His position (if I understand it properly, which I may not) is that espousing “a” core curriculum commits you to arguing that it should be “the” core curriculum – that there can be no intellectually honest distinction between the two. My position is closer to yours, although not identical.

For a start, I think I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who went through a completely different system in which all four years of university education were devoted to a single disciplinary area.*

So from my perspective, distinctions between “core curricula” and other ways to structure degree requirements are variations on a basically similar American liberal arts-y, general education model. There’s a wide underlying consensus that “normal” college should involve exposure to different subject areas. St John’s and Evergreen State are in complete agreement here.

So the “real” underlying question seems to me to be, for the moment, remarkably uncontroversial – what one argues about are the exact details. Plenty of room to argue about those, but one needs to keep in mind the enormous number of different possible combinations.

“Core curriculum” is at best a useful shorthand for a range of more restrictive options. It’s not necessarily a useful shorthand – I’m not actually fond of it at all -and its use shouldn’t be allowed to reduce what is in fact a complex array of different interacting choices into A and B.

What we’re really talking about is, I think, requirements to graduate, and every institution has them, and therefore has to make some choices. One can’t, I think, talk about this as a matter of “traffic management,” because that presumes that one has already answered the questions of overall direction and flow – which is what we’re really talking about in the first place when discussions of core curricula and the like arise.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether one wants to have a “core curriculum” or not. You’re committed to having some requirements to graduate, no matter what, and you have to justify them. Any argument that you have justify a core curriculum in universal terms needs to contain some explanation of why it stops at core curricula, and doesn’t apply to requirements to graduate in general.

On the other hand, if one does, as I do, see American universities and colleges as largely offering variations on a similar model, one can view it as quite appropriate for those variations to be suited to the particular institution. This includes variations in whether or not they have “core curricula,” and what those core curricula contain.

Given the sheer number of possible ways one could put all this together, it seems misguided to me to believe that one could arrive at some universal “right answer,” and even more misguided to suppose that there would be one in the first place. There are bound to be trade-offs here, and a set of requirements that does one thing well will do another thing badly.

*This oversimplifies how the Irish system of third-level education functions, but it’s an accurate picture of the specific part that I went through.

However, if I were going to make the case, I’d distinguish between core curricula that argue that particular national subjects need to know certain things and core curricula that argue that all modern subjects in liberal societies need to know certain things. The first view sometimes crops up in cultural conservatism in the US and elsewhere, that the purpose of core curricula is to produce some form of national unity, a shared national tradition. That view certainly wouldn’t advocate that people in different nations should have the same core instruction, quite the opposite.

The second view is going to have an easier time of it when it is dealing with subjects that already posit themselves as implicitly or explicitly universal, where there is strong internal disciplinary consensus about what is essential and non-essential. When it gets to literature, history, anthropology, and so on, it’s going to have a harder go of it. Probably the best you could do is either argue for a sort of Arnold “best that has been thought and said” approach, a kind of core-as-greatest-hits-for-all-humanity or argue for some sort of “these are the histories and cultural works which have had the greatest measurable influence on the present for everyone on the planet“.

Or (if Irish third-level institutions worked like this, which they don’t*) an Irish history in Ireland should be justified as something that everyone in the world should know? (There are concrete reasons, that have to do with “not killing people,” that make a nuanced and multidimensional knowledge of Irish history somewhat more important in an Irish context than in America.)

And once one admits that context matters, then one can’t get out of the difficult question of deciding how much should it matter.

*However, primary and secondary education in Ireland does work like this, so the same arguments crop up at a different level. For that matter, they apply within disciplines – would you really feel that every history department should approach the task of setting requirements for the major as a matter of arriving at the sequence and spectrum of offerings that every department should have?

Which, by the way, is why I think core curricula are almost always a mistake. As I said, I think you have to persuade students as you teach about the importance of what they’re learning. That’s what makes learning an enduring part of your life, it’s what teaches students to teach themselves. Curricula with strong requirements and few options allow faculty to circumvent that need to persuade except in the rare cases where they recognize the need to both require and persuade. Authority-driven curricula have a lifespan no longer than graduation, unless you’ve managed to so thoroughly indoctrinate students that they willingly march in lockstep for the rest of their lives.

Weak core curricula are usually just attempts at traffic management that disguise themselves as philosophical statements about what people ought to know. It’s better that they just be explained as traffic management.

This I don’t agree with at at all (and it doesn’t fit with stuff that you usually say about the value of heterogeneity in higher education). I think it’s perfectly reasonable to argue for the local value of a particular core for a particular institution, and not as something that should apply to all institutions everywhere.

There are other definitions that pull in different diretions , I think more towards a core curriculum, among them the historically-based one that derives from the Greek-derived trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic).