Perhaps Duke expects too much of its freshmen.
By that, I mean that freshmen are often more intellectually immature than their tremendous course freedom would suggest. It’s no secret that many have no idea what they want to study, even into their sophomore or junior years. Amid this confusion, I wonder whether the lack of options for structure outside a defined major or certificate track is a deficiency in Duke’s liberal arts education.
As a remedy, Duke ought to consider the creation of an optional Great Books immersion program for freshmen.
The idea occurred to me when I read a piece by Yale University senior Matt Shaffer for the Manhattan Institute’s higher education Web site. Shaffer expresses his regret and that of many of his peers over not participating in Yale’s “Directed Studies” program, their year-long Great Books curriculum. DS students are more eager learners, he says, and begin their college education on a surer footing than their peers.
Every Fall semester, 125 Yale freshmen in the program embark on three year-long courses in the Western canon of literature, philosophy and historical and political thought. According to the program Web site, DS fulfills a number of distributional requirements, in addition to providing a “strong foundation for all majors in Yale College.”
Reflecting on Shaffer’s column, I felt like it spoke directly to the Duke undergraduate experience, too. For instance, my own course selection early in college was often random and haphazard, conducted without a clear sense of specific educational goals. I often wonder whether I might have made more of my academic career at Duke had I had a clear track laid out for me. I know many other students feel the same way.
I talked to Robert Thompson, former dean of Trinity College, about Duke’s academic aspirations and whether the University ever considered a Great Books program. Thompson stressed the goals of “breadth and depth” in American higher education as well as the diversity of approaches toward satisfying those ideals. Duke’s particular balance, he said, was struck “commensurate with [our goals as] a research university, with an emphasis on the process of research and discovery,” as opposed to a directed readings track.
Now I firmly believe academic institutions should establish a clear vision for their curricular priorities. For the most part, I have no qualms with T-Reqs, even if I sometimes doubt the efficacy of their implementation. Yet, in the great unending debate over whether higher education curricula should favor freedom or structure in preparing students to enter the world, I detect a false choice.
Here especially, offering students the option—not the requirement—of a Great Books-type immersion in their first year would not only enable them to satisfy numerous University requirements, but do so in a meaningful way that would enrich the remainder of their studies and prepare them to make more deliberate and thoughtful academic choices.
Indeed, in a liberal arts education, course order matters. Though it is true that many of the themes engaged by the primary works are timeless, they are not ahistorical. They are best studied as part of a conversation, and the classes I have learned the most in are those which have taught intellectual history as such.
Particularly for humanities students, it becomes clear over the course of their study how important the history of ideas is to a meaningful understanding of their coursework. The lack of a broad-based exposure to major thinkers in many of these fields can be frustrating for students as they enter higher level courses and realize they aren’t quite as familiar with the foundations as they thought they were.
My sense is that this originates from the lack of any required introductory courses for various humanities majors. Students don’t know what courses they should take, and so take whatever they feel like. This has clear disadvantages. In my own experience, I never actually read Aristotle at length until the first semester of my senior year despite taking multiple philosophy and political theory courses. This seems to me an unequivocal absurdity.
Some might say students should know better and seek to remedy the deficiencies in their curricular exposure. But the problem with not knowing what you’re missing is that you often don’t realize you’re missing anything at all.
To be sure, Directed Studies at Yale is not perfect. Students sometimes complain about being overburdened with readings. Nonetheless, many of these same students remain effusive—and keep coming back. One I interviewed, Yale freshman James Benkowski, said that students “most definitely benefit.”
I suspect Duke students would benefit as well. A Duke DS track need not start off large—it could begin as a pilot program, with some 30 or 60 students—like a FOCUS plus, of sorts.
Sure, Great Books can wait—they have been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But can students?
Vikram Srinivasan is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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