Reform Effort Pre-Dated Strike

Students, administrators, and faculty were studying how to reform the Major Cultures component of the Core Curriculum last semester, well before hunger strikers struck an agreement with administrators last month.

The Committee on the Core and the Task Force on Undergraduate Education first discussed potential changes to Major Cultures in March 2007 with the intention of redesigning courses based on the seminar style format of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. Although no concrete timeline has been set, any reformation of Major Cultures comes with the understanding that more money will need to be spent, more faculty and instructors recruited, and more time spent planning course format and content.

The hunger strikers’ original demands called for “reformation of the Major Cultures requirement to contain a course in a seminar format.” After the strike ended, an e-mail sent out to the student body by Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks and Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley stated that “the Major Cultures component of the Core needs to be strengthened, bringing it into parity in terms of classroom size and curricular importance with other parts of the Core.”

Activists had been lobbying for changes to the Core prior to the start of the strike, but they had not pushed for anything specific regarding the Major Cultures requirement, according to strike negotiator Sam Rennebohm, GS.

The strike’s original goals included the incorporation of themes of colonialism and racialization into the Core, according to Vivian Lu, CC ’10 and one of the strike negotiators, but this demand was “shot down repeatedly” by the administration, which stated faculty have control over course content. The idea of turning the Major Cultures requirement into a seminar only evolved after administrators shot down the strikers’ demand to make colonization and racialization themes within Core classes.

“It’s unfortunate the way Major Cultures is structured the way it is, and I think everyone would get so much more out of it from having a small classroom,” said senior Michelle Diamond, president of the Columbia College Student Council and a member of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. “My personal experience in Major Cultures is that I’ve been in two classrooms that I think had about 150 people. ... I think the CC [seminar-style] model would allow students to get so much more out of Major Cultures.”

According to the online course bulletin’s listings of courses labeled as either A, B, or C Major Cultures courses for the Fall 2007 semester, there were 41 lecture courses with 49 sections, seven seminar courses with seven sections, and five colloquium courses with 16 sections. Student enrollment in these courses were also listed on the bulletin and totaled 2,223 for lectures, 77 for seminars, and 330 for colloquia. This gives an average of 45.6 students for each section of lecture, 11 students for seminars, and 20.6 students for colloquia. The average number of students per section overall is 38.3.

More than 13 percent of all Major Cultures courses this semester are listed as seminars. According to Columbia College Dean of Academic Affairs Kathryn Yatrakis, more seminar-style classes for Major Cultures had been proposed when the requirement was created in the early 1980s.

“The notion of small courses has always been in the minds of faculty since Major Cultures has been created. It’s not like there was any resistance to this at all,” she said. She added that an increase in faculty who represent a wider range of specialties has gradually made this possible.

Diamond said that the Major Cultures reforms demanded by the hunger strikers were already being considered by the Task Force. “Everything they asked for was already in the works,” she said. “It was just a matter of funding.”

History professor Martha Howell, chair of the Task Force’s Working Group on Curricular Structure, predicted quick changes in reorganizing the courses and redesigning courses with long term work in hiring and developing staff to teach additional sections.

Niko Cunningham, General Studies Student Council President and member of the Task Force, pointed out that financial hurdles will confront the restructuring of Major Cultures. “I don’t think there’d be a consensus among those who control budgets that that [creating more seminars in Major Cultures] would be the wisest thing because that definitely puts a strain on budgets,” he said. “I just think it’s a function of if someone can make the right argument that the budgets can support smaller class sizes.”

Chair of Contemporary Civilization and History Professor Michael Stanislawski agrees that having Major Cultures seminars would be a costly investment. “It costs an enormous amount of money to teach CC and to teach the Core classes as they are now. ... It’s going to cost a lot of money for the University to mount this, but I think we have to, and we should.”

Administrative officials have said that these changes would be funded from a section of the endowment devoted to the Core Curriculum of as much as $50 million, which would yield a fraction of that in annual returns on investment.

Lu responded to the fact that discussion on changing Major Cultures had started before the strike by stating the University had committed itself to increasing funding for the requirement. “What we did get from them was a written commitment which was more than they gave us at the beginning.”

With respect to how funding will be generated for the smaller classes, Yatrakis said, “This is another situation where the curriculum and the pedagogy will drive the funding—not the other way around.”

Yatrakis said the Committee on the Core has “not yet come up with a timeline” partly because changes in Major Cultures’s curriculum and staffing “will have effects on the curriculum at large.”

The reformation of Major Cultures is not a novel development in the Core, which has evolved continually since its inception to adapt itself to changing social and political environments.

David Xia can be reached at david.xia@columbiaspectator.com.