(1) If the only purpose of the liberal arts core requirements were to keep encroachments of professional programs at bay, they would be a worthless gimmick. The core was traditionally intended, I would say, to give each student, whatever his major, a liberal arts education so that he is not a mindless drone. The difficulty is this: the utility of auto mechanics is easy to defend: you can use it to fix cars and earn a living. But the utility of the liberal arts (knowledge for its own sake) is hard to defend: knowing Shakespeare, the Battle of Agincourt, or the metaphysics of Aristotle has no immediate utility. Yet it's the most important part of meeting the Socratic ideals of "self-knowledge" and "the examined life."
(2) We should all be liberally educated so that we all know something about philosophy, history, biology, astronomy, etc. There is perhaps even a unique way in which philosophy, unlike other disciplines, is everybody's business in some sense. But the notion that this end is best achieved by having the core requirements in philosophy met by all faculty assuming responsibility for it in their courses I find silly -- no less silly than that the core requirement in biology or chemistry should be met by my assuming responsibility for these subjects in my teaching as a philosopher. The Great Books program at St. John's College (both in Annapolis and Santa Fe) attempts something like this: all learn math by working their way through Euclid, Leibnitz, Einstein, etc.; but I doubt that's a viable option generally. Now philosophy, as I've said, is unique in some ways. So I might agree that it is political scientist's business to be familiar with (and deal with) basic philosophical discussions of justice, equality, and liberty. But I wouldn't want to encumber him with a detailed familiarity with Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics, Augustine's Civitas Dei, Thomas Aquinas' Treatise on Law and Treatise on Government, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, John Locke's Treatise on Government, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, etc.; any more than I would want to encumber our resident mathematicians with Derrida's work, On the Origin of Geometry.
(3) Despite all the obstacles to interdisciplinary work of the kind some would like to see at a small liberal arts college like this (heavy teaching loads, understaffing, severe budgetary constraints), I think the college could encourage interdisciplinary work on a voluntary basis among those willing to undertake it. In order to meet the scheduling requirements of students wanting to take Latin and Classics, our resident Classics and Latin professor typically juggles the equivalent of 2-3 overloads. He does this voluntarily because he likes teaching and is thrilled at encountering any warm body interested in what he has to teach (a scarce commodity). It might require that sort of voluntary commitment to teach interdisciplinary courses. Short of that, however, there are scads of other ways in which what we do is already inter-disciplinary. English professors here teach courses in which they read a wide variety of literature beyond the traditional English canon. History is similary open to cross-disciplinary teaching. Philosophy is the mother of all inter-disciplinary teaching because she is the mother of all liberal arts period. A doctorate in Chemistry is a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD). All our contemporary disciplines find their beginning in philosophy, which Aristotle divided into three species: (1) theoretical (metaphysics, mathematics, physical sciences), (2) practical (ethics, politics, law, etc.), (3) productive (literature, drama, etc.). Hence it comes as little surprise that a whole slew of philosophy courses are available with titles that take the form of "Philosophy of ________" where the blank may be filled with: mathematics, science, technology, language, art, law, politics, society, knowledge, religion, morality, and so forth.
With this in mind, one can well imagine how ludicrous it would seem to have to defend the place of philosophy in the core. There are reasons for this, of course, pertaining both to the Lutheran academic legacy of a general disinterest in philosophy and the general disinterest in liberal arts generally (of which I see philosophy as the core 'discipline'). What would a curriculum look like that reflected the fact that philosophy is the mother of disciplines? The Free University of Amsterdam had the model: philosophy is the hub of a wheel from which spokes radiate outward as the special sciences and other disciplines. This would seem prima facie self-serving to an outsider ignorant of the history of philosophy. But I think all would agree, at least, that other candidates for the 'hub' are few and far between: biology? chemistry? economics? sociology? None quite have the universality of philosophy, do they.
(4) Some state that they think we're ready for a change in the curriculum. They say that they think our current system demoralizes students and faculty both. Is it the curriculum that demoralizes people, or something else? I was never demoralized by the curriculum. While the curriculum is far from perfect, it sure beats what we had when I arrived here twenty years ago: philosophy at that time had no required hours in the core. The core courses I taught (my two huge classes each semester) were in "Western Heritage" (essentially history). I didn't resent teaching history, because I like it. But I wasn't prepared to teach it. I probably knew a bit more than those I was teaching, but I lacked the wealth of background a PhD in history would have had. Since then we acquired (finally, for the first time in the history of the college) 3 hours in the core. This meant I could teach an introductory survey in philosophy, dealing subjects I was well-prepared to teach, such as moral philosophy, theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Furthermore, a course previously entitled "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy" (lumping together 2000 years of philosophy from the pre-Socratis to the late medieval nominalists in one 3 hour course) was eventually split into two courses at my request (I pushed for this for years), permitting me to devote two separate courses to those two philosophically highly fruitful periods. Now these two courses have again been conflated into one as a result of core pressures. If the trends continue as suggested by the proposals being floated, I may soon find myself teaching a watered-down version of that "Western Heritage" history course again, this time under the heading of a "Humanities" service course to professional majors. What joy irony intended]!
It seems to me that we have now a workable core curriculum if only we have the will to work it. The pressures are coming from the professional program and from students who find their core courses more difficult than they'd like. Students don't like being forced to take courses outside their major. Virtually all students who take a required philosophy course to fulfill their core requirement come to class the first day not having a clue what philosophy is. They sometimes resent having to take it. But when they find out what it is, some of them perk up and find it interesting. And a few choose to major in it. The only way I have of acquiring majors in philosophy is through the required core course in philosophy. All students know, or at least think they know, what history and English are. But almost no freshman would attempt even a definition of philosophy. The answer to these problems, then, is to simply resist these pressures to reduce the liberal arts core, and to reduce the pressures from students who want to wiggle out of the core requirements, from having to learn to write, reason, argue, etc.
As to writing, I don't see any easy way out of courses specifically devoted to writing, as onerous as they may be. I require a lot of writing in my courses, but with enrollments of 38-40 students in each class, the writing burden is becoming intolerable. I used to require eight or nine two-page reaction papers per term in these classes. But do the math. That meant reading and grading nearly 1,200 pages of sophomore writing each semester (not counting any of my upper-level classes). I used to spend a lot of time grading grammar, punctuation, even style. But that becomes a ludicrous, thankless undertaking after a while. Further, there are many of our colleagues who won't be pressured into requiring writing at all with class enrollments such as we have. I don't know any way around having writing courses with small enrollments (20 max) taught by people trained to do this. The alternative would be to reduce course enrollments across the board in the liberal arts (20 max), which just isn't going to happen. I suppose I feel about teaching logic a bit like English folk may feel about teaching writing. Wouldn't it be nice if we could market pills to students which made them logically and grammatically literate!
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