With more than 1,400 undergraduate courses spread over 40 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs, Dartmouth provides access to an incredible wealth of learning opportunities. It would take 90 years of four-term, four-course loads to appraise Dartmouth's full academic menu, assuming, that additional courses are not introduced in the meantime.
For a matriculating student, the latitude of possibility can feel daunting. Dartmouth proffers some measure of guidance by obligating concentration in at least one academic discipline. Coupled with an array of distribution requirements, this promotes breadth and depth in our education.
Yet the nature of these requirements serves as a source of ongoing controversy. Implicit in any compulsory academic criteria is the belief that all students should engage some set body of knowledge in preparation for postgraduate success. But what exactly should be included in this body of knowledge?
At a basic level, one must be able to write and communicate effectively. It is the equipment of the word, the Aristotelian rhetorical modes, that underlies credible discourse and human interaction. A freshman writing requirement currently serves to impart these abilities, though consensus indicates that results have been underwhelming, if not frankly insufficient. Dartmouth also requires demonstrated proficiency in a second language and provides ample opportunity for study abroad.
What else? I am tempted to suggest a primer on applied mathematics, tailored, perhaps, to an individual's major; a survey of the natural sciences physics, chemistry and biology to ensure understanding of our very existence; a statistics course, to properly inform our inferential capabilities; an economics course, to advise our inevitable passage into capitalist society; a philosophical study, to probe our conceptions of reason and ethics.
It might only take one philosophy course, though, to call the whole thing into question. Though college is often billed as preparation for "the real world," who exactly prescribed such a utilitarian purpose? Could college actually be a reprieve from, the everyday? Might it be an opportunity to explore the profundity of thought, to freely share ideas without the distractions of adult responsibilities? Could college be a time for learning simply for learning's sake?
And what of the knowledge we do gain here? Immanuel Kant, building off of David Hume's problem of induction, cautioned that we tailor observations to our cognitive faculties and not the other way around. Nearly two centuries later, Michel Foucault detailed how a human tendency to find order in things allows the arbitrary to evolve into the absolute. The convergence of these contentions reveals a crucial contemplation; without recognizing the certainty of error in human judgment, we are bound to assume as fact what is actually fiction.
Postmodern theorists have blamed this intellectual contradiction for the promulgation of tyranny. Supposed fact has justified policies of eugenics, genocide and racial purity, the institutionalized subjugation of women and minorities, the conception of physical illness as psychological conflict and most recently, a perilous configuration of the global financial mechanism. An established body of knowledge necessarily discriminates between truth and fallacy, yet the inexorably imperfect division between the two likewise contributes to the discrimination of mankind. It is frightening to consider that we no doubt currently hold misconceived truths that actively force suffering on others.
The solution, then, is to remain highly vigilant and skeptical in the quest for knowledge. There needs to be a middle ground between philosophical questioning and empirical reasoning, between collecting knowledge and remaining acutely aware of its assumptions, origins and inadequacies. This is vitally absent from Dartmouth's academic agenda. For some, a critical reflexivity naturally emerges at the nexus of various paths of study, facilitated by Dartmouth's important focus on an education grounded in the liberal arts. But mere diversity of knowledge is not enough; one must understand the theoretical underpinnings buttressing any field of study.
That means, for biology majors, courses on the theory of science and epistemological anarchism; for those in psychology, a course on philosophy of mind; for economics majors, a course on the shortcomings of methodological individualism. An introspective appreciation of knowledge is key to the furtherance of knowledge itself and to the eradication of nothing less than oppression.
