This is a way of describing ‘diversity requirements’ that I’ve seen many times, and which, to me, misses the point. People from all cultures should learn about other cultures, so they have an understanding that their own history or way of life is not the only history or way of life; they should also learn about their own culture, in order to fully understand the history and way of life that has shaped them. Practically speaking, though, basically everyone learns about the dominant culture: that’s why it’s called dominant. I see a diversity requirement as an attempt to get most people to learn about non-dominant cultures, because that history/politics/sociology/philosophy/whatever is an important part of the world and gets less attention than straight powerful European men in most curricula; the identity of the student affects what need that fills, but having a diversity requirement doesn’t have to be about getting people to take classes about ‘someone else.’

Anyhow, Tim says:
“disseminate a particular kind of content or experience so widely throughout the curriculum that a student would have to deliberately go out of their way to avoid contact”

This seems to be suggesting that instead of mandating students to take one from a category of classes, that Williams mandate its professors to all teach some certain thing? That’s quite an infringement on professorial autonomy.

Philosophically, however, it seems to me that category requirements are the correct third way between a tight core curriculum and free-styling your way through college–in my view, such “class from group 1, class from group 2” formulations still allow the marketplace to work while ensuring the student acquires a certain set of experiences/skills. From my experience as an undergrad at Williams in the 1990s, the market worked far more freely for the “Peoples & Cultures” requirement than for the science requirement, where all the people who wouldn’t ordinarily take science were smushed into 1 of 2 classes. At a wild guess, some 15-20 classes per semester were open to people who needed to fill the PC req.

What puzzles me is the argument from Williams (and apparently you) that course requirements that define diversity based on the inclusion of material on “minority groups” or “non-Western cultures” are (necessarily) based on the assumption that the person taking them is a Western/non-minority person and studying these different people to widen their otherwise narrow horizons. This seems technically wrong as the “diversity” applies to the subjects studied rather than the identity (or presumed experience) of those taking them. The Williams’s discussion of the problem (particularly the question from Chrisotpher Waters, “Why would our minority students need to take such a course?”) seems to involve the corollary presumption that such courses can only be of use to Western/white folks, with others being diverse enough already. I hope someone brings to his attention what a slap in the face this is to his colleagues who have been teaching such courses – as if their courses did not represent disciplinary knowledge, but simply diversity training. Were there really courses at Williams in the past about non-white/Western people that did not include critical relflection or theoretical analysisis?

Also puzzling is the belief from the Williams faculty that they are narrowing the requirements for such courses rather than broadening them. I did my undergrad at Macalester College, which, like Swarthmore, used a loose system of distributions rather than extensive GERs. It seems to me that, taken as whole Williams new requirements either rephrase the existing ones as Courses with Critical Thinking on or Immersion in Difference of Some Kind, or amount to Please Take a Humanities or Social Science Course, Any Humanities or Social Science Course.

On the other hand, I have no idea why any department would design its introductory courses without a significant writing component. Any introductory class should be designed to make sure that the people who come out of it know, at a minimum, what kind of work people do in that discipline. Since almost all disciplines communicate primarily through papers (except for mathematicians, who communicate through proofs), I don’t understand any department that doesn’t spend a significant chunk of its introductory courses covering how to write papers (or lab reports or proofs) in that discipline. If departments are already doing that, the writing requirement is unnecessary; if they’re not, the writing requirement alone is not that useful, because it separates ‘writing’ from ‘communicating ideas and information in a way comprehensible to your audience’ which is just plain silly.

The diversity requirement is similarly silly, in that most social science courses should address at least one of those issues, and if they don’t, what exactly are they doing?

And yes, it must be nice to teach at Swarthmore. It was pretty sweet to go there.