sphinxRemember all that yelling last fall about changing the Major Cultures requirement? About how it was going to change into a seminar using $50 million from the endowment? Well, the requirement has changed for the class of 2012, according to a bulletin from the Core office — but Bwog isn’t actually sure how different it is from the old one. The new “Global Core” seems to involve a new list of classes that can be either focused on one culture or look comparatively at several, but the link to the list is broken, so we’ll have to get back to you with more details.

The blurb on the changes (misspellings and all) is pasted after the jump.  

“The Global Core requirement consists of courses that examine areas not the primary focus of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization and that, like other Core courses, are broadly introductory, interdisciplinary, and temporally or spatially expansive. Courses in the Global Core are organized around a set of prinary texts or artifacts, which may range from texts of literate traditions to media (e.g. film), ritual performances or oral sources, produced in the regions of the world in question. Global Core courses fall into two categories: those that focus on a specific culture or civilization, tracicng its appearance and/or existence across a significant span of time and sometimes across more than one present-day country or region; and those that address several world settings or cultures comparatively (and may include Europe and the West), in terms of a common theme, a set of analytic questions, or interactions between different world regions.”