A Move in the Right Direction

So Earth’s Major Cultures are now its Global Core. And this means what, exactly?
I’m not sure. For me, one of the 1000-plus first years who face the new world of the Global Core and tray-free John Jay dinners, the Major Cultures component of the Core is just a piece of history, and the hunger strike that precipitated its demise is just a story on Bwog. I never dealt with three separate lists of acceptable Major Cultures courses. I didn’t experience the hunger strike first-hand. And, quite frankly, I’m not sure I can explain what the difference is between Major Cultures and Global Core now that I must only concern myself with the latter. I’m just the callow, quixotic Lit Hum-er Columbia’s seen too many times, one who is just getting to know what fueled the activism against Columbia’s Major Cultures, one to whom Professor Patricia Grieve’s Aug. 29 letter about the Global Core seemed excitingly unfamiliar, and one who is still all too eager to explain why he believes he supports this latest amendment to the Core.

From the untainted, untested perspective of this irreverent Terrible 12er, the entire Global Core debacle seems at once unnervingly strange and comfortably familiar, distinctly Columbian and insipidly commonplace. On a superficial level, terminology like “List B courses” and “Global Core requirement” feels foreign to me. What exactly are Lists B and C, and why don’t they apply to me anymore? But at a more fundamental level, one beyond the punctilios, I think the basis for the argument over the Global Core is actually identical to that of an argument everyone on the pedagogical globe is having right now—or, at least, should be having. The accusation of the Spectator’s Editorial Board in “Core of the Matter” (Sept. 3)—namely that the Global Core is only “superficial[ly]” different from its predecessor’s disgraceful “cursory overview of non-Western culture”—is essentially the same accusation leveled against Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate from opposite sides of the Atlantic. One says the former is too “American” and the other accuses the latter of being too “European,” yet in the end neither organization offers a truly all-inclusive education despite their grandiose curricula. It’s also the same grudge China holds against Japan: that Japan’s textbook writers are too nationalistic to acknowledge the atrocities their forefathers committed in WWII. And it’s even the same type of imprecation hurled at both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin (whether justified or not) saying their views are too parochial or that the candidates themselves are too inexperienced.

Suddenly hurled into a new school and a new city, I find myself comforted, even excited, to discover that even the most campus-centric arguments are the same as those playing out on the world’s stage. But my reaction is actually more than just excitement—it’s also one of pride. The Global Core hoopla confirms to me that Columbia’s desire for true education—an education in which we learn and value what we believe matters rather than what society expects us to—is real. Columbia philosophically understands what it means to truly educate, even if we can’t agree on how the university approaches the pressing need for each person to have a global education.

So to me, to someone who just got here, to someone who hasn’t yet faced the disgruntlement and disappointment that inevitably come with four years at any school, this is what makes Columbia a singular educational institution. The Core—whether part of it goes by the neologism “Global Core” or by the more familiar “Major Cultures”—forces us to deal with worldly issues on a daily basis and compels us, with our distinctly Columbian rebelliousness, to challenge the very ideas that are supposedly taken axiomatically in our curriculum. Whether the move to “Global Core” is, as the Editorial Board says, “no[t] a step in the right direction,” is an essential question, one that absolutely must be addressed by faculty and students alike. However, it’s not a question with which I am willing to grapple quite yet. All I know for now is that the mere existence of a requirement like this one, whatever name it assumes, is a move in the right direction—a direction that, unfortunately, not many people outside of Columbia can claim to have. And to have taken a first step in that direction is something for which I am truly thankful.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.