Global Core for our "global community"

This Monday, Shock and Awe’s Sarah Leonard and Kate Redburn present guest columnist Kassandra Lee on the important questions to consider when evaluating the objectives of the Global Core requirement.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting about the Global Core sponsored by the Columbia College Student Council (our lovely student government). The faculty members present were Roosevelt Montas, the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum, and Patricia Grieve, chair of the Committee on the Global Core. It was an opportunity for students to discuss concerns about the Global Core and understand the objectives from the designers of the requirement.

One of the ways they imagine the Global Core moving forward is to have team-taught, interdisciplinary courses focused on primary texts, which would be more like Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. But, of course, like everything at Columbia, the recent economic crisis has “put a strain on resources” across departments in the humanities and the social sciences.
Professor Montas made a point that the Global Core represents two necessary aspects of an education that might be left out of the rest of the Core: exposure to other cultures and exposure to non-Enlightenment-based theoretical paradigms. Both faculty members seemed to hope that the Global Core would successfully explore both of these objectives.

The other students present offered their views and experiences with the Global Core. Their opinions seemed to be mixed about almost all aspects of the requirement: should the classes be seminars or lectures? Should they rely on a great books model? One student even suggested that we have a “Frontiers of Culture” class similar to the design of Frontiers of Science.

I asked a question about the focus on “culture” and the role of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in the change from Major Cultures to Global Core. Grieve then asked which Global Core classes I had taken and asked a follow-up question about how I liked the class Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies, to which I replied that it was one of my favorite classes here.

Grieve answered that if a class is about a group in the United States or Europe (“Western”) that has enough maintenance of cultural ties with the “parent,” culture then it could be a Global Core class (Asian-American Literature would be an example). Another possibility would be that the Committee for the Global Core may ask a professor to add more books from underrepresented regions to the syllabus if the class seems close to meeting the Global Core requirements. In this way, professors would have the opportunity to expand their interests as well.

Overall, the faculty members were receptive and engaged with what the students had to say. So hopefully there will be more discussions about the Global Core and the Core in general in which students’ opinions can be taken seriously.

Personally, I worry about “engagement with other cultures” as the dominant raison-d’etre of the Global Core since it erases some of the other organizing factors of the CC/Lit Hum syllabus that aren’t simply related to culture. One of the other students mentioned that the Global Core seems like a catch-all for all that is left out of the Core, and I think it’s a tragedy to think that the only communities, people, and paradigms ignored by the CC/Lit Hum courses are those that originate in non-Western regions. If we simply look to engage with cultures that are “non-Western,” do we erase the existence of groups that have operated within “Western” paradigms? Is W.E.B. DuBois the only African-American deemed worthy enough for the Core to care about? Did people who are not white nor male never “contribute” to “our society”?

This brings me to another point: how are the complex experiences of people and communities that operate and have operated in the West going to be included in the Core? The presentation of the Core is a political statement of what has been and must continue to be the important genealogies of culture, political theory, philosophy, and morals in the “West.” The Global Core attempts to show what’s going on in “the rest of the world” with “other” cultures, but what about the philosophy, political theory, music, and daily existences that challenge the very coherency of “Western Civilization” that the Core puts forth? Should we (or they) even be fighting for inclusion in the political statement the Core makes?  This sort of approach could not be acted out through the inclusion of more texts but would precipitate a total revaluation and radical restructuring of our dearly beloved Core. 

When I used to work in the Alumni Calling Center, alumni always loved to hear about my encounters with Plato and Aristotle before deciding to whip out their credit cards to help donate to the school. These are the material incentives that demand that Columbia faculty and administrators maintain the ideological objectives of our Core Curriculum.  

This week’s Shock and Awe guest columnist, Kassandra Lee, is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in comparative literature and society. Shock and Awe runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com