After picking up on the vaguely changed Major Cultures requirement last week, we inquired with the good folks at the Committee on the Core to figure out what exactly we have to do to get this one out of the way.  Profs. Patricia Grieve and Roosevelt Montas (the subject of an interesting profile here) had this to say:

“The immediate change to the ‘Major Cultures’ requirement, besides the change in name, is the revised mission statement — which reflects more accurately the educational goals of the requirement — and the elimination of the A, B, and C course lists in favor of one single list of approved Global Core courses.  These changes, which the Committee on Major Cultures and the Committee on the Core instituted in the spring, are preliminary steps to a more comprehensive review of the requirement.  That review will begin this fall, and will involve extensive consultations with departments, faculty, and students.  For the moment, however, what we have achieved is the elimination of some clumsy bureaucracy and the laying out in broad outline where we want to go with the requirement — namely, towards a more cogent offering of seminars that parallel the depth and rigor of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization.  The existing courses in Latin American Humanities and African Civilizations provide useful models of the direction in which we want to proceed.”

Could that mean that no Global Core class will have prerequisites?

Bwog asked for further clarification, and learned that while courses that currently have prereqs, like language courses, will continue to require them — but that otherwise, the A, B and C list classes don’t have to be taken in sequence. “The intention of the requirement is to have a mix of students of different disciplines and interests, as we have in Lit Hum and CC, and so it is my sense that we would want to include many courses that do not have prerequisites,” wrote Grieve.

But don’t get comfortable with however things end up this fall — everything is likely to change again as the system gets revamped.

Oh, also, the broken class list link will be restored slightly before school starts.