At yesterday's Winter term faculty meeting, professors debated the merits of several proposals to amend the world culture curricular requirements, but voted on none. While many faculty members were in favor of amending the distributive requirements, they reached no consensus on how to do so.
The faculty's debate centered around two proposals to replace the current system, under which Dartmouth students must take one course in European culture, one in North American culture, and one in non-Western culture.
Under the first proposal, prepared by the Committee on Instruction, Dartmouth students would be required to take one course in Western culture, one in non-Western culture and one in Race, Ethnicity and Migration.
According to the second proposal, drafted by history professor Pamela Crossley and art history professor Ada Cohen, students would have to take courses about three of five different general geographical areas (Africa, Europe, Western Eurasia, Eastern Eurasia and the Americas) in order to fulfill the world cultures requirement.
Matthew Rowlinson, an English professor, said that the COI proposal would "open ways of thinking about culture that aren't geographically based."
Rowlinson also noted that the existence of the current requirement that students study non-Western culture presupposes the existence of a unique Western culture. Combining the European and American requirements will better allow students to gain a sense of what that unique Western culture is, he said.
Anthropology professor John Watanabe said that he wanted students to become "self-conscious about the intellectual traditions they come from and the intellectual traditions that others come from." He said that such traditions often transcend geographical boundaries.
In their proposal, Crossley and Cohen said that structuring the World Culture requirement according to geography ensures that the classification of courses is not influenced by ideology.
When addressing the meeting, she explained that the question "Where is Africa?" is much less ideologically charged than the question "Where is the West?
The sharp distinction made between Western and non-Western cultures also concerned Crossley. As a teacher of Chinese history, she strives to teach her students not to see a world rigidly divided into the West and the non-West, she said.
Several faculty members also preferred aspects of the original Student Assembly proposal for restructuring the distributive requirements to the COI's adaptation of it. Under the SA proposal, students would have been required to take a course about Race, Ethnicity and Migration within North America.
"The constructions of race and ethnicity within our society are uniquely our own and have been shaped by our history," said English professor Josna. Her specialty, postcolonial literature, allows her to appreciate how differently societies construct race and ethnicity, she said.
Sergei Kan, an anthropology professor, argued the opposite viewpoint. "I'm afraid that requiring our students to take courses in race, ethnicity and migration would give them a narrow, politicized sense of how race is constructed," he said.
Hoyt Alverson, an anthropology professor, objected to the notion that students should be required to study race and ethinicity at all.
"Race doesn't exist," he said. Rather, he saw it as a 19th-century social construct that lacks a firm biological basis.
Watanabe countered Alverson's comments by replying, "If there is no such thing as race, there is such a thing as racism."
The faculty may vote on the two proposals at their quarterly meeting this spring.
In other business, President Wright gave an opening address about the College's financial situation. While the College has received less income from its endowment than administrators had hoped -- due to the recent economic downturn -- Wright emphasized that Dartmouth will continue to fund all of its programs as normal.
The faculty also used the meeting to grant permanent status to the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and sent a recommendation to revise the Organization of Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Dartmouth College regarding reappointment procedures to the Committee on Organizational Policy.
