r/BrownU • u/Far-Television2939 • 7h ago
Opinion: I’ve had too much freedom in college [Boston Globe]
I’ve had too much freedom in college
An open curriculum may seem enticing. But today’s students need structure.
By Coby Mulliken
Coby Mulliken is a student at Brown University majoring in comparative literature and applied math.
Like many high school graduates, I was eager to throw off the constraints of a rigid secondary school curriculum and take more control of my academic life in college. I wanted to be, as Brown University’s website put it, “the architect of [my] own education.” And not just any architect: a good one. I believed I could craft a program of education for myself better than what any prepackaged core curriculum could provide.
I’d been drawn to Brown in large part for its Open Curriculum, which allows students to take whichever courses they like so long as they complete the classes that are required for their majors. That meant, in effect, beginning each semester by placing seven or eight of the roughly 1,500 available courses with the most intriguing titles or the most respected professors or the most compelling students in a virtual “shopping cart” (literally marked with a little blue shopping cart icon) and attending classes until I had narrowed down my schedule to the most appealing four or five.
I was learning, in theory, to educate myself — or at least to determine the content of my education. I was enjoying the fruits of being a “free” student.
Such was the philosophy of the student activists who persuaded Brown in 1969 to abolish the school’s general education requirements: “The individual who is being educated,” they wrote, “is the center of the educational process.” The school’s hands-off approach has played a role in elevating Brown’s reputation and selectivity. It admitted around 1 in 3 applicants in 1964, and just about 1 in 20 this year.
The activists’ ideas have been influential elsewhere too. Colleges like Wesleyan, Smith, and Grinnell have since adopted their own open curriculums, and many more traditional universities have accepted some of their principles, such as the liberalization of once-rigid course requirements in many humanities departments.
Five semesters of college have left me wary of this approach. For all its success at Brown and elsewhere, I think students have paid a steep price.
Appealing as the ideals of freedom and self-direction may be, they assume we are capable of directing ourselves well, of acting freely toward good ends — qualities that, I imagine many will agree, most college freshmen do not possess. In following these ideals blindly, I worry we have come to see the university as a playpen, constructed to satisfy the desires of individuals rather than a community in which those desires are cultivated and directed. I fear we have altogether lost sight of the point of an education.
How do you know what you need to know?
The cult of self-direction at Brown and other experimental colleges rewards a certain sort of performed precocity. The ideal student is idiosyncratic, self-assured; they know what they want — ideally, something totally unique.
In my case, this manifested as a drive toward hyperspecialization and a juvenile penchant for name-dropping. I learned in seminars that my references to Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” or Edward Said’s assessment of Russian Orientalism would earn more effusive praise than earnest attempts at working through a difficult passage in plain language. I felt encouraged too — not by any individual’s advice but by the general atmosphere — to try to leapfrog ahead in my coursework. Friends spoke admiringly of sophomores taking graduate courses, of freshmen deep into theory.
And so I leapt into classes on political theology before I’d really understood Genesis, literature and multilingualism before I had much of a grasp on either. There was a certain gratification to all this. It felt like nothing — no administrator or tutor or academic handbook — could stand between me and the frontiers of humanistic inquiry.
Looking back at the period now, I realize how little I knew about what I did not know. I had imagined college as an institution that would make me whole, fill my gaps, remedy in some part my cluelessness. But while schools like Brown can, in theory, play that role, they rely on the student to both identify those gaps for themselves and be disciplined enough to seek out the courses and professors that could address them. Maybe there are some preternaturally self-aware teens out there capable of this. I was not.
In the middle of my junior year, I realized that I lacked the foundations to really grapple with much of what I was reading. I’d barely touched the Greeks — save for some excerpts from Plato and Aristotle in a literary theory class — and, despite my interest in political theory, had yet to read more than some excerpts of Hobbes. I noticed in a seminar on Herman Melville that I failed to parse many of the novelist’s allusions to texts that would have been obvious to his contemporaries — references to Milton, to the Bible, to Rousseau.
Sure, this was the product of my choices: Brown offers courses on the Enlightenment, on Greek political thought, on the Bible, and I could have taken them. I probably should have. But we do not enter university with the benefit of hindsight; and considering my 18-year-old self’s desire for shortcuts to erudition, I understand why I did not.
Abdication of responsibility
Partisans of the “Brown model” see its rejection of structure as a vindication of the rights of the student. These 18-year-olds, they say, may not know exactly what to study or what forms of knowledge will be most useful to them, but they know better than anyone else their own values, interests, and aspirations. It follows that imposing a one-size-fits-all curriculum upon them is a sort of tyranny, an impediment to the better choices they would make for themselves had they the opportunity.
In the words of Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell, the student coauthors of the 1968 report that brought about Brown’s curricular overhaul: “Those caught up in the rationalistic theoretical planning of education forget that they are planning for vital human beings, whose needs, desires, and irrationalities, both mentally and physically, often do not allow for tight logical planning.”
The report’s authors were drawing on a wellspring of individualism that was sweeping the nation. The new curriculum was as much about emancipating the student as it was about throwing off the provincialist shackles of tradition and rejecting the dictates of the elder class that had given America the Vietnam War. Concerns of fairness too played a role. In the 1970s, when forcing all prospective history majors through the gauntlet of several semesters of European history may have seemed like an assertion of the supremacy or centrality of that history, Brown’s history department began offering an East Asian history intro sequence as an alternative — a welcome development, in my mind. In the 2010s, however, it stopped offering introductory sequences at all. (Students can now choose among optional thematic intro courses like “History of Capitalism” and “Refugees: A Twentieth-Century History” and must still meet temporal and geographic distribution requirements, but there is no single course all history majors must take.)
Such liberalization has allowed humanities departments across the country to dodge accusations of Eurocentrism, but it has also allowed them to abdicate responsibility for prescribing a curriculum altogether.
In a country with a robust secondary education system, that decision might make sense. (There is something to be said for exposing students to new frameworks after many years of quasi-rote memorization of Euro-American history: I took a fascinating course my first semester that presented the history of the Americas through their energy resources.) But it makes less sense in the United States today, where some quarter of young adults are functionally illiterate and where, even at highly selective universities like Columbia, per The Atlantic, many students struggle (or prefer not) to read entire books. Some reject the so-called crisis altogether; many Columbia professors took issue with the conclusions of the Atlantic article, claiming they had seen no such reduction in the capacity of their students.
I cannot comment on the accuracy of the much-cited literacy statistics or compare my peers with students from earlier eras: I am not a professor or a policy wonk. But I can say that there is a pervasive sense among my generation that intellectual culture on campuses is stagnating, if not retreating. Can we really be expected to synthesize and theorize freely if we lack familiarity with the most basic details of the events and texts we are discussing?
Some of that stagnation is due to recent innovations in self-lobotomization like the Instagram Reel and the large language model, technologies which, it is clichéd to say by now, either divert our attention from the task of getting educated or permit us to abstain from that task entirely.
But I also think adults have abdicated the duty to set out the bounds and purposes of education in the first place. It is an abdication most explicit at universities like mine, where it is codified in the absence of constraints, but is present nearly everywhere in subtler ways: in the reduction of reading lists; in the withering of survey courses; in the ascendancy of critique over construction. It is an abdication that leaves my generation rather nihilistic.
Colleges with a classical bent — schools like St. John’s, the University of Chicago, Deep Springs — are pitching themselves as an antidote to this trend and have earned a wave of favorable press. Nontraditional schools have emerged too — non-degree-granting institutions catering to both students and working adults like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (founded in 2011, which includes a mix of canon and critical theory in its offerings) and the Catherine Project (founded in 2020, with a more St. John’s-like approach). And many legacy institutions — Ivy League universities and others of the sort I have been critiquing — have maintained opt-in humanities programs like Directed Studies at Yale or the Hum 10 sequence at Harvard.
Red-state politicians have taken notice. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted in 2023 to transform the state’s New College into a “Great Books” school by replacing many of its trustees. The move was intended as much as a political cudgel as it was a trial of educational reform: In the same press release from his office that praised the “classical, liberal-arts education” the school would provide (and, it claimed, had once provided), it also bragged about the termination of the school’s gender studies program and the replacement of “far-left faculty.” Similar attempts to create more structured curriculums or programs in civics and the humanities at the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin, and elsewhere have been marred by analogous political overtones.
Though I am suspicious of many of these initiatives — I fear they envision “classical” education as a means of churning out conservative culture warriors rather than critical thinkers — I cannot blame their sponsors for trying to take advantage of the vacancy left by the failure of many elite schools to set out coherent visions of the ends of an education. Students want structure, and these actors are capitalizing on its absence.
I cannot imagine Brown killing the Open Curriculum, its proverbial golden goose, and I do not necessarily think it should. But the university, and institutions like it, should do more to educate students in how to best use the academic freedom they’ve been granted.
That could mean bringing back introductory humanities sequences like those offered elsewhere; it could mean imposing more structure on the requirements it does enforce for each major, so that students have some set of reference points in common; it could even just mean a recentering of “foundational” texts (however defined) in existing courses. I am agnostic about all of this. I care mostly that universities like mine find the courage to articulate a vision beyond mere openness.
I hope in so doing we might come to again conceive of an education as Brown alumnus Horace Mann once characterized it: “a way by which [...] nobler faculties can be elevated into dominion and supremacy over the appetites and passions.” Mann was speaking of education in childhood, but his sentiment applies just as well to the extended adolescence we call our college years.
