Do We Need Our GE's?
By Jonathan Arkin
Corsair Managing Editor

• Pro:

It's as if the community college system needed another cause celebre to tear academic policymakers further apart. As the result, perhaps, of years of grousing from lazy students throughout America , the value of general education requirements - a hallmark of the university system nationwide - is being called into question. Yet again.

The GE requirements, as they have come to be known, have always been in place. Our parents' generation had to deal with them, if not on the baccalaureate level, then at least in secondary school (Remember home economics, mom? How about automotive class, taught by the local "Fonzie?").

Other institutions call them "multi-disciplinary studies" or "distribution requirements." The City University of New York re-established itself as one of the premier public institutions of higher learning thanks to their establishment of the "core curriculum." And, at Santa Monica College 's mother system (and at the UCs) they are tagged by the rather unwieldy acronym IGETC (Inter-Segmental General Education...well, you get the idea). A program by any other name, though, would still smell as sweet. Or would it?

Lazy administrators are spurring this debate on, no doubt, as well. Many of the grade appeals at Santa Monica College , surprisingly, come not from major requirement courses, but from these "gen-ed" classes.

And, in this corner stand some of the instructors as well. Frustrated by their classes, filled with uninspired students content with C grades, they have resigned themselves to the backburners of academe, the stepchildren of the degree process. Well, I've had great times in my classes, and I can say with certainty that there is no subject beyond the reach of an able, excited professor. It starts there. And, unfortunately, it often ends there as well.

But, we must not forget that our value as a society in America (read this, Al Qaeda!) lies largely in our ability to incorporate tremendous amounts of cross-cultural input and to use it humanely and in an educational way. Where would we be without language distribution, allowing us to interact with those less functional in lofty English? How about the grand strides in race relations being made in the former Deep South ? Couldn't an Alabaman form of our own "diversity" class have made some contribution to that? And then there is the all-important study of history: what did Santayana say about repeating the mistakes of our past? What lessons there are in " Western Civ " and "Anthro 101" classes!

A respected dean at Columbia University in New York once told me of his preference for students striving for a "well-rounded, liberal arts education." This runs contrary to the philosophy at UCLA, where one has to apply as a "pre-major," often with a courseload of six or more prerequisites in a chosen field of study. No wonder transfers hate our IGETC track: narrow-minded schools claiming to be on the same page as us are actually causing unnecessary headaches by creating drudgery and intellectual anomie among students in the community colleges - those of us with more than enough crap on their minds.

The solution: make the general education requirements uniform throughout the American public collegiate system, and recruit better instructors to teach these classes (such as department chairs and interdepartmental "stars"). And let us continue to create well-rounded, conscientious graduates.