By Charlotte Allen

Brown University is famous for having the loosest graduation requirements in the Ivy League. In fact, there are almost no graduation requirements at all, for although Brown undergrads do have to major in something in order to qualify for a degree, they are free to design their own majors. As for anything else in the way of mandatory courses, forget it. Don't like math and science? You'll never be asked to take a single class in either at Brown. Find learning a foreign language too difficult? No worry---you'll never have to utter a single word en francais or en espanol during your four years on the university's historic campus in Providence, R.I.. You can even bid au revoir and hasta la vista to freshman English while you're there, although you do have to demonstrate some level of competence in writing in order to don your cap and gown at the end of it all Grades? You can elect to take all of your courses pass/fail if you like. And if you do choose to have your professor give you a letter grade, the range consists of A, B, and C; F is not an option. Thus, there's almost no such thing as an introductory survey course designed for non-majors at Brown, whether in biology or history or anthropology or economics. Why should there be? Students at Brown don't have study anything outside their chosen (and often self-designed) fields.

Even given today's rampant grade inflation, especially at the Ivies and other elite schools, and today's lax definition of distribution requirements that allow students to select courses from a smorgasbord of offerings (a little Chinese history here, a little Caribbean poetry there) that usually ensures that they never learn the basics of any academic field outside their major, Brown's requirement-free curriculum is a standout. If it sounds like something left over from the 1960s, well, it is. In 1969 Brown's administrators jettisoned the university's traditional core curriculum, including distribution requirements, survey courses and required sequences that obliged students to learn the basics of an academic field before going on to advanced-level work, in order to focus on an free-form educational philosophy whose goals were variously described as to "put students at the center of their education" and to "teach students how to think rather than just teaching facts." One of the architects of Brown's "New Curriculum," as it is still known almost 40 years later, had been Ira Magaziner, now best remembered as the designer of President Bill Clinton's failed national health plan but then a student activist and antiwar protest leader at Brown. And so, to this day, while Brown says it encourages its undergraduates to "experience scientific inquiry," for example, there is no mandate that they actually do so.

By Anthony Esolen

Whenever anyone asks me what sealed my commitment to teaching the heritage of the West, I recall a minor uprising at my college long ago. In some ways it was tame enough. No sit-ins, no public obscenity. A group of students, led by a newly arrived sociologist, had been roused to indignation at having to study Dante and Homer and Thomas Aquinas. They called themselves Students Organized Against Racism. What they wanted to study instead they never specified. It wasn't math.

So the school organized a panel discussion, attended by a hundred students and a few dozen professors. The panelists were polite. There was a leftist ex-nun in blue jeans, who intoned, "Teaching is a political act," that great first tenet of the academic credo. A history professor tried to defend the old regime, then shrugged and admitted that a little change couldn't hurt. The students included a young lady driven by the cause, petulant and pretty, and a young black man who played the Guiding Star, intelligent, well-spoken, an obvious leader, but ignorant, as most people at that age are.

Back then I too was a left-leaning professor, but I had long fallen in love with Plato, Chaucer, Pascal, and the rest, and so I found myself at an impasse. I figured I'd try to persuade the attendees that if they really wanted to advance their causes a sinistra, studying the heritage of the West would be a fine strategy. So I asked the young lady a simple question: "Why do you study Virgil?"

I expected an ideological reply, with the requisite pepper of scorn: "To confirm the patriarchy" or something similar. What I got instead stunned me.

"I don't know why we study Virgil."

By Patrick J. Deneen

Overwhelming evidence attests to the liberal tilt on our college campuses. Studies show that the faculty at most mainstream institutions are overwhelmingly registered with the Democratic party and give a disproportionate share of their political donations to left-leaning candidates. A recent study of donations by faculty at Princeton University during the current Presidential election season shows that every faculty donation went to a Democratic candidate. Were such unanimity to manifest itself for conservative candidates at an academic institution, one can be certain that our leading academics would decry the lack of diversity.

Anecdotal evidence everywhere further attests not only to the liberalism of most "mainstream" faculty, but the disproportionate share of radical professors in our humanities and social sciences. Innumerable stories have been circulated of aggressive efforts to "destabilize" gender, to question "normativity," to challenge backward institutions such as marriage and family, to encourage students to break out of pre-conceived social notions they may have inherited from parents and community. A recent article in my campus's newspaper, The Hoya, reflects this sort of radicalism. In the column, philosophy professor Mark Lance introduces himself thusly:

I'm an anarchist, a rationalist, a feminist, a man, a pragmatist, an evangelical agnostic, a friend, a philosopher, a parent, a teacher, a committed partner of one other person and a nonviolent revolutionary. These labels are all, to different degrees, important to me; they define my sense of self. You could call them my identities, but all are "works in progress," which is to say that the label stays roughly the same, but my sense of what it means changes and grows. (For example, I still have no idea what I mean by identifying as a man, though over the years I've figured out many things I don't mean. Some days, I wish that one would drop off the list.)

Aside from its unbearable self-indulgence, it's a predictable indication that Lance would seek to reject the one form of his "identity" that is actually given by nature. This is the one unbearable aspect of identity, because it is not chosen or willed.

Conservatives are often satisfied to register their righteous anger and indignation at this state of affairs, and have tactically adopted the language of victimhood and demands for diversity as a way of combating this left-wing hegemony. This may be politically effective and may in fact help raise awareness of the current campus culture to potential supporters outside the academy. However, these arguments are only tactical at best, and fundamentally obscure deeper investigation into why this state of affairs has come to pass and what would be required to begin a more fundamental reform of higher education.

By Erin O'Connor

When asked about the theme for December's annual MLA convention- "The Humanities at Work in the World" - Yale comparative literature professor and MLA president Michael Holquist spoke of the need "to raise the consciousness of people outside the academy about the importance of the work that's done inside the academy." Acknowledging that the humanities do not enjoy wide public support, Holquist diagnoses the problem as a superficial one of public relations - if humanists simply advertise their worth more effectively, he suggests, the public will accept their self-assessment at face value.

But that's a glib analysis of a problem that goes far beyond appearances. The real problem the academic humanities face is a loss of purpose, imagination, and professionalism. No amount of PR can conceal that or make it palatable to a skeptical public - and efforts to do so risk revealing exactly how intellectually hollow the humanities currently are.

A case in point: Stanley Fish's recent attempt to use his New York Times blog to justify the humanities. A Milton specialist who has written numerous books on literary theory, Fish is a public intellectual who has long been at the forefront of the most influential movements in the humanities. That's why the New York Times gave him his very own online forum, "Think Again." It's also why his posts there routinely draw hundreds of comments from academics and lay readers.

A skilled rhetorician, Fish is exceptionally able to walk finer intellectual lines than most. So it was instructive to see him take up the perennially vexed question of the humanities in two posts at "Think Again."

By Herb London

[a speech originally given at the University of Texas]

What is an appropriate curriculum for our students? What happened to the consensus on which the college curriculum once rested? Together these comprise two of the most urgent questions in contemporary American higher education. It seems to me that the criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind of a decade ago are symptomatic of the problems we are facing. High standards are described as elitism, a pejorative of scathing proportions. A call for the assertion of Western traditions is characterized as racist and anti-democratic. And Bloom's critique of radical feminism as a virus let loose on the curriculum is greeted with cries of "phallocentrism."

The college curriculum as the source of youthful enlightenment free of the impediments of bias and prejudice has unraveled. While Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, recently noted that "scholars are less politicized in the United States than in any country in the developed world," he neglected to point out that a profound and revolutionary change has occurred on American campuses since the 1960's, resulting in the institutionalization of a radical agenda.

For a generation students have been fed on the "studies" curriculum, whether it is women's studies, gay studies, environmental studies, peace studies, Chicano studies that are designed to indoctrinate students about pathologies in contemporary American culture - specifically race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

By Anthony Paletta

Many college freshmen face their first academic task before they even set foot in a classroom - the freshman summer reading project. Many colleges now select a single volume for all incoming freshmen to read, and construct discussion groups and attendant orientation activities around the book. Temple University's explanation of its program is fairly representative: "the goals of the project are to provide a common intellectual experience for entering students" and to "bring students, faculty and members of the Temple community together for discussion and debate." At a time when core programs and required courses grow increasingly infrequent, it is surprising to find such strong language about "common intellectual experience" from universities. This all sounds encouraging, right? Perhaps, until you find out what they're reading.

An overwhelming favorite of these reading programs is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed - it's a perennial from Baruch to Slippery Rock to UNC Chapel Hill. Nickel and Dimed appears a perfect class-conscious selection to expand students' minds. Poverty is a running theme in recent years' assignments, from Case Western Reserve's The Working Poor: Invisible In America to One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All at Washington University to a variety of Kozol readings across the nation's campuses. These assignments have not always been received happily - the 2003 Nickel and Dimed assignment at UNC Chapel Hill inspired a protest coalition, arguing that the book was an inappropriate assignment, as a radical and left-inclined critique of the American economy.