<p>I took core (at Chicago) as a graduate student. It was a great intellectual adventure as finally, coming out of engineering, I was able to put the things I already knew into some sort of context. Wonder if core isn’t wasted on first year undergraduates. Maybe a common exam at the end for everbody to guarantee some sort of cultural literacy. Isn’t that i.e exam schools the Oxford approach Mini? By the way, Jacques Barzun the very apostle of core at Columbia had real philosophical reservations about the St. John’s Great Books approach. Like Feynmans Lectures on Physics, another item from the golden age, it is simply too difficult for the majority of undergraduates. For graduate students it challenged and put together everything they kney but for undergraduates, even at Caltech in 1962, it was way over their heads.</p>