I heard a freshman girl at the VISIONS dinner a few weeks back say this: "I think the distributive requirement is good. Without it I never could have convinced my dad to waste his money on a class like art history."
Without fools who say such things in our midst, it's easy to understand how students let the administration roll over them with talk of a new distributive requirement (named REM -- Race, Ethnicity and Migration -- obviously to win the support of the dying alternative-rock population). But as a tax and spend liberal, I can see where Republicans are coming from when they cry for less government and less intervention. We were once "highly sought after candidates," after all, and it's high time we started getting treated like them.
Dartmouth knew what it was getting when it signed me up for this four-year deal -- science was my lowest grade for four consecutive semesters in high school. Now I float through astronomy classes, where the intellectual decorum of 100 students trying to get out of this lab science alive is comparable to a Saturday pong tournament. My professor's reminder that each class costs us $200 only lowers the morale further in a class where the quiz average has never exceeded 70 percent. But apparently this is my fault.
"Obviously, you don't care enough about your liberal arts education if you're in that kind of a situation," one of the people at my table remarked snidely at the dinner. Obviously, this pretentious idiot lacks an understanding of what a liberal arts education is. I may come out of my distributives without a true comprehension of art, music, literature, science, math, philosophy or history. Fortunately, I have a personal interest in many of these subjects, but if the school wanted us to have a traditional liberal arts program, we would be immersed in a required series of classes much like students at Columbia. I don't really support this: I have enough confidence in my cream of the crop brethren that we will be able diversify our academic schedule without college-imposed requirements. Seeing the agony of nave freshmen taking Math 8 instead of Math 5 ("A Matter of Time"), however, makes me rethink the necessity to explore every field. After all, we take only 35 classes as college students, and excluding the 10-12 major classes, the three language requirement classes and an average of one foreign study class, only half our allotted classes are left to "explore" what else academics has to offer.
Thus bringing us to the bizarre REM plan, which went through years of touring small colleges in the '80s before hitting it big here. I feel like somewhere on the road I must have taken a class that would fit this requirement, but if I hadn't I would be pissed as hell, seeing that I have a policy of only taking interesting classes. The quantitatively inclined would "race" to sign up for the easiest class with the least reading. These classes would be driven by political correctness no doubt, as most discussions of race are on this campus. More importantly, it would require the creation of more "relevant" requirements in the quantitative field, until distributives start flaring up everywhere, leading to a civil war between humanities students and math/science students.
Most students, faculty and administrators are on the same page, realizing that one needs an understanding of more than one subject. I think the mistake lies in assuming that taking one class in ten different subjects will be more academically rewarding than taking three classes in each of three subjects. In any case, who should be deciding? If you are a student attending the school, you should be able to choose your classes. If your parents are paying for it, maybe they should have a vote. But we obviously made some good academic decisions during our first 18 years if we are here now -- I implore the college to trust us with making a few more.
