In today’s editorial, the Majority argues against a proposal that would require students to “take at least one course with international content and one course that explores the intersections of culture, identity, and power.”
I too come down against the proposal in its current form, but I disagree sharply with the Majority’s reasoning. The Dissent is right: structural inequality exists. That academic debate was settled a long time ago, and it is a political matter only because many Republican leaders are so allergic to some facts that they treat them as “liberal.”
The Editorial Board is surely correct that some courses with the tag would be politicized. But plenty others would not be. I know this from experience. If these tags were added today, I would have already fulfilled them through a course called “The Global Ghetto.”
This was a global seminar that traced ghettos throughout history, from the Venetian Jewish quarters that first took on the name, to the ghettos of the Holocaust, to the adoption of this term by communities in America. We spent most of the course examining sociological theories of racism and structural inequality.
The course was not “highly politicized” — only actual Nazis and Holocaust deniers would find ideological disagreements with its content. When the Board argues, then, that identity and power are political issues, I shake my head. They are not, at least not if the tag is implemented appropriately.
"The Global Ghetto" was probably the single most important course for my personal and intellectual development. I would love to see more people share a similar learning experience — and, therefore, support the spirit of these tags.
But I oppose the tag system on two grounds. First, I am generally against any changes that would make the curriculum here more restrictive. Even though I have already fulfilled these requirements, I would not ask others to do so unless we asked less of them elsewhere by taking away an existing distribution requirement.
The Task Force recommendation tried to solve this problem by creating “tags” that stack onto the underlying distribution requirements — and, in some cases, allowing a single course to fulfill two existing distribution requirements.
But this awkward solution is the second reason for my opposition to the tags. By allowing some courses to count for two requirements, the University unintentionally creates a great incentive for students to enroll in these particular courses. That’s harmful to the University’s broader goal to encourage diversity in academic study.
Under the tag system, "The Global Ghetto" would have fulfilled both an SA requirement and either an international tag, a power and identity tag, or both. Students would therefore be encouraged to take this course as their SA to the exclusion of, say, ECO 100, which itself would introduce them to a way of thinking different from that presented in "The Global Ghetto."
I want to encourage students to take a course on power and identity — but it need not come at the expense of all other SAs. We should recognize that “identity and power” is not merely a content tag, as the Majority in the editorial claims, but that such courses also introduce students to a new and important learning methodology substantially different from other SAs — and are therefore worthy of their own, separate distribution requirement.
Because we do not need a more restrictive curriculum, we must ask ourselves if the benefits from this distribution requirement outweigh the benefits from whatever existing distribution requirement we would drop. That is where the debate should be centered.
My own opinion is that we should drop the second SA or LA requirement to make room for this one. This recommendation comes from someone who has taken five LA courses and eight — yes, eight — SA courses. Nevertheless, I can say from experience that students will probably benefit more from a course on power and identity than from their second English or economics class.
The proposal from the Task Force has already suggested that the A.B. requirement for a second SA, LA, and ST be dropped. But their proposal — that students choose which three areas to take two courses from — is frankly inane. I seriously doubt that many A.B. students could graduate without taking one extra course from three areas, even if they tried.
The likely effect of giving students choice, then, is to remove the imposition altogether. It would be better to remove the imposition formally, then designate identity and power as its own distribution requirement.
And while we’re at it, keep the STL requirement and continue letting bilingual students place out of the foreign language requirement. Our Editorial Board got those two recommendations right.
Newby Parton is a Wilson School major from McMinnville, TN. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.
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