Word: takings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...foreign; rather, it is entirely too familiar. So many Core courses deal with the present or recent past--"The Warren Court" in Historical Studies B and "Industrial East Asia" in Foreign Cultures, for instance--that students are tempted to explore the cozy space within their current horizons rather than take a broadening course. Also, it seems that every ethnicity is recognized with at least one course, allowing students, in effect, to study the subject with which they are already (and quite inevitably) most familiar: themselves. Is it any surprise that Afro-Americans are overrepresented in Afro-American Studies, or that...
Worst of all, when exposed only to simplified and modernized tidbits of philosophy, students can begin to take philosophy itself for granted. If one can easily approach and understand Kant and Aristotle, and one need only look to them to inform contemporary disputes, they become decidedly less lovely. And if one doesn't love Kant and Aristotle, can one really find solace in Marx or Foucault...
...course, youth itself does not prevent students from taking ideas seriously. On one hand, there are the seniors reclining in Sanders' balcony, pondering Kant's thoughts on a free market for women's eggs, and then there is the 20 year-old Friedrich Schelling writing to Hegel. "We must take philosophy further! Kant has destroyed everything; but how is everyone to notice? You would have to crush it to bits before their eyes to make it tangible to them!" Or the 19 year-old Marx who, upon reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life...
Precious few students take ideas so seriously; those who do tend to be either devout Christians struggling within a Fallen world or social justice zealots roused to a frothing fervor by mistreated proletarians in faraway lands. Students are politically apathetic, we're told by countless pundits who 30 years ago proved conclusively the virtues of the same apathy they now decry. But political apathy isn't as much the problem as is intellectual lethargy--a much more troubling ailment in which so many Core courses are complicit...
...right direction. Hopefully, more student organizations like it will develop sometime in the near future and fill a long-empty void in the College. Permitting applicants to identify with more than one racial group, instead of the "other" category, is perhaps the first step the University can take to create a more welcoming atmosphere for multiracial and biracial students. Students need to be encouraged to embrace all the separate and beautiful components of their heritage, instead of being subtly yet forcibly limited to just...