To the Editor:
Samuel Walhout ’25 makes the case for general course requirements at Brown, citing the centuries-long tradition of liberal arts curricula. His general point that the Open Curriculum is today more of a branding tool than a pedagogical necessity is hard to dispute. Even the brightest students, as Walhout contends, need guidance in order to optimize their undergraduate education.
There is, however, one part of Walhout’s piece that I find objectionable. Walhout laments that, due to the Open Curriculum, “technocratic consultants and software engineers eschew the humanities while activists and Marxists abandon the pursuit of objective truth.” But truth is a contested idea, and no small number of philosophers, theologians and physicists have challenged the notion that we can easily discern neutral, stable facts from variable, subjective impressions. Questioning what some people call objective is not the same as abandoning scholastic responsibility.
I take particular issues with the phrase “activists and Marxists” to describe a kind of academic malpractice, as if it were a form of left-wing deviency. The liberal arts tradition exposes students to ways of thinking that ideally force them to reconsider the very foundations of their own beliefs and sense of objectivity. I earned my bachelor’s degree at a liberal arts university with many general education requirements. I studied chemistry, computer science, history, literature and, yes, Marxism. I credit that education, Marxism included, with my enduring interest in humanistic study.
In a time when higher education is facing serious threats from the far-right, I would caution against using the word “Marxist” as a catch-all term for students whom the author views as obstinate or unserious.
Sincerely,
Andrew Clark GS
To the Editor:
I admire the respect Samuel Walhout ’25 displays for the learning process in his recent op-ed questioning the merit of the Open Curriculum. He writes, “Brown’s curriculum offers the chance to be the ‘architect of your own education.’ But architects need training.”
Interestingly, his words remind me of my own when I wrote the foreword to the inaugural issue of the Brown Journal of Medical Humanities, a publication I co-founded as an undergraduate in 2023: “With greater freedom and flexibility to discover what we love and study what we choose, Brown’s distinctive approach to learning enables students to become architects of their own education. It was this heightened responsibility to take ownership of our studies that inspired us to launch the Brown Journal of Medical Humanities.”
It is in the spirit of the Open Curriculum that Brown students dare to do what they may otherwise not be empowered to. Walhout fails to address this power of the Open Curriculum.
Walhout denounces the Open Curriculum as a “brand identity” designed to “stand out in the commodified market for luxury education.” But what’s inherently wrong with cultivating a strong brand identity, and then marketing it? To a certain extent, college admissions is a matchmaking process. Brown wants a certain kind of student: one who wants them back. Isn’t that why one of the application essays asks, “Why Brown?”
When most of us reflect on our Brown experience, we highlight not the classes we took or the subjects we learned, but the peers we met and the relationships we built. Maybe it is not what the Open Curriculum provides but who it attracts — the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the changemakers — that makes it valuable.
Jane Zafran ’23
