Core consistency

On Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009, 20 fresh faces turned sour in the dusty twilight of Butler Library. Hunched over laptop computers, soaring through bits and bytes and cookies, these first-year students on a mission to impress a certain Literature Humanities professor inevitably found themselves cursing out the stony wrinkles of Alma Mater. I sat among them, an Iliad-literate prep school graduate utterly unprepared for the baffling question professor Zeus had posed for the deliberation of the mere mortals: “Why, then, is Trojan the number-one selling condom brand in the United States? Consider that”—to a smattering of titters—“for class Thursday.” As I read the Iliad that night, I sincerely hoped she did not expect a serious response, for the answer, I knew, was not in the stacks.

Across campus, my roommate toiled, engaged in the same sort of preliminary over-preparation for the dreaded first Lit Hum assignment. I assumed, as Lit Hum is the foundation class of the Core Curriculum as well as the uniting literary fodder for discussions in the classroom and the dining hall and the laundry room, that she, too, would be grappling with a similar bizarre task. I returned, however, to find her hunched over a mangled red saucer sled, crafting a “virtual representation of the shield of Achilleus.” It was then that I realized the following: although we all read the same texts, the discrepancy among the focal points of sections of Core classes makes for a wholly different learning experience for each class, and, indeed, each individual.

This incongruity among sections of Core classes seems to contradict the reputation of the Core Curriculum as an educational foundation and a common bond. The Core classes, we are told, will be the bank of intellectualism from which we will draw ideas and skills for future classes and life in general. The lectures about Homer and Sophocles are a sort of hazing process, an admittance ritual into “an intellectual community that includes Columbia graduates in different places, different careers, and different generations.” This stuff, they tell us, this jumbled syntax, these obscure passages—this is the stuff of Pulitzer-winning novels and drunken cocktail conversations with other alumni down the road. Covering 24 books of Homer’s epic in three to four class periods, a professor can only touch on so many things while still engaging each to a reasonable degree of depth. How will I comfortably bond with another Columbia grad over a martini and the Iliad when my Lit Hum professor lectured about Thersites the ugly and hers lectured about the role of hubris?

Even more striking are the curricular differences between sections of University Writing. Dissecting an essay titled “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” I inquired to a group of first-year friends as to the details of a related historical event only to find that they had all read different articles, the subjects of which ranged from New York to “values of difficulty” to Eminem. Although we would all eventually write the same essay assignments, there became evident an astounding lack of commonality in the primary aspects of seminars that were supposedly the same.

This, then, begs the question: Should Columbia truly streamline the Core?

Although the Core Curriculum varies to a surprising degree in nature and content, these deviations play a vital role, actually reflecting the Core’s central philosophy that, though the content of these great texts is important, the analytical skills honed in their study are lasting, unifying, and powerful. The multitude of professors and consequent diversity of ideas that each brings to the classroom foster a college-wide atmosphere of potential intellectual pandemonium. The consistent teaching of fundamental literary analysis and effective writing skills, however, harness that chaos and allow instead for the successful integration of thousands of unique perspectives.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.