Looking forward to a pledge term with ample time spent in the basement and diminished time spent in the library, hordes of sophomore guys are making the guilty decision and taking "gut" classes this fall to keep their GPAs afloat.
For those not familiar with the term, a "gut" is a class that is work-optional, attendance-optional, has a high median grade, is full of non-majors and occasionally fulfills a distributive requirement that would otherwise be difficult to get out of the way.
I'm not going to name any specific classes here so that I don't offend any professors, but we all know which classes these are. Students who signed up for these classes often stop and ask themselves if they're really making the most of their parents' money and their time here by taking a gut. When you overhear somebody talking about what it's like to be in a class that deals with the creative difficulty inherent in basic hand-drumming, you can't help but think, "What a joke." There are a lot of logical arguments that could be made about why these classes should not exist at such a fine academic institution as Dartmouth, such as the devaluation of a Dartmouth diploma and the potential for one to go through college taking only the easiest classes. These are valid concerns, but there's another side to the argument.
This past spring I took an English class that I found to be very intellectually stimulating. It took me a while to realize why the class was going so well. I didn't love the material. The professor was good, but she didn't lecture much, so we didn't get much of her direct influence. I realized that the students in the class were smarter and more involved than the students from any of my other classes so far. Was this pure coincidence? No. Then it dawned on me.
Nobody was taking the class to get rid of the literature distributive, and nobody was taking it as an easy third. The only reason for someone to take this class was either to fulfill major requirements or for pure love of the subject. This was only possible because there were guts that non-majors could take to fulfill a literature distributive without too much work. Because of the presence of these guts and the lack of students in the class who are only looking for the distributive, the discussions in my English class were amazing, with every student participating, instead of half the class constantly wishing it wasn't there.
Some people aren't literary types, and some people can't wrap their heads around anything more mathematically complicated than algebra. And since distributives can't be NRO'd, students who are deficient in one academic area need a way to make it through to graduation without getting a grade so horrendous that their future employer rescinds their offer. This isn't meant as an assault on the idea of distributive requirements, but it seems cruel to make a student suffer through a class where they feel like they're the only person who doesn't love the subject matter. It'd be much better for them if they could take a class with other students who aren't coincidentally writing a thesis on the same subject. Sure, there might be some people dragging the class down, but that's a better learning environment than being completely lost in a discussion of Ezra Pound's poetry. And, in a gut, there's a mutual understanding that if you're not capable of making any profound contribution to the class, it won't hinder other students' learning too much.
Another way that guts can enrich our Dartmouth experience is to grant us freedom. I've never taken a ridiculously hard senior seminar or written a thesis or tried to start up a non-profit organization on campus or gone through an enormously time-consuming pledge term. But I'd imagine that if I were to undertake something so difficult, I wouldn't want to be hindered by other classes that take up huge amounts of valuable time. Some theses are crowning academic achievements and some pledge terms are the most socially formative time of a student's life, and some of those theses or pledge terms probably wouldn't have gone as well if the writer or pledge didn't have a gut or two on the side to free up some time while still keeping them on track to graduate.
I'm not recommending you spend the rest of your time at Dartmouth taking the most ludicrous guts around. But you should be able to take one or two guilt-free. And the next time you hear somebody talking about the latest reading about witchcraft, don't be so quick to judge. They may be making the smart decision.
