The Global Core lacks substance

Last week, I received a notice from the Committee for the Global Core that the coursework I had submitted to satisfy that requirement had been returned and denied. The underlying logic was that the courses were, amusingly enough, “too Western.” At first, I was stunned that this committee could presume to delineate between sufficiently and insufficiently “Western” courses, until I realized that this was nothing more than a clever gambit to mask a more fundamental issue: that the Global Core is, at its heart, a deeply flawed profanation of an otherwise sterling Core Curriculum.

To start, the supposition that anyone can find the sharp bounds of Western culture is just a little bit silly. Particularly in this age of globalization, the concept of the West as a concrete entity is becoming increasingly meaningless. Emerging nations have adopted and integrated components of traditionally Western society, blending them into a new hybrid that defies easy categorization. The Global Core itself struggles mightily with what constitutes an approved course, for a class can either be focused on a specified “non-Western” culture or be a comparative study. Those delineations break down in practice, though, as some cultures straddle the line between Western and non-Western or seem to wholly defy those prescriptions. Surely “Latino History and Culture” falls squarely within the West geographically, but perhaps not in ideology. How, though, does one characterize “Asian-American History,” which is, by definition, embedded within the American tradition? More and more, it is impossible to separate out threads of Western thought and influence from minority cultures simply as a logistical matter.

More than these practical concerns, however, the intent of the Global Core is nothing less than anathema to the mission of a core curriculum. It violates the charge that all Columbia students read the same books at the same time, creating a unified and coherent intellectual atmosphere. The Core at its best seeks to offer a common understanding to all undergraduates by tackling the greatest questions of human civilization. It hopes to broaden the mind, eliminating parochialisms by inquiring about the most fundamental of concepts, from justice to truth to duty.

It is in this vein, though, that the global requirements collide most fully with the mission of the core. These classes are, by nature, intensely narrow in scope and deal not with issues that confront all of humanity, but only those of the Caribbean, or India, or Tibet. The genius of the real Core Curriculum is its stability and the timeless nature of its investigation. The Global Core’s aim is to specialize, to focus, and to constrict. “The Mongols in History” can teach us little about the universal nature of man—it equips us only with knowledge about Mongols in history, which is of questionable import as a basis for expanding knowledge.

In the end, there is no distinction between Scandinavian truth and Indonesian truth or Mexican truth. Plato on justice and Augustine on God are explorations that do not fluctuate with time or place—they remain the pillars of philosophical thought irrespective of the petty contemporary classifications in which the global requirements so lavishly indulge. To admit that, though, would be to concede that the Global Core falls dramatically out of line with asking about the collective character of the human person and to expose the Global Core as an insignificant specialty course lurking among intellectual giants.

The Global Core, then, serves as little more than a politically correct submission to the trend of multiculturalism, a poor attempt to offer disparate points of view at the expense of coherent analyses of the baseline points of human thought. It may be a worthwhile pursuit for the specialist, but it is disingenuous to argue that the Global Core is consistent with the mission to expound on great questions. Only there do we find illumination, not in these thousand points of trivial light.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore. He is a senior editor for the Helvidius Group.