<p>I usually don’t pay any attention to college rankings, but I thought johnwesley might like this one.</p>
<p>[CollegeGuide.org</a> - Rating America’s Colleges](<a href=“http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=14]CollegeGuide.org”>http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=14)</p>
<p>Clearly, if your intent is to roll-back virtually every advance in higher education over the past fifty years, you start by aiming at the head of the pack.</p>
<p>JW, they claim to rate the schools according to a strict set of criteria. Here are some of the indicators they rely upon:</p>
<p>How extensive and serious are the general education (core) requirements of a school? Must students cover American history and the classics of Western literature and thought—or can they avoid them in favor of courses on recent history, popular culture, and multicultural grievances?</p>
<p>Do academic majors such as English, history, and political science mandate that students cover the fundamentals of those disciplines—or do they permit overspecialization and a focus on trendy, ideologically charged topics?</p>
<p>Is there a wide range of views available on campus for free debate and exchange—or does a stifling orthodoxy shepherd students toward agreeing with their teachers? Are student organizations of many persuasions welcome on campus?</p>
<p>Based on the above, do you think Wesleyan merits their number one ranking?</p>
<p>johnwesley</p>
<p>Do you really believe that Wesleyan is responsible for “virtually every advance in higher education over the past fifty years…”? It is hard to take your comments seriously.</p>
<p>Honestly, I feel proud to go to an institution that’s at the top of the list. Reading the entire list, the criteria essentially dislikes schools that emphasize diversity and an open curriculum. Here’s a quote from this gem of a list, “If multiculturalism is indeed—as many suspect—a new, theocratic religion…”</p>
<p>I can’t tell you how embarrassed I am that my alma mater only received a yellow light and not the coveted red light that Wes got.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No matter your political orientation, this quote should be disturbing to everyone, if true. Certainly, it could be just one faculty member’s opinion and not accurate, but if it is generally true on this campus and others, that should be a concern for everyone, because that does not
</p>
<p>^^It’s easy enough to go to the Wesleyan website and check out their course catalogue, or Wesmaps, rather than relying on combustible remarks from an anonymous source. It’s not like they keep it in a secret chamber. :/</p>
<p>So are you saying that the course catalog reveals that those courses are uniformly post-Left Communist and inhospitable to students whose political leanings are otherwise? And therefore the statement is true?</p>
<p>Or that the course catalog somehow shows that religious and/or more conservative students wouldn’t have any problem at all?</p>
<p>englishjw wrote:
[quote]
johnwesley</p>
<p>Do you really believe that Wesleyan is responsible for “virtually every advance in higher education over the past fifty years…”? It is hard to take your comments seriously.
[quote]
</p>
<p>I think I said Wesleyan was a leader. And, it is.</p>
<p>In fact, one of the remarkable things about Wesleyan’s history is that it was constantly advancing things that raised the hackles of conservative critics; things like, teaching modern languages; things like permitting professors to conduct scientific research. Some of that was going on even before the outbreak of the American Civil War, when most eastern colleges were still pretty sectarian.</p>
<p>However, by “advance”, I’m not talking about breakthroughs in scientific discoveries or the establishment of specific academic sub-specialties (although, I can think of at least one example of the latter: Ethnomusicology.) I’m talking about Wesleyan being an extremely early adaptor of innovations that have since been widely copied by the rest of the education Establishment (and which raise still raise the most hackles among conservatives today):</p>
<p>1) Eliminaton of “core requirements” - Guilty. They went out the window as early as the late sixties, soon to be replaced by loose “expectations” that undergraduates would sample at least two courses from four broad liberal arts categories. </p>
<p>2) Multiculturalism - Guilty. A major New York Times Magazine article from January 1970 asserted that in the race for greater African-American enrollment, Wesleyan was outdistancing even Harvard and Yale. And, with the addition of blacks, latinos, chicanos and later - women (in 1968, Wesleyan became the first of New England’s traditionally all-men’s small colleges to turn co-ed) - came survey courses and inter-disciplinary majors dealing with race and gender which served as precursors for the whole area studies approach to specific parts of the globe.</p>
<p>3) Flexible grading systems- Guilty. The College of Social Studies (CSS) and College of Letters (COL) both pushed the boundaries of departmentalism and were wel-funded and established in the late 1950s. Both eshewed letter grades in favor of lengthy written evaluations.</p>
<p>4) Study of Popular Culture - Guilty. Wesleyan Professor, Richard Slotkin, wrote several seminal scholarly works during his tenure at Wesleyan, all pioneeering in the use of pulp fiction and other means of mass communication in painting a picture of a specific period of American history. This is now an accepted method of academic research. </p>
<p>Wesleyan also has one of the best Film Studies departments in the country and has been using the study of popular film to inform everything from traditional departments like English and Russian Literature to newer ones like East Asian Studies, ever since the early seventies. For such a small school, Wesleyan has had an incredible impact on American popular culture.</p>
<p>Is it true a student can receive a degree from Wesleyan without ever taking a foreign language, a literature or composition course, a natural or physical science, a math course, an economics course, or a US government/history course? Maybe going all four years without taking any one or a number of these courses is not a problem, but not having to take any of them is disturbing to many people.</p>
<p>Johnwes- please don’t dignify parent57 with an answer</p>
<p>Junesoon, I thought my question regarding the lack of any distributional requirements in the core disciplines was eminently reasonable. Your answer would give credence to the charge of a stifling atmosphere, not conducive to a free debate and exchange of ideas with people who don’t slavishly adhere to the orthodoxy of the main group…</p>
<p>junesoon</p>
<p>Your approach is a sure a way to promote some dialogue!</p>
<p>Take another look at johnwesley’s comments. He is advancing a discussion and presenting his point of view. When he does, it is easy to find areas of agreement. We don’t have to agree on everything. I doubt much would ever be achieved following your approach.</p>
<p>This seems to just be a site that lists schools with open curricula (bad) and deep core curricula (good), and nothing more. If you don’t like the idea of an open curriculum, don’t go there/send your kid there. An open curriculum is an inherently liberal idea, so of course those schools (Wesleyan, Amherst, Bard, etc.) will skew leftward. Princeton is arguably the most conservative of the elite schools, hence its placement at the top of the “exceptional” list. No surprises here. I’m not trying to say an open curriculum is better than a core, it’s just a different way of educating.</p>
<p>“I’m not trying to say an open curriculum is better than a core, it’s just a different way of educating”</p>
<p>Yes, but is it an effective way of educating. There are many of us who might be chagrined, after spending close to a 1/4 of a million dollars for our child’s college education, to find out they have not taken any courses in the core disciplines. For example, can any of these students answer the most elementary questions about economic theory, the Federalist Papers or Shakespearean sonnets.</p>
<p>^^Would you consider studio art, music, theater and dance a part of the “core curriculum”?</p>
<p>
The point of an open curriculum is not to ignore the core disciplines, but to engage them in a way that complements what you want to get out of a college education. </p>
<p>
Surely parents know what school they are sending their children to? If you expect your child to be exposed to every aspect of the “traditional core” then don’t send your child to an open curriculum school.</p>
<p>“Would you consider studio art, music, theater and dance a part of the “core curriculum”?”</p>
<p>No, unless it is your major.</p>
<p>Maybe I am old fashioned or too old, but I would not be happy if most of the courses my kid took to satisfy core requirements were courses like, "Key Issues in Black Feminism or “Queer Literature or Studies”. BTW, it has nothing to do with racism or intolerance, in case anyone wants to accuse me of that. I just don’t feel this is what I envisioned in a broad liberal arts education, which, in my view, should demonstrate a discipline-based competence in literature, composition, sciences, economics, math, American govt and history, and foreign language. </p>
<p>I agree that others can have other views, particularly if you are willing to pay the exorbitant tuition fees for colleges these days. Some of the posters here are seemingly getting very upset for just raising this issue. I thought the discussion was quite civil so far, but for some reason a couple of posters seem to be quite threatened by discussing this topic.</p>