Month: November 2001

Our Tribute to Western Civ

A letter from Cynthia Peters, Associate Director of Public Affairs at Pomona College:

Thank you for making us aware of the Wall Street Journal articles. I had not yet seen them.
The article is correct in stating the Pomona College does not have a specific American History or Western Civilization course requirement for graduation. Among Pomona’s general education requirements however is one to “explore and understand an historical culture. Through immersion in a non-contemporary culture and its historical context, students develop an understanding of the historically embedded, evolving nature of human cultures and societies. The complexity of the task faced by historians in establishing historical causality is highlighted by involvement in the reconstruction of historical change.” You will be happy to know that countless Pomona students do take courses in American and European history, government and related areas. We offer an American Studies major as well.
The 2001-02 catalog provides a very nice description of Pomona’s focus on teaching intellectual skills versus specific required content. “The purpose of the General Education Program at Pomona is to nurture the intellectual skills in perception, analysis and communication that prepare a student for life-long learning. As change accelerates in knowledge, cultural values, and the professions, a liberal arts education must provide a broad base of content and skills that foster openness and rigor in on-going scrutiny of old and new ideas.” To do this, one certainly needs a historical context but specific content is only one means to the end of creating intellectual resilience.
You may be interested to know that 40% of freshman who entered this fall (49 of 394 students) received graduation credit for an AP exam in history (U.S., European or both), with a score of 4 or 5 on one or both exams. So it seems, that most of Pomona’s students have a good base in history.

I remain curmudgeon enough to think that a semester or two of Western Civ wouldn’t be a bad idea as part of the GE requirements — while “specific content is only one means to the end of creating intellectual resilience,” it’s also helpful for there to be common context upon which to build the interchanges between people that make for “on-going scrutiny of old and new ideas.”

While not wanting to disparage the achievements, nor the contributions, of non-European societies in making up modern American culture (and while also realizing that not everyone at Pomona was an American), modern American culture is primarily European in its basis, and understanding what that really means would seem to be of great importance.

I’m also pleased that so many Pomona Frosh are coming in with AP credits in history. I certainly hope that reflects a deeper understanding of American and/or European history than my AP English credit did in my understanding of literature. What I do know is that I took the full array of history courses in my high school, and any given semester of history in college blew the whole lot of them away in terms of what I learned. There was a quantum leap in sophistication — and expectations — between the experiences.

That all having been said, my biggest quibble at this point, though, is … who the hell wrote those passages from the GE requirements and catalog which Ms. Peters cites? They really sound like something Dilbert would be poking fun at. I’m all for complex sentences with lots of multisyllabic words (no kidding, Dave), but, really, when you start to sound like you’re crafting a mission statement that reflects the consensus of everyone on the faculty, noise begins to drown out signal.

I learned that from my liberal arts education, too. Or at least, I should have.