A recent essay in the New York Times and a new report issued by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have sparked anew the ongoing debate about what should be included in the "canon" and core curriculum of the academy.  At the outset, I should say that I find these debates among the most thoughtful and consequential in higher education and that all sides make points that are serious and worthy of consideration.

Rachel  Donadio's "Revisiting the Canon Wars" discusses the rancorous debates between traditionalists and multiculturalists about what should be included in the canon of the humanities and makes the point that contemporary students may be lacking a familiarity with the intellectual traditions upon which the university is based.  The ISI today released a report entitled "Failing Our Students, Failing America" which details a profound lack of knowledge about the United States' civic institutions among graduating college students.  Both pieces, either implicitly or explicitly, make the claim that faculty, who are charged with course design and curriculum development, are to be faulted for failing their students in these regards.

more on the other side...

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the arguments of traditionalists and advocates of a traditional core curriculum.  College graduates should have a grounding in the intellectual traditions which have guided the academy since its medieval inception and should be expected to have an understanding of the civic landscape with which we expect them to be engaged upon graduation.  I don't hold the canon sacred, by any means - these works should be reflected on and critiqued, but, of course, you have to learn them in the first place if you intend to turn a critical eye on them.  Post-modernism without the context from which it was conceived is not very useful in understanding the world.  And I fully recognize the fluid and dynamic nature of the core.  A core curriculum shouldn't include works because they are "objectively great or important," a difficult claim to make and support, but rather because they help students critically reflect on themselves and the world in which they live.  What texts and knowledge are useful in this regard will change over time, and scholars have a duty to engage students in the modes of thought which will be most relevant in helping them understand their environment and the academic disciplines in which they are engaged.  The debate over the canon and core curriculum, in other words, is a lively and important part of the free exchange of ideas, essential to ensuring that students are able to receive a broadly based liberal education.

Faculty do need to be mindful about general education, and from my own experiences, they are.  At the many (painful) faculty meetings I attended as a graduate student in sociology, I watched many debates over the canon of sociology.  My department had a fair number of Marxist and postmodernist scholars, but all were keenly aware that sociology students needed to have a firm grasp on the intellectual foundations of the discipline if their own theoretical inclinations were to make any sense.  I'm willing to extend this well-meaning attentiveness to all faculty, although mistakes will be made.  But core curriculums are constantly in flux, and nothing is written in stone.  However, I think it's a mistake to lay students' lack of familiarity solely at the feet of the professoriate.  In many ways, the same conservatives who are bemoaning the abandonment of the traditional curriculum are, in fact, one of its causes.

Over the last three decades, we've seen the mission of the university drift from liberal education to providing credentials for future employment.  With this, as Martha Nussbaum notes in Donadio's essay, we've witnessed the "devaluing [of] the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology."  The humanities, of course, are the disciplines where these core values would be transmitted.  As a result, resources are being shifted away from the humanities and social sciences and to programs like business and the hard sciences where students are acquiring the tools that will help them garner future employment.  It's difficult to reconcile, on the one hand, a criticism that colleges are failing to educate students on the essentials of a liberal education and, on the other, creating an environment where the disciplines that are the pillars of liberal education are persistently under-funded and devalued.

Concomitant with this new pragmatic ideal of a university education is the mindset that education is a commodity and that students are consumers of that commodity.  Given that students and their parents are shelling out more and more for a college education, are we surprised that students would feel a certain sense of entitlement in choosing courses that catered to their personal interests rather than a raft of requirements?  In this, we see the consumer rationale of choice at work - students want a choice in what will fulfill their general education requirements, and if they don't like the choices that they have, they'll take their tuition dollars elsewhere.  Following the business dictum that "the customer (i.e. the student) is always right," it makes sense that colleges would design a core curriculum that would appeal to a broad cross-section of the student body.  Their ability to attract students depends on it!