MR-101: Philosophy of the Core

When I turned in my study card at the end of shopping period, I felt an unexpected surge of ambition and desire. No, it wasn’t that delusional drive I feel at the beginning of each semester to get all my work done and get eight hours of sleep every night. I decided that I was going to march into that bastion of academic and intellectual freedom—the Core Office—and ask for two petition forms. Yes, I was angry about the fact that only three Historical Study-B courses (including departmental courses) are being offered this semester, but I decided that I would look past this grievance, enter their territory, and play the game by their rules.

But wait—what are their rules? We have all heard that we should not to bother petitioning for classes without both a midterm and a final exam, since Cores supposedly need to include both. But this can’t be true, since the 1,115 of us taking Justice are well aware that we don’t have a midterm.

Confused from this realization, I decided to try to find out what Core criteria actually are before beginning my quest for the Holy Grail of petition approval. I downloaded a 33-page document detailing the philosophy behind the Core Curriculum, the assumptions that helped develop the Core, detailed descriptions of each Core area, recommendations about when to take Cores, and requirements broken down based on concentration. There was one sentence that was sort of applicable to my sojourn: “Before a course can be approved for the Core Curriculum, it must conform to faculty guidelines specifying the educational goals of each component of the program.” Ohhh…I get it now.

Nevertheless, march I did. I wasn’t sure that anybody would listen or talk to me. Actually, I don’t think anybody talked to me—it was less like being talked to and more like being verbally slapped in the face.

When I told one of the members of the Core Department which courses I was petitioning to count for credit and for which areas, I was informed that, using the logic that Cores should count for other students if it counts for me, the course can’t have capped enrollment and it has to be offered in future years. I felt like someone had hit me over the head with 1,115 Justice coursepacks. The number of students in the history seminar for which I had planned to petition had certainly been limited (but wasn’t Justice, as well?), and the other class is probably not going to be offered again after this semester since the professor is visiting from another university.

Outside of 77 Dunster St., I wandered aimlessly, nursing my dashed hopes, taunting petition forms, and fruitless course syllabi I had so optimistically brought along with me. But worse than my all but failed quest was a realization I slowly came to, a realization that applied not just to my specific plight: the criteria I had just been told about were wholly and shockingly arbitrary. I felt like I might as well have been told that a course can’t count unless it meets on a Monday and Wednesday after 4, and Thursday before 11. And even more than this randomness, these requirements didn’t make sense and may even be spurious: I know of Core courses that have capped enrollment (Justice, Science A-43, Literature and Arts B-11, should I go on?) and there must be Cores that are never going to be offered again (are all the 86 courses before Historical Study A-87 going to be offered at some point? I can’t wait to take Historical Study A-69).

More importantly, the philosophy behind these supposed requirements is flawed. A non-lecture course with capped enrollment like a seminar often holds students more accountable for completing reading and participating in class, making the course more rigorous, and it offers individualized attention that lectures do not. So by (allegedly) restricting Core courses to those that don’t limit the number of students, the Core Office restricts some of the best classes from counting for credit. These are the courses that are arguably better at, for example, achieving the aim of “develop[ing] students’ comprehension of history as a form of inquiry and understanding,” as Historical Studies courses are supposed to do according to the 33-page guide.

Yet for some reason they don’t count. Shouldn’t the primary (and perhaps only) criterion for determining what qualifies be whether or not a course fulfills the objectives laid out? Why are random characteristics like the number of students in the class considered more important than whether a course’s themes and aims fit perfectly with the description of what a Historical Study-B course is?

And as for the “problem” created by a course’s being offered only once, if the Core Department were to do away with this arbitrary distinction and loosen its requirements, there would always be more courses in future semesters that a student could count. If he or she doesn’t get the opportunity to count the one I did, there will be another one that I won’t get to count. It’s time to start removing arbitrary and paradoxical rules and red tape, especially in the face of a system we’ve deemed to be so flawed that we’re doing away with it.



Victoria B. Kabak ’09, a Crimson news editor, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.