Should Brown offer a 3-year BA/BS?

PAGRok
Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:29:43 +0000

@mrcsinc Thank you for your opinion, but I don’t have time to write out the discussion of friendship according to Aristotle concerning “living” with friends being active discussion with them or physical proximity to people and how this concerns the interconnectivity of people now through FB. I also don’t have time to state how the Three Orders of the Prerevolutionary France, the beginning of the French revolution as an aristicratic revolution against the sovereignty of the king, the formation of the National Assembly, and the debate of proper rights of citizens that developed within the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen applies to the debate about citizen rights in modern time.

Also, these courses (humanities and civilization) if we look past the content, are meant to give you skills working with source and original documents and analysis. They help you learn how to think, develop arguments, and discuss ideas even if the reading list is old and possibly outdated. Yes, some of these courses are mainly focused on Western documents but there are professors, like my own, Professor Leela Gandhi, who bring a strongly global context to them. And there are Core humanities courses that deal with other non-traditional canon like Media Aesthetics or Readings in World Literature or Language and the Human, I took a very traditional course called Human Being and Citizen. Also, my Civ course is History of European Civilization, so I clearly am focusing on Western Civilization in two of my Core courses.

These two courses are only a slice of the Core anyways, there is also Arts, Math, Physical Science, Biological Science, and Social Science. How are these requirements “tired”? They are all very much alive today. I am not afraid to say that your belief in the Core as tired holds no weight for me against the belief of the faculty of the University of Chicago of these courses as important and fundamental. I personally believe Brown’s open curriculum is great for some people, particularly those not looking for a well-rounded liberal-arts education. Though I do believe Brown gives guidelines for studying in a wide range of fields. To like Brown’s academic freedom does not mean you shouldn’t respect the Core courses of UChicago as important, also I’m sure Brown has many courses like UChicago’s in all fields that are required to be studied by Uchicago students.