Arts and Sciences vs. Oxford

bernie12
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:50:12 +0000

Just because it doesn’t describe itself as a liberal arts institution or as having that emphasis doesn’t mean it doesn’t. Colleges market and gimmick themselves in different ways. Of course a campus as small as Oxford (and one that may have a harder time attracting students) would try harder to trump up the fact that it is somehow much different from say, a larger university. The trick is the way they do their liberal arts approach not the fact that they are liberal arts intensive. I can show you many CASes( especially among top 20s) w/in research U campuses that are liberal arts intensive. Given that Emory has excellent English, Polisci, and history programs it shouldn’t have to stress that it views LA as important. You don’t get a neuroscience and behavioral biology major w/more than 1/2 of its classes lying in psychology or anthropology in an entity that doesn’t stress liberal arts seriously. It just doesn’t happen.

Seriously? You let marketing do the talking. That’s crap and you know it has the potential to be uninformative or even deceptive.

Welcome to Emory College.;

CAS describes itself as characteristic of a liberal arts entity w/the RESOURCES of a research institution. Whether or not it said flat out whether it is a liberal arts college doesn’t matter. My 3 years experience tells me that the self-prescribed description of its nature is pretty much on point despite what you perceive from their marketing. Now, if I were in the b-school or the nursing, I would have a different experience (actually I wouldn’t, most of them go through CAS for 2 years), but I’m in CAS. I’m willing to bet one wouldn’t see a huge difference between some of the more social science/humanities oriented courses (maybe w/exception of intros. and even those are conducted quite well, requiring many writing assignments and heavy reading load, and breakout sessions when necessary) at Oxford and main campus. After looking at syllabi, I would even dare claim that some of the science profs. at Emory are even better at doing it than their counterparts (only weakness is CAS labs). Some of the gen. biology professors for example, use a similar, but more rigorous approach than the Oxford counterpart despite the 70-90 person class (mainly a heavier caseload and thus more out of class work/writing). The same could be said for organic chemistry (which is nearly a joke at Oxford. It is apparently so easy, that no curve is needed b/c averages are so high. Many are shocked when dealing w/the likes of Weinschenk, Soria, or Morkin on main campus). The primary differences I see in the sciences is how they approach math and physics.