Barnard’s Nine Ways of Knowing was created out of the belief that all college students should graduate with an essential base of knowledge that will benefit them regardless of their life choices. The list of requirements is intentionally flexible and allows many diverse courses to fulfill each of the nine categories. While most Barnard students like the Nine Ways, many have criticized the science requirement for its intense time commitment and scheduling conflicts due to scarce laboratory sections. To make the requirement more manageable and beneficial, Barnard administrators should adjust the science requirement to include two lecture courses and just one lab.
Barnard’s science requirement is the most time-consuming Way of Knowing. To graduate, Barnard students must complete two courses in the same science track, such as Astronomy I and Astronomy II or General Chemistry I and General Chemistry II, as well as two associated labs. Columbia’s science requirement includes Frontiers of Science and two other math or science courses, without any mandatory labs. While the labs offer an important practical perspective to the lecture material, they take up several hours of the day and are often nearly impossible to schedule due to the limited number of sections. Competition for psychology labs is especially competitive. Students must enter a lottery system that assigns what section and professor—if any—they get, forcing students to work their major-related classes and work schedules around their lab and lecture. The random assignments, based on students’ preference rankings, also prevent professors from being rewarded for or corrected on their teaching quality. Because
students have a hard enough time getting into a psychology lab, they cannot opt out due to extremely poor professor ratings, a tendency found among a number of professors in the psychology department.
While students benefit from lab courses and Barnard seeks to encourage women in the sciences, it is not practical to require every student to take such a time-intensive course load on top of major and minor requirements. Currently, the supply of lab space and staffing at Barnard does not meet the demand of the two-lab requirement, and most Columbia labs do not meet the Barnard lab requirement. Forcing students to take courses that are consistently hard to get into may also breed resentment of the sciences in students.
The Nine Ways of Knowing is certainly part of Barnard’s liberal arts tradition, but there comes a time when these requirements go beyond the educational needs of the student and infringe upon her ability to navigate her own educational path. One of Barnard’s many attractions is its highly flexible requirements, especially compared to Columbia’s Core. Along with ensuring that all Barnard students graduate with a well-rounded knowledge base, Barnard administrators must do everything in their power to prevent these requirements, especially the science requirement, from becoming an obstacle to students’ desired course of study.
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