Onward from the last third of the twentieth century, a social activist ethic has chipped away at the core curriculum of many liberal arts colleges (with only rare notable exceptions). And while the death of the liberal arts by identity politics may seem old news, there are still battles fought and lost every day: Why did administrators bend so easily to students’ demands for curricular review at a Jesuit university in the Pacific Northwest? For one thing, those students were crying for a type of reform with widespread precedent—at those vaunted temples to higher learning, the stately old schools back east.
In late May, Dartmouth College published an Action Plan for Diversity and Inclusion, largely indistinguishable from a more ambitious, lavishly funded one Brown University put out in February. Both plans respond to a torrent of protests, starting in the fall of 2015, on their respective New England campuses. Both pledge to double “underrepresented” faculty in service to “diversity and inclusion.” Both recommend new required courses on diversity.
At Brown, the requirement has apparently failed: The proposed “Diverse Perspectives in Liberal Learning (DPLL) requirement for graduation” doesn’t exist, but the course catalogue does advertise DPLL electives. Requiring a new course would be a step too far for Brown, you see, where the open curriculum enshrines the undergraduate’s right to flit and flake (sorry, I mean to “study what he chose, all that he chose, and nothing but what he chose”). As a Brown undergraduate in the late 1960s, Ira Magaziner, hippie-activist-cum-
Dartmouth, however, does plan to mandate a course on diversity. According to academic dean and Spanish professor Rebecca Biron, the college’s Curricular Review Committee labored for most of a year to define the goals of a new required course on “human difference.” It will join a handful of existing requirements in math, foreign language, lab science and so on. And it will entirely replace the mandatory three world culture courses that used to force a math major to make it through an art history survey, entirely for his own good—or so someone must have thought at one time. The university determines the meaning of the liberal arts degree when it decides graduation requirements. Every now and then, the university changes its mind.
Dean Biron responded to my request for clarification of the Curricular Review Committee’s process—
According to its goal, the human difference courses will invite students into a common discourse about diversity and inclusivity—equipping them with a set of tools with which to unpack their “invisible knapsack” of privilege, perhaps. While the former world culture requirement covered easily thousands of courses, the human difference requirement can only be fulfilled by a tightly controlled forty-five. But as Dean Biron wrote, the curriculum committee intends for these courses to teach students “how to think about these complex issues, rather than what to think about them.” And the emphatic distinction between “how” and “what” suggests at least passive resistance to the appearance of indoctrination into a predetermined set of ideas about race, class, sex, faith, really the whole suite of sensitive topics.
In explaining the curricular committee’s work, she also wrote, “Given the broad scope of these issues, specific recommendations were disaggregated so that they could be discussed and approved (or rejected) by the faculty over the course of the 2015-16 academic year.” But she did not respond to a request for further clarification regarding the rejected proposals and the reason for the emphases—”how to think about these complex issues, rather than what to think about them.”
The emphases, I freely venture, came from a concerned few—perhaps members of the academy’s silent majority—who dared to speak up for free thought. Maybe those few even argued that the human difference requirement, in principle, cheapens the liberal arts—the reason they’re all there on the faculty curriculum committee in the first place! The committee debate hidden in plain sight between the lines of Biron’s email wants to be a one-act play, but I can’t imagine it’s one a future Dartmouth student will write. They’re only allowed to think about complex issues in a few dozen acceptable ways, of course.
