Cornell undergraduates must take courses in ten subject areas as part of their general education curriculum. This “distribution requirement” or “ways of knowing” approach offers no coherent articulation of what an educated American should actually know. Indeed, most general education requirements across the Ivies are so general—some arts here, some sciences there—that the available options are too activist, narrow, question-begging, or self-indulgent to count as providing the fundamentals of a serious college education. In fact, many options are both tendentious and ludicrous. This characteristic excerpt from Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation of Cornell University’s curriculum examines three of its required subject areas.
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE
With such a crowded field of identity groups, each making its case, it can be hard for a student to decide which oppression to pay tuition to learn about.
• Asian American: Topics include “war and empire; queer and feminist lives and histories . . . anti-Asian violence; settler colonialism, and postcolonial critique.”
• Indigenous: “Critical responses to and forms of resistance toward neocolonial political and economic agendas . . . the history of victimization of indigenous peoples through colonial oppression . . . the complex interconnectivity between the ecological and the sociocultural,” and more.
• Latino: “The politics of resistance and solidarity of Latinxs/Hispanics in North America, with a primary focus on the US political system. . . . [C]onceptual categorizations and definitions of the Latina/o/x population, pondering whether Latin@s should be regarded as a racial or ethnic group. Then, we follow with a historical survey of Latino migration to the US and analyze how interlocking systems of oppression shape the material conditions and lived experiences of Latin@/x people. Ultimately, we conclude by analyzing Latino collective action to understand how they organize at the local, national, and transnational levels to confront systems of inequality . . . [including] neoliberalism.”
• Immigrants: “Central to this class is the exploration of multiple systems of marginalization that shape the opportunities, material conditions, and lived experiences of immigrants in the US. We conclude with an exploration of historical and contemporary migrant-led forms of resistance, such as the Immigrant Rights Movement, and its linkages to other transnational struggles for social justice.”
• Palestinians: “We will learn about Palestinian life—in Palestine, exile, and diaspora—and ask what these experiences can teach us about colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, and resistance.”
• Intersectional Disability Studies: The course title says it all.
• Deaf Americans: “Oppression of signed languages,” among other topics.
• South Asian religions: “The [modern] impact of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization.”
• Race in America generally: “Race has been the terrain on which competing ideas of the American nation have been contested.”
• Women: “We will . . . consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals’ identities, experiences, and options.” (This is a typical introductory gender studies course.)
• Trans Studies: “The vexed relation between queer theory and Trans Studies . . . the specific violence faced by Black trans women and the possibility that Blackness itself might be para-ontologically trans,” and so on. (Note that the Gender and the Brain course, for its part, takes the sex binary as a given and does not take sides between these two genders.)
• The French: The French Studies Program offers some different ways to learn about oppression in the course French and Francophone Literature and Culture, including a section on “women and sexual minorities” and one on “colonialism and the other.” This course also counts for the foreign language requirement.
• The Germans: The course Changing Worlds: Migration, Minorities, and German Literature gives special attention to “Jews, Turks, and Black Germans,” with less attention to “other minorities.”
• The Spanish: The course Fashion Victims treats “such topics as textile trade and Spanish empire, ethnicity and national garb, fashion and gender norms, as well as contemporary debates around cultural appropriation.”
Then there are some anthropology courses, including:
• Economy, Power, and Inequality: “What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses . . . formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies.” One might guess how the discussion of “capitalism and socialism” is intended to turn out.
• Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective: “A deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. . . . We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.”
Is there a way out? Yes. The philosophy courses Moral Dilemmas in the Law, and Topics in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, seem most likely to avoid taking identity-group oppression for granted. Also, Shi’ism: Poetics and Politics simply teaches about Shi’ism in a “socio-political context.” It appears to be silent about oppression by or against this major world religion (which seems like a missed opportunity in the context of the Social Difference requirement).
Here are some other possible options:
• One partial way out is to take a literature course that meets the requirement. For example, the English Department has one on nineteenth-century Gothic literature—but beware—this course still includes “scathing critiques . . . of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism” to ensure students get enough anti-Americanism for this distribution requirement. (The other English Department course meeting the requirement is Critical Approaches to Video Games. Avoid the opportunity “to consider how race, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality shape the code and the machines that we play” by reading “scholars in Indigenous studies, Black feminism, and video game studies.”) In French one could take Bankers, Gamblers, [and] Hustlers to critique capitalism via well-known and less-known French authors.
• Another possible escape is into Magic and Witchcraft in the Greco-Roman World, but the course cannot help but include “social class, gender, religion, and ethnic and cultural identity” in order to fit.
• Reading between the lines, one might infer that the course Of Saints, Poets, and Revolutionaries: Medieval and Modern Iran and Central Asia is mostly about culture and that it just throws a bone to the Social Difference requirement by including the words “colonial and post-colonial occupations” in the course description. Similarly, the course Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Inquisitors, Heretics, and Truth in the Early Modern World looks more like a history course that sneaked into the Social Difference area through the theme of heresy.
• Introduction to Anthropological Theory might work out if one believes that anthropological theory is still politically neutral.
• Music and Sound Studies is a discordant choice in Social Difference, but at least it gives the Department of Music a chance to score some tuition.
With such a crowded field of identity groups, each making its case, it can be hard for a student to decide which oppression to pay tuition to learn about.
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP
The distribution requirement called Global Citizenship is often just a different flavor of Social Difference. Indeed, some Cornell courses meet either requirement. Here are some noteworthy courses, starting with the less serious.
• Heat Waves and Global Health: Environmental Justice and Social Autopsy in London and Beyond: “A collaborative, intensive examination of the growing problem of extreme heat for global health and urban environmental justice,” including a spring break visit to London.
• Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor, and Climate Imaginaries: A seminar course “interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of ‘capitalist ruination’ which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.”
• Cayuga Language and Culture: An understandable course given Cornell’s location and history, but this course does little over the span of a year. The spring term continues “with a focus on plants and growing in the spring.”
On the serious list:
• China’s Next Economy: “An analytical framework to understand China’s ongoing economic transformation.” Other courses on China look fact-rich, too. Likewise, consider The History and Politics of Modern Egypt.
• Introduction to Comparative Government and Politics: A regular political science course.
• Political Violence: “The causes and consequences of modern-day civil wars.”
• The Viking Age: Scandinavian history over the years 800–1100.
• History of State and Society in Modern Iran: Through Literature and Film, and The Ottoman Empire 1800–1922: Both courses offer what they advertise.
• Modern Spanish Survey: An introduction to literature in general and modern Spanish literature in particular. It also meets the foreign language requirement.
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
Again, this area overlaps with subject areas above, with some courses listed under multiple areas. While many courses are very narrow, that is no impediment to learning how to engage in historical analysis. Until Cornell produces real requirements to learn American history and the history of Western civilization at the college level, this area will continue to be just another distribution requirement.
Among courses not yet mentioned, here are some to avoid:
• Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women’s Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective: “Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare . . . this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect . . . . Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice.”
• Comparative Modernities: This seminar invokes “the effects of capitalism . . . and the onset of neoliberal globalization” to study art “in a global context.”
• Reading Race: Early Modern Art: “This seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized ‘otherness’ and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability” (and so on).
• Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History: “We will explore the methodological potential [that] watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives” and will challenge “the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.”
• Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450–1750: “Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?”
• The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth: Autobiographies of “leftist political figures” with, inevitably, “special attention to the question[s] of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race.”
• Costume Construction Studio: “Draping and patterning basics . . . basic machine sewing experience helpful, but not required.” Such a bad fit, one would think it’s a mistake, but it slips in by including “historic silhouettes.”
Until Cornell produces real requirements to learn American history and the history of Western civilization at the college level, [Historical Analysis] will continue to be just another distribution requirement.
Here are some courses to take:
• The US and the Middle East: This course appears to be an objective account of events from the 1800s on. Also consider Introduction to Judaism.
• Romanesque and Early Gothic Art and Architecture: Europe and the Mediterranean, 1000–1150 AD: Monumental, though it’s more about culture than particular historical events.
• Medieval Romance: Voyages to the Otherworld: A real course in European literature. Or take the Chaucer course, reading it in Middle English. Or take the Beowulf course using a bilingual edition. Or take the fascinating course on Tolstoy, a man of contradictions. There is hope for literature students at Cornell!
• The Making of Modern Europe, from 1500 to the Present: A sincere attempt to teach a broad survey of European history and make it relevant to today.
Finally, special mention is warranted for this course on China, named Global Maoism: History and Present. Here is the course description:
Maoism and Chinese Communism are not history after Mao’s death in 1976. In China, Maoism holds the key to the enduring success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most remarkable organizations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that has survived the collapse of communism in Europe and the USSR. With the beneficial transformation brought by capitalism and globalization in China, the end of the Cold War and the narrative of the “end of history” cannot explain the resurgence of Maoism.
Is the course merely descriptive, or is it celebratory, or is it a warning? From the description alone, one cannot tell. That suggests a worthwhile course.
Read more in Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation
