When I was younger, any time I went to a family gathering or banquet with buffet-style food my father would walk through the buffet line next to me and put on my plate all the food I had passed over. And as much as I protested every time he slopped some feeble-looking mung on my plate and said, "Here, son, try some of your aunt's spinach potato-salad; she worked hard on it," I always knew he was doing it for my own good. So even though I cringed with each helping of stewed-cabbage or monkey bread piled on my plate, deep down I realized that my father was only trying to help open my eyes and let me experience a wider variety of things.
Tuesday's Student Assembly resolution proposing a change to Dartmouth's World Culture requirements is a little like my dad at the buffet line. According to his Jan. 14 column, "Redefining the Requirements," Jorge Miranda '01, the resolution's sponsor and chair of the Ethnic Studies Committee, claims that the proposed IRE (Identity, Race and Ethnicity) will "narrow the focus of the [North American World Culture Requirement] in order to concentrate on racial and ethnic identities." This is an important, well-intentioned goal -- similar to my dad's goal, its purpose is to give people new experiences and an understanding of differences that they might not otherwise obtain. But, as I often told my father, force-feeding someone is no way to get them to appreciate monkey bread.
A key difference between the IRE and my family buffets is this: at the buffets, whenever my father wasn't looking, I could always feed the salad to the dog under the table and slide the cabbage onto my sister's plate and then head straight to the dessert table. The IRE offers no such outlet, which, for most people, is completely fine.
Personally, I would not mind the IRE requirement. In fact, I'm sure that I will voluntarily take courses that would meet that requirement. But, with Dartmouth's reputation being what it is, I'm also sure that there are some people on campus that would be looking for the proverbial dog-under-the-table to get rid of their IRE requirement. And if one of the goals of the IRE is truly to "open up new doors" and foster better racial and ethnic awareness on campus, it will fail miserably if it is forced on people.
To continue the theme of vague, over-generalized food analogies, picture this: whenever my mom would bake brownies, she would get out all the ingredients and put them on the counter before she started baking. Whenever I saw the bag of walnuts, I would always try to run off with it and hide it somewhere. I absolutely hate walnuts and have always felt that they ruin an otherwise great brownie. But my mom would usually catch me and explain to me that the walnuts are essential to the recipe and that they really do make the brownie much better. To be truthful, she never actually said, "Liam, the walnuts are there to make the brownie more well-rounded and better able to cope in the diverse, global world in which it lives, and merely the knowledge of the different walnuts helps promote unity and understanding within the brownie," but she had that look in her eye, I swear. She also hinted that if the brownie had absolutely no requirements -- excuse me, walnuts -- they'd end up baked lopsided like the brownies at Brown.
Just as brownies probably are better with nuts, a Dartmouth education and experience would no doubt be better if it included IRE courses. I plan on making a point of taking IRE courses because I think they will give me a better understanding of American cultures, and they hopefully don't involve any math. But that alone isn't reason enough to force them on students. And $30K a year is a pretty steep price to pay for a brownie if it's not baked the way you like it.
