an open or disribution curriculum might end up with a seemingly unrelated collection of courses, he may be making his/her own connections between the content of those courses in a way that makes sense for his developing view of himself and the world. I know in my own education, certain themes and questions emerged across a range of courses in the way I connected them and I pursued these in the papers I wrote, my outside reading, etc.</p>
<p>I didn’t think Gen Ed was particularly broken, but the Core Curriculum was developed the year I was a senior and introduced to the freshman after I graduated. I liked the greater flexibility of what we had, but then I think I’m a Brown woman at heart, especially as I have gotten older. One difference was supposed to be that Gen Ed courses were often survey type courses and the Core Curriculum was supposed to emphasize ways of thinking. But a lot of Gen Ed courses just got new names.</p>
<p>The best survey course I took at Brown was “Art 1” but it changed every semester- it was usually team taught by three professors from different specialities, and each professor got to do a deep dive into his or her area of choice. So I didn’t learn the traditional “here are cave paintings and here is Jackson Pollack” canon of Art History… but since we had the same linear textbooks as every other college in America, the professors assumed that you’d read the book at some point to get the front to back version. The assigned readings were usually primary criticism of specific pieces, historical and literary works from the same era for “context”, or discussions about technique, the difference in chemical composition of different paints or alloys, etc.</p>
<p>Is this the “right” way to teach Art History? Who knows. But I know more about Byzantine mosaics than any other HR person in my company and after 35 years can still remember virtually every lecture from one of the professors by heart (we gave him a standing ovation almost every week.)</p>
<p>Have any of you read The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience, by W. Bliss Carnochan (I believe he was a Humanities prof at Stanford)?</p>
<p>zapfino,</p>
<p>I would agree that there are many approaches. I do think that an open curriculum can promote that encounter. It really depends on the type of student. I was mostly reacting to the notion that ‘intellectualism’ and ‘introspection’ are in some ways antithetical at the early stages of a college career. </p>
<p>Here’s what I remember taking as a first semester at Brown. I was the product of a typical suburban high school, and I remember pouring over the course catalog, loving almost every course I read about. </p>
<p>I took a course as a first-year student called ‘Magic, Science and Religion’. We read Durkheim, Marx, Malinsowski, Levi-Strauss, Kuhn etc. As an 18 year old, I was totally blown away. In addition, I took a ‘Medieval Perspectives’ class, which was team taught by a bunch of the medievalists on campus. Loved reading baudy French poetry and Icelandic sagas, and also learning about medieval locks and locksmiths. I loved biology and was thinking it would be my major, so I took the ‘Intro to Biology’(taught by Ken Miller). And finally a calculus class.</p>
<p>Second semester–the second part of the Biology sequence, a linguistics class entitled ‘The evolution of language’–here we read some Darwin, some linguistics and Phil Lieberman (the instructor)'s own work on the subject, a fiction writing course (egged on by my dormmates, who didn’t want me turning into a ‘science nerd’) and one last course that I just can’t remember. </p>
<p>I took this schedule based on my own interests, talks with other students, and talks with my advisor. It’s good to have some guidance, even with an open curriculum. It’s not like learning ever happens in a vacuum. </p>
<p>Just because it’s an open curriculum and you, the student, have the responsibility for designing your own education doesn’t mean you simply do it by yourself, without any input from faculty and other students.</p>
<p>It certainly beat the typical ‘freshman comp, american history survey, intro psychology etc.’ that first years often take.</p>
<p>I remember being exhausted, and quite humbled, after that first semester.</p>
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<p>Just for the sake of argument, maybe it is not “immature”.</p>
<p>A student may believe that if a distribution requirement is imposed on everyone, then the overall perception of the value of a degree from that school (in the eyes of employers, for example) will be increased.</p>
<p>Great post Skrlvr. I think you’ve captured the Brown experience.</p>
<p>Well, skrlvr, your freshman courses sound much more exciting than my more typical freshman courses many years ago. Initially, mine were focused on meeting a rather rigid set of distribution requirements. Despite this, I did discover several intellectual interests that continued to weave a thread through my subsequent coursework and papers during my college years.</p>
<p>The Core from a different angle…</p>
<p>[Confessions</a> of a Middlebrow Professor - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Confessions-of-a-Middlebrow/48644]Confessions”>http://chronicle.com/article/Confessions-of-a-Middlebrow/48644)</p>
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<p>Said student thinks a little too much about things if he actually thinks employers sit there and study the distribution requirements of the colleges where they recruit.</p>
<p>150 posts in, and two legitimate new ideas appear!</p>
<p>Sorghum is right, at least in theory. A rational person could prefer a distributional system if he thought others believed it conferred value, even if he himself did not believe it (or if, in fact, it did confer value in some market-measurable way). In practice . . . I doubt one could possibly tease that factor out of the dozens of other factors that go into the expected value of one degree vs. another. And, even then, the rational student would have to weigh whatever value increment distributional requirements provide against the higher value he could capture for himself (and which employers would presumably recognize) by his course selections in an open system. So it’s hard to believe that this explains students’ antipathy to open curricula (when such antipathy appears).</p>
<p>But, yes, looking at that would not be immature thinking. It would be an example of the craven, amoral, rational, pseudo-maturity that depresses me whenever I see it expressed by students here, which is to say daily. (“Do employers think A is more prestigious than B?”)</p>
<p>And the Pannapacker essay linked by zapfino is wonderful. 20 points to Hope College!</p>
<p>^ But how much of Brown’s reputation, positive or otherwise, is tied to its open curriculum? After all, many people would consider that to be a defining difference between Brown and peer schools. If it weren’t, this thread wouldn’t exist.</p>
<p>TheGFG:</p>
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<p>I don’t think so. From my neck of the wood, Brown’s rep has little/nothing to do with its open curriculum. Heck, I’m guessing that only the college aficionados even know and probably they don’t even care. Just like a handful of colleges have an open curriculum, only a handful have a true core. The vast majority of colleges have distribution requirements or GE’s (or whatever they call them) – 6-8 courses outside your field of major. Obviously, that is easily accomplished at Brown for anyone who was interested.</p>
<p>The short answer in my neck of the woods is that Brown’s social/cultural scene is its primary reputation (and it’s 8 year med program).</p>
<p>When I was in high school Brown was everyone’s second choice so you applied to Harvard and Brown, or Yale and Brown. I was sort of shocked to see how many schools were ahead of it, but it’s possible that if USNWR had existed back then its ratings would be similar. Around here Cornell is by far the most popular Ivy to apply to, followed by Columbia, and Penn. H and Y and D get about the same number of applications and Princeton a much smaller number (I think it’s preppy reputation hurts it.)</p>
<p>I loved the essay, made me feel very nostalgic. We didn’t own the great books, but we did watch the same TV shows. Actually we might have had the Harvard Classics. I still have the OED (from Book of the Month natch). And yes I, too, check out people’s book shelves when I can. Sadly most living rooms don’t have books any more.</p>
<p>My parents have the whole 5-foot shelf of Harvard Classics. Last time I visited them, I was trying to figure out what we would do with them when my parents leave their current home. And I use the BOTMC OED I got for high school graduation all the time. It’s in my living room, in the built-in bookshelves.</p>
<p>Actually there is a fascinating account in a book on the marketing of high ed (name escapes me, sorry, something like EINSTEIN IN THE ACADEMY) about Brown.</p>
<p>According to this source, Brown was kind of down on its luck as the least favorite ivy and perceived as kind of stodgy and boring, and Providence the same.</p>
<p>In the sixties they introduced the “new curriculum” (not Brown’s previous mode), and voila, a superstar was born. </p>
<p>Hm. JFK Jr. went there. Wanna bet that the open curriculum was why?</p>
<p>Not sure if this is the book you had in mind:
David Kirp, “Shakespeare, Einstein, & the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education”
[Amazon.com:</a> Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (9780674016347): David L. Kirp, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Jeffrey T. Holman, Patrick Roberts, Debra Solomon, Jonathan VanAntwerpen: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Einstein-Bottom-Line-Marketing/dp/0674016343/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Einstein-Bottom-Line-Marketing/dp/0674016343/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top)</p>
<p>A check of the index on the Amazon site indicated only a few pages that mention Brown, but the book sounds fascinating nonetheless—primarily a number of case studies on specific universities.</p>
<p>That’s it. It was really interesting. Well, it may have just been a few pages, but the book managed to offer this thesis.</p>