Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

I was dismayed by Scott Levi’s first assertion in “How to Survive—and love—the Core Curriculum” (Sept. 1) that “The Core pushes you to shed preconceived notions, and you will do just that upon realizing that your doctoral student instructor leads as fantastic a section as that of his famed dissertation adviser.”

Levi is right—tenure is no guarantee of professorial wisdom. A grad student might lead a better section than a full professor of philosophy. Likewise, a precocious resident might perform a better bypass than a cardiac surgeon. Given the choice, however, I’d take the surgeon.

Levi says “time [for] students, scholarly background, and workload” are the criteria by which to judge a Core professor. I disagree. Because Core classes are required for so many students, the range of teachers is huge—and quite a few are pretty far from their area of expertise. Familiarity with the material is the one indispensable thing, and this means either Core veterans or literature and philosophy professors.

I did what Levi is proposing. My Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilizations professor (I can’t remember any longer which) was a young, freshly minted Ph.D. He’d never taught the Core before, and freely acknowledged that, like us, he was reading things for the first time. It wasn’t a great class. And it wasn’t his fault. The volume of reading is enormous. Asking someone to learn and then teach all this stuff in a matter of days is like asking someone to eat a 10-course meal and then go swimming. People need time to digest.

The professor who knows the books backwards and forwards, thanks to multiple re-readings and the study of secondary sources and who can contextualize, fill in gaps, and elucidate hidden connections, is the professor who transforms the Core from a burden to a blessing.

Mark Bulliet, CC ’02
Sept. 6, 2009