When I was a professional-school dean (at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism), we had no choice but to try to define the specific content of an education in our field. The premise was that if you want to practice a profession, there is a body of material you must master, at least in the early part of your education. That perspective led me to urge, this year in The Chronicle Review, that undergraduate colleges move in a similar direction: a core curriculum.
Traditional undergraduate colleges have had the luxury of being far looser in the way they define what it means to be educated. Of course American undergraduate colleges vary greatly. The majority of undergraduates study skills, mainly by taking courses designed to prepare them for specific jobs, in practical-minded fields. But liberal-arts majors, who populate the country’s most renowned and prestigious colleges, usually have a great deal of choice in what they study. Some colleges have no curriculum requirements at all; most impose only a light-duty distribution requirement, perhaps along with a required writing course.
My premise here is that the liberal arts are still essential to an undergraduate education. The explicitly liberal-arts colleges will continue to set the standard for what an undergraduate education means, and so will have a broad effect; and almost no college is so skills-oriented as to be willing to drop any claim that it is providing its students with more than the kind of education one could obtain at a free-standing trade school.
The core is the focal point of something. Apples are necessary cores, the Earth consumes a core, and the Sun takes a core. By and large, the core is denser than whatever remains of the thing. The exceptionally deepest piece of a body having enough gravity to maneuver itself into a circle is the core. Typically the heaviest materials settle there.
The core is the focal point of something. Apples are necessary cores, the Earth consumes a core, and the Sun takes a core. By and large, the core is denser than whatever remains of the thing. The exceptionally deepest piece of a body having enough gravity to maneuver itself into a circle is the core. Typically the heaviest materials settle there.