Ah, the day courses go online. Is there a better day at Duke? Even the awful new ACES cannot purge that day of its hopeful idealism. Every class seems great when you are registering-when you don't have to deal with professors, exams, TAs, term papers or other students. Every class will be perfect, with no digressions or busy work. You can set your schedule so you never have to wake up before 11, so you have a four-day weekend or so you have no finals. Your next semester can be both intellectually rewarding and relatively undemanding.
But if there is a Grinch in ACES Christmas, it is the dreaded T-Reqs. The awful setup of Duke's distribution requirements always rears its ugly head and forces you to drop the class you've always wanted to take for an ALP or a QS.
Distribution requirements are, in theory, a good thing... in theory. It is true-no matter how much humanities students abhor number crunching and math/science kids hate literary theory-there are certain subjects that every college student should know. Sure you don't "need" to know Shakespeare or the components of a cell, but you don't "need" to go to Duke, do you? Higher education is about learning the things you don't "need" to know.
Were Duke students really receiving a balanced education, then distribution requirements would be worthwhile. But that is not the case. Everybody knows the easy credits that satisfy our QS (Statistics 10) or NS (Chem 83), and occasionally we find that hidden gem of a class that an industrious professor has managed to get coded a dozen different ways. But we don't learn anything important in these classes. We sit through them doing the crossword, take whatever grade we get and try to forget about all those classes we could have taken instead.
If Duke really wants us to balance our courseload, then it ought to have a real core curriculum-a la Columbia or the University of Chicago-that students cannot fake their way out of. If not, then get rid of the requirements altogether. Either option is preferable to forcing students to waste what amounts to a full semester in bureaucratic loopholes. Duke is an elite school-we shouldn't waste students' and professors' time with Rocks for Jocks and other fluff courses.
Unfortunately, the problems with Duke's course offerings go beyond the worst-of-both-worlds distribution requirements. There is a lack of uniform requirements even within concentrations, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Since Duke students are not forced to take any "Intro to X" or "Z 101" courses, these departments are free to simply not offer them. As a result, entire departments often seem to serve a specific niche at the expense of the overall subject.
Looking at the history department's Spring course offerings, for example, you can find a course on Russian Revolutionary Cinema, but not the Russian Revolution. This is the same department that has not once, in my four years here, offered a course on the French Revolution. I suppose that's not historically relevant.
Introductory courses, in many departments, are often at the discretion of the professor, yet certificates like markets and management and policy journalism and media studies are given more careful attention.
Niche fields and new approaches to subjects are obviously important to academic development, but fetishizing innovation often comes at the expense of teaching the more-important basics.
All of these problems can be traced to the faux pas of educational elitism-it is considered arrogant or ideological to decide what "the basics" are. Saying that Darwin or Shakespeare "must" be taught seems old-fashioned and ethnocentric, even if it's true. As a result, the University talks in abstractions like "modes of inquiry" and "areas of knowledge" instead of simply saying, "If you're a college graduate, you should know this stuff."
But that's what being educated means-being taught the things you are supposed to know, whether it's the ABCs or the foundations of American democracy. Education at the college level comes with autonomy, of course, but that is not the same as improvisation. Duke cannot just pretend "Baseball in Global Perspectives" is more important than the French Revolution, just like it cannot pretend every QS teaches real math. Doing so is more delusional than any student has ever been on ACES Day.
John Schneider is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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