It's usually unfortunate when discussions get polarized, and particularly so in this case. While I don't believe that anything that gets put into core curricula is essential to leading a productive life, there are certainly skills-writing, reading, shovelling snow, etc.-that can be considered essential. What I'm against is the idea that a college education should aim to make graduates seem culturally literate; a lot of people seem to have this view, and it's what stimulates all the editorials about people having been through college without reading Shakespeare. I think this view is misguided for two reasons: Cultural literacy is something that you can acquire on your own should you want to, and college is capable of more serious and interesting functions, such as bringing students into contact with active research and the practical epistemology of accepted truth, often for the only time in their lives.

The abilities that one could sensibly require of all students are some level of proficiency in writing, mathematics and foreign languages. I have never understood why people think a semester of calculus brings about any sort of intellectual development; a proof-based course might be interesting, but I would hesitate to say that mathematical proof techniques are essential knowledge. Absolute rigor is fun but possible only in a narrow intellectual range from which most questions of general interest are excluded. Besides, most disciplines demand pretty rigorous thought once you get in deep enough.

The purpose that foreign language requirements are supposed to serve is even more mysterious; there are plenty of reasons to be interested in foreign languages, but just as many not to be: Language courses are an investment for which the payoff is access to a foreign literature and culture and, therefore, justified only if you need access.

It's reasonable to require that all students be competent writers by the time they graduate, but a fair number can write well from the outset, and there's no point to making them take writing-intensive courses when they could be doing something more interesting.

Statistics is, I think, the strongest candidate for a core-curriculum class, since most people don't learn it at school and it's of great practical relevance; however, it's inappropriate as a core course because there are so many different levels of sophistication at which you can take it. In other fields, distribution requirements seem more natural than core courses-why impose Dante instead of Dickens, say, or dead rats rather than nitric acid? If one is to impose a chore curriculum of some sort, it's only fair to let the students decide how they will execute the chores.

However, I think distribution requirements are a bad idea too. Assuming one is required to major, there are roughly three ways in which one could distribute the other 23 courses: Take more courses in one's major, spread them thinly across various departments or lump them in two or three interests outside one's major.

The first option is widely imposed in English universities; my objection to it is that if one likes a field enough to study it exclusively for years, one can do so at graduate school. After all, it's never going to be feasible to take "WAGS for physics majors" after college. This consideration does not distinguish between the other options, though, and I think breadth has been chosen rather arbitrarily over depth. It should be pointed out that there is a choice to be made here because the number of courses that you want to take greatly exceeds the number you can. A major is generally at least 11 courses with a thesis, and if you're really interested in it you're likely to do a few special topics and advanced, slightly off-topic seminars, which brings it up to 14 or so. If you want to learn a new foreign language to a useful level and take a course or two in its literature, that's another six courses, which brings you up to 20. A typical core curriculum would take up at least another six courses-so you have six courses to yourself, a rather meager number. If you take five courses every semester the calculation is different, but I don't think one should be forced to do so in order to follow one's interests. (I once asked the illustrious Mihailis Diamantis '04 how he managed to do anything outside his three majors-with-theses; apparently he took five courses a semester and audited several others. But that was Mihailis.)

The great advantage of a place like Amherst is that students have access to professors who are active in research, and in my experience professors tend to be at their best in relatively small upper-level courses, where they are not limited by the students' lack of background. Besides, fields get a lot more interesting by the time you've taken your sixth course in them. The (admittedly rare) thrill of insight and the quieter satisfaction of having a comprehensive view have been, for me, the most worthwhile things about academics, and neither would have been possible to the same extent if my time here had been dominated by the necessities of a core curriculum.

Gopalakrishnan can be reached at sgopalakrishnan@amherst.edu