COLUMN: Gen Req experiment won't benefit students

From Jeremy Reiss', "Vegas, Baby," Fall '00 From Jeremy Reiss', "Vegas, Baby," Fall '00In September, 200 members of the Class of 2004 will become part of an academic experiment. The pilot program was carefully constructed over a 14-month period and approved by the School of Arts and Sciences faculty last month and will, we are assured, be monitored with the help of constant student input. But that doesn't make it a good idea.From Jeremy Reiss', "Vegas, Baby," Fall '00In September, 200 members of the Class of 2004 will become part of an academic experiment. The pilot program was carefully constructed over a 14-month period and approved by the School of Arts and Sciences faculty last month and will, we are assured, be monitored with the help of constant student input. But that doesn't make it a good idea. Five years from now, when faculty members are asked again to vote on whether to approve drastic changes to the College's General Requirement, my hunch is that the majority of them would reach the following conclusion: The four disciplines College Dean Richard Beeman and his committee have proposed are broad enough in their scope to give students free rein to use their requirements to take classes that most interest them. They are also so vague and so minimal that it's hard to expect the new requirement -- scaled down from 10 classes to four -- to add much, if any, educational value. But there are a couple of glaring problems with such a setup. For one, the proposal neglects some of the skills that are often invaluable to a liberal arts education. For instance, a student might be able to graduate without learning any quantitative skills, owing to the lack of a mathematical or statistical requirement. If that sounds like good news, then what about the students who will be able to get by without having to analyze any literary texts? In any career path, it is now more necessary than ever to have a broad range of skills. CUE's proposal seems, instead, like it will allow students to skillfully avoid those subject areas that aren't their favorites. Under the current system, students will take easier courses rather than ones that will expose them to new areas of knowledge. But these courses nevertheless do have value. A History major may work harder than ever just to pass Economics, and in doing so, may gain a better perspective as to how society functions. Maybe a pre-med student becomes a better doctor, or even just a better student, because reading and analyzing the works of Faulkner and Joyce helped him to better understand the human condition. I'm not advocating the status quo. In fact, I will do almost anything to waste time before sitting down to do schoolwork, let alone for a subject about which I don't care. But if the University is still of the opinion that learning for the sake of learning is both possible and important, than scaling back the requirement makes little sense. Certainly the case can be made that the requirement needs a bit of tweaking. But if there aren't enough available and interesting classes within a certain discipline, more resources should be devoted to creating more variety -- instead of loosely combining the different subject areas. In the scheme of things, having 10 required courses isn't so onerous when you consider more than one of them should fall under just about anyone's major anyway. One of the common complaints regarding the current requirement seems to be that students really do not learn very much from General Requirement classes, despite the 10-course burden. In that respect, one course in each of four areas would hardly add depth to students' studies. Already, some of the courses CUE has approved for the pilot program, while providing a breadth of disciplines, seem to lack the necessary depth of knowledge. One course, for instance, entitled "Life in the Universe" will cover everything from the philosophical foundations of life to the astrophysical and biochemical bases for its evolution. Though CUE is making a noble attempt to satisfy students' differing educational interests, such courses seem too broad to provide the basic foundations of any particular discipline. And reducing the number of courses from 10 to four only heightens that problem. The reality, though, is that while a majority did approve the pilot program last semester, just 66 of the 450 standing faculty members actually voted, and many of those against the proposal abstained. But I would hope that as the experiment progresses, those skeptics will more vocally voice their opinions about a proposal that could prove contrary to the goals of a Penn education.