Series on Core Program Falls Short

I have a admit that I chuckled when I read the quotation from an interview with Kathryn Meneely that appeared as part of the 'Soft Core' series: my remark was so taken out of context that what had been voiced as a serious criticism of the Core program sounded like a critique of those who teach in it.

Contrary to what the article implied, I do believe that students can be taught "approaches to knowledge"--if "approaches" is defined as a method of inquiry, a demonstration of what questions are important to ask.

Ten years from now, very few of the students who have taken Chivalric Romances (Literature and Arts A-13) will remember that the Green Knight was really Bertilak in disguise; what they may recall, however, is what we learned about the unstable nature of gender identities at all moments of human history, or about the influence of history on literature, then and now.

I was disappointed, too, that the more important of my criticisms was not passed along by Meneely. If the Core program is flawed, the students, themselves must be willing to shoulder some of the blame: by insisting on a "star system," on taking classes with the luminaries in the field, they guarantee that those classes will be huge and impersonal. Perhaps what is needed is two-tiered system in which students can satisfy their distribution requirements either through the Core, or in the departments themselves (where, ideally, class size would be much smaller). Either way, nothing will change unless the students themselves insist: and articles with silly names like "Soft Core" don't advance the cause sufficiently. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen   Lecturer on History and Literature   Head Teaching Fellow   Literature and Arts A-13