I first began giving tours of Brown as an impressionable first-year. On the second stop of the tour outside University Hall, I would gather my modest crowd of overachieving high schoolers and their anxious parents to extol the virtues of Brown’s unique curricular system. After responding to a host of familiar incredulous questions — “You can really take any class S/NC?” “There’s no such thing as a D?” — a question of my own would often drift through my head: “How come we’re the only one of our peer schools that does this whole Open Curriculum thing?”
I struggled to answer this question. It seemed obvious to me that Brown’s successful model could be easily adopted by other universities. After all, we had discovered that the time-honored tradition of liberal learning, once jealousy-guarded by the faculty elite, could be entrusted to a choice selection of 18-year-olds with no ill effects. It was a scandal to me that the fine administrators a train ride away in New Haven or Cambridge failed to see how their antiquated distributional requirements harmed student learning.
But perhaps the Open Curriculum could only work on College Hill. It is a tempting, if not ego-soothing, line of reasoning to imagine that an admissions officer, trained to sniff out the best and brightest, has chosen you — yes, you! — as one of a select few worthy of determining your own educational path. But does anyone really believe this is the case? Even if the admissions officers were infallible decision-makers, we must critically question the evidence at their disposal. Reviewing nearly 50,000 applications a year, admission officers receive only a single essay of up to 250 words about how each student plans to leverage the Open Curriculum. That’s it. Admissions officers are not psychics. These responses alone do not provide enough information to ascertain whether a prospective student will make good educational decisions over four years of college.
The students that are chosen, correctly or not, receive what they are told is a liberal arts education. By virtue of the title “University,” derived from the Latin “universitas,” or “the whole,” Brown ostensibly participates in a time-honored tradition of liberal education stretching back to the Middle Ages. But imagine telling Thomas Aquinas that his students at the University of Paris would be allowed to select for themselves which elements of the Trivium and Quadrivium they wished to study. Feel free to toss arithmetic if you find mathematics overwhelming. Grammar? Skip it. Go straight to rhetoric if that’s what you’re interested in.
A foundational principle of the liberal arts is the education of the whole person. The Open Curriculum achieves this in theory but not in practice. For every future Fulbright scholar dutifully plotting out a unique academic plan, there is a clique of nepo babies skipping out on calculus, a frat’s worth of finance bros S/NCing concentration requirements, a dozen pre-meds scrubbing their transcripts clean and a stack of computer scientists escaping college without ever reading a book. Brown’s curriculum offers the chance to be the “architect of your own education.” But architects need training.
By placing personal academic liberty as the highest aim of Brown’s mission, the University has fractured the campus. Technocratic consultants and software engineers eschew the humanities while activists and Marxists abandon the pursuit of objective truth. It’s difficult to have fruitful dialogue without common ground. Rather than force students with different perspectives to come together, the Open Curriculum allows them to stew in their separate echo chambers. While many students make the effort to cross disciplines and foster productive conversations, there is a dark corner of entrenched ideologues and one-track minds upon whom the Open Curriculum fails to shine the light of fresh ideas.
We should ask ourselves who keeps the Open Curriculum in its celebrated place. Is it the faculty? I doubt it. Nowadays, even talented scholars feel pressure to take whatever tenure track job they can get, especially at a school as prestigious as Brown. I find it unlikely that new professors are getting picky about pedagogy with their careers on the line. This is a recipe for a lukewarm faculty, more noncommittal to the Open Curriculum with each passing year.
Could it be the students? This is more plausible. We like doing whatever we want. It benefits us to have rampant grade inflation. It comforts us to S/NC that class we think might be hard. It’s much more fun to take electives instead of those boring old core subjects you hated in high school. Even so, I question if the average student would actively protest in support of our current curricular system as many did for the New Curriculum in the ’60s.
This leaves us with the administration: the deans, financial managers, admissions officers, marketers and those they oversee whose numbers have consistently grown faster than the number of students or faculty. It may have been a past generation of activist students who set Brown on the path to the New Curriculum, but I believe it is the current generation of administrators who leverage the Open Curriculum as a brand identity to stand out in the commodified market for luxury education. Brown’s distinct academic approach is an easy sell to wealthy high school seniors who can’t truly grasp the meaning and purpose of a liberal education because they haven’t yet received one. The administration needs to keep the lights on, but curricular decisions should be driven by the pursuit of knowledge — not the bottom line.
The administration will breathe a sigh of relief that I no longer give tours. But for the sake of the future Brunonians on these college visits, I hope we can reevaluate the Open Curriculum experiment. Whether we should return to an older model or forge something new, I don’t know. But it seems to me that the current system is sustained by finances rather than academics, aspirations rather than realities and convenience rather than love of learning.
Samuel Walhout ’25 can be reached at samuel_walhout@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
