Well, now that we’ve gotten well into the semester, let’s stop for a moment and consider the Core Office’s standing in our esteem.

The short answer:  not terribly well-liked.

The long answer:  they were inefficient, unsupportive, occasionally rude, understaffed and overburdened, and just a tad insane in a general way.  A friend’s petition to be added to a Music or Art Hum class, submitted on the first day of classes, was overlooked for a week (when they were told that first day that they would know by four o’clock that afternoon) and then rejected, leaving them hanging with an empty slot for another class which they then had to scramble to fill.  Another petitioned to change CC sections due to schedule conflicts, was told to drop their class so they could be added to a suitable one, did so, then almost didn’t get into a new section.  (They actually had to go and complain after the end of the add/drop period to get added, and were then of course stuck with loads of make-up work which they shouldn’t have had to deal with.)  And that was for a required class!  (i.e., one they would have gotten in serious trouble over if they hadn’t bothered to make a fuss to get registered for that particular semester!)  In fact, now that I stop and think of it, I can’t think of a single friend who needed something from the Core office this semester and didn’t get screwed over in one way or another. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to read this glowing profile of American Studies prof Roosevelt Montas without being convinced that the school’s new point-man on Core reform is literally the future of American higher education. Montas has his work cut out for him, but if successful there’s a good chance he’ll go down as the man who saved the Core Curriculum in an age of hunger strikes and rampant cultural relativism:

The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum’s multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct the effort.

And later:

What will change is the offerings on the list of major cultures classes that can count toward Core credits. Mr. Montas’s job will be to work with faculty and administrators to create a set of more rigorous, seminar-style classes for that requirement, he said.

No sense here of what will really “change,” especially since expanding the Major Cultures lists is too superficial to even count as “reform.” Although we don’t get a sense of Montas’s more ambitious, long-term plans, the article reaches a troubling conclusion as to what saving the Core Curriculum actually means–indeed, more cynical readers of this article will note that Montas-style intellectual pluralism is being equated with indoctrination into white-bred western modes of though.

Now I’m sure that’s notwhat Mantas has in mind. From the looks of it, he’s all abou confrontation: smashing the universality of the western cannon straight into the socio-cultural complexities of the multi-cultural modern world, following a tack that denies Plato cliched ”dead white man” status without resorting to mindless worship of “the cannon.” Or mindless worship of Foucault or Gayatri Spivak, for that matter.

Montas’s job is to translate that into a curriculum that will satisfy pro-Core partisans without totally alienating their umm, more self-depriving classmates. Let’s see what he can do.

I attended my second Frontiers lecture today. I’ll willingly own up to a lack of interest: my motivation for attendance was curiosity rather than education, and I wanted to see how many people bothered to show up the first day after break. The turnout was impressive.

However, the lecture’s content was so elementary that I found myself spending most of the lecture wishing that I hadn’t bothered to come. I guess curiosity really does kill the cat - or at least put her to sleep.

But then the professor turned hydrogen balloons into fireballs. That was kind of hard to sleep through.

After a minute of thinking about it, it became less impressive. At that point, I instead started to wonder if the lecture had been ‘borrowed’ from my tenth-grade chemistry teacher. Same material, same presentation, same demonstrations (fireball balloons included).

It was really a dead ringer.

Remember University Writing, waaaaay back in the day? Remember trying to decipher the instructions for the lens essay and the conversation essay? Remember how your teacher always told you that these were some of the most important writing techniques you’d ever learn, and you should be paying careful attention, because you’d probably use them for every paper you wrote in college?

Remember how cynical you were? Remember how you went, “I don’t know…I took twenty-five APs and four college classes in high school, and none of them ever required a lens essay…”? And the ever-present response: “Well, that wasn’t at Columbia. The work here is much more demanding.” And because it was your first semester *ever* at an Ivy and you were a scared little first-year, you didn’t argue, but continued to quietly bust your butt over the stupid thing.

Well, as a seasoned student, I’m here to tell you: I still haven’t used that lens essay. I get the feeling I never will. And watching other people write in class (and having to edit what they write) makes me realize—the people that could write before can still write. And the people that couldn’t write before are still as bad as ever.

Screw lens essays—we need to be drilling grammar and punctuation here. And we’re supposed to be smart?

The currently uncharted TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL, overlooked by Dante due to its nonexistence at the time: A Lit Hum discussion dominated by a Fundamentalist girl who obviously does not understand the Catholic requirements for entry to heaven. This circle would be chilled to approximately sixty degrees Fahrenheit; the occupants would be dressed in jeans and light t-shirts, and the air-conditioning control would be broken. The sin is as yet unknown (the principle of contrapasso has yet to suggest a crime) but several of us seem to have already been condemned and dispatched.

The discussion would run something like this, looped ad infinitum:

Girl: “But I don’t understand…how does Purgatory work? Didn’t Jesus’ death wash away our sins? They all accepted Jesus into their hearts…that means that they’ve been promised a place in heaven. Right? Right? That’s why Jesus died.”

Teacher: “Well, you see, the Catholic church believed and still believes that even if you’ve led a good life, the sins that you’ve committed won’t just disappear when you die. You need to earn forgiveness for them. It’s cathartic, really – forgiving yourself as God forgives you.”

Girl: “But you don’t have to forgive yourself! God’s already forgiven you!”

Teacher: “As the church saw it, God couldn’t forgive you unless you yourself have come to terms with your sin. To believers, the guilt of the sins (especially sins on the scale of the seven venal sins) was so huge that any form of repentance offered on the human scale was just not enough. To truly receive forgiveness, then, they needed to repent more than they could in the world – hence the penance done in Purgatory, which allowed them to repent on a more divine scale.”

Girl: “They didn’t need to feel guilty, though…”

I’d take burial in ice over that any day.

As I was sitting in my Frontiers discussion section today, I started copying the (slightly altered) lyrics of the Lamb Chop song along the margins of my notebook.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake – the song wasn’t kidding when it said that it never ends! I didn’t mind at the time – I was kind of bored and found it amusing (this probably says something about my mental prowess, but we’ll gloss over that). In retrospect, however, I realize what a shame it was. I wasted two hours of priceless instruction time. I realized as I glanced through my notes that this class is extremely valuable. Why should I complain? I need to be paying attention! Frontiers is as good as it gets! Read the rest of this entry »