Maybe it’s selfish of me to criticize the Pope Center’s “General Education at UNC-Chapel Hill.” As the Elephant in the Room, it’s usually my job to go to bat for some of the less popular things the GOP and its allies do. But this time, I can’t.
I wish I could, though. Inside “General Education at UNC-Chapel Hill,” a reader can find nuggets of pure conservative gold. Imagine a middle-aged, upper-middle-class white male reading, “Students’ lack of political and economic understanding is frequently appalling; they often condemn business and capitalism without being able to provide a simple definition.” He reclines in his La-Z-Boy after a long day on Wall Street, takes a sip of the martini that his housewife prepared upon his return and cackles at how stupid liberals are.
But apart from throwing meat to the lions that are the Pope Center’s loyal readership, what purpose does this document serve? An attack of this sort, one so perfectly aimed at the general education curriculum that this school prides itself on, wasn’t meant to change the way we think. It was an attempt to use a sort of farmer-with-a-straw-in-his-mouth, oversimplified common sense to change the way everyone else thinks, which would then force change upon us.
While I typically despise the sort of people who would use the term “intellectual chauvinism,” in this context it’s unfortunately appropriate. A whole 24 of the 40 total credit hours in the Pope Center’s “Optimal General Education Curriculum” are devoted to “Ideas and Cultural Knowledge,” which is almost entirely Western-centric.
I won’t deny that the West has played an outsized role in shaping the history of humanity, nor will I deny American Exceptionalism, but it’s ridiculous to think that the point of college is to study in-depth the culture in which we live. The report’s critiques of multiculturalism, as well as its refrain that gen eds should create social cohesion, simply ignore the fact that U.S. colleges largely gave up on assimilation decades ago.
I took the Western Civ course that the report wants to make mandatory. However, I think the authors would be disappointed to learn that, according to the professor himself, the Western Civ course that they envision is a cultural artifact, and modern versions are geared toward — uh oh — more multicultural approaches.
Perhaps there are some gen ed classes that are too easy. Perhaps there are some gen ed classes that don’t measurably improve our reasoning skills. But a breadth of knowledge over such diverse fields as “Geisha in History, Fiction and Fantasy”and “Shalom Y’all: The Jewish Experience in the American South” represents a much richer education than a simple survey of American history.
The Pope Center cites the narrow nature of some of UNC’s gen ed courses as reasons that the smorgasbord approach should be changed. It’s ironic, then, that the authors fail to see how narrow they would have our gen eds be.
