EDITORIAL & OPINION: Progress on a new Gen Req

A new experimental General Requirement has potential but will have to address several serious concerns. We support efforts to improve the existing General Requirement, which takes up 10 credit units without truly requiring students to expose themselves to the spectrum of knowledge. But we have only cautious support for CUE's specific recommendations. Our reservations stem primarily from the severely circumscribed nature of the experimental General Requirement. We are concerned by the notion that the material covered under the existing Gen Req's 10 courses can be condensed into a mere four semester-long courses spanning freshman and sophomore years. Equally, the present General Requirement can be, and usually is, satisfied by taking advanced courses in areas of greater interest and basic courses in area of lesser interest. But under the new proposal, students would have to take all four basic courses, with the exception of a limited exemption for science majors. In attempting to free students to pursue their interests, the committee may have forced students in non-science disciplines to sit in classes that transpire at too basic a level. Finally, by focusing on "democracy in the modern world," "modern conceptions of physical science" and "major developments in contemporary science," the proposed requirements risk perpetuating a utilitarian conception of education focused on the political and scientific status quo. As best we can tell, only in the Imagination, Representation and Reality requirement is attention paid to the "similarities and differences? developed in different societies, cultures and religions." Such a broad-based approach has a place in all four requirements, not just the category where it is easiest to admit the possibility of alternate visions, that of the arts. It is only in the context of such alternate visions that a true understanding of our own systems can be achieved. We would hope that the requirements, as they reach finished form, reflect the diversity of views that exist in all fields of knowledge, rather than providing students with a merely utilitarian understanding of the world in which they live.