Everything is basically the same, we promise; it’s just slightly worse.

Since its debut over 100 years ago, the Columbia Core Curriculum has undergone many changes to get to the point where it is today. We’ve hung banners of influential female authors on Butler, force-wedged Luisa Roldán to the Art Hum syllabus because women were artists too, speed-ran all of the Jazz movement to fit it in the semester, and publicized Wretched of The Earth almost just as much as The Odyssey. We even got representation for people who turn into bugs to cope by adding Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis to the Lit Hum canon! Progress!

Don’t get me wrong: though I am poking fun at the more performative aspects of updating the Core, a lot of these moves indicate a willingness to challenge idolized works of Western art, music, literature, and philosophy, gaining more cultural sensitivity in the process.

But…what if we just made it bad again?

This article isn’t trying to undermine the “purpose” of the Core. In fact, most of these suggestions don’t even touch 99% of the Curriculum. We just want to imagine a Core that’s only slightly worse. Imagine this version of the Core like it’s a glass of water, only it’s been sitting on the side table for three days, and you definitely notice the slight tang of dust it collected when you take a room-temperature sip. Or, it’s like an artisanal loaf of bread you baked, but the only ingredient you forgot to add was salt, so it’s like, fine, but you can definitely notice you did something wrong. That kind of “slightly worse.”

Here are Bwog’s suggestions:

Lit Hum, Replace To the Lighthouse with The Great Gatsby. Oh, you said you wanted a book that deals with the terror and uncertainty brought by the turn of the century? And you want it to be from a unique point-of-view that explores the intergenerational effect modernization had on the feminine identity? Well, that’s asking too much! Here’s a book by another white man instead. And it’s a book every high school pretended to be obsessed with probably because Lana Del Rey wrote a song for the movie reboot. It’s also arguably not that well-written; however, it takes place in the 1920s, so that’s about as good of a replacement for one of Virginia Woolf’s many masterpieces that we’re going to get.

University Writing, Add a new section that focuses entirely on Common App Essay workshops. You can keep the other sections if you want, but don’t you want to know if your essay you submitted to colleges last year actually sucked? In this new section, you don’t read the intersectionality essay by Kimberlee Crenshaw: instead, you read the essay by Kimberly, the girl from your high school AP Gov class who wrote about wanting to be a biologist because COVID-19 stopped her from going to her 8th grade graduation. You workshop your own essay (if you still have a copy of it) and read those of your peers, revising it and rewriting it until it’s perfect. Sure, this skill is absolutely worthless now since you’re already at an Ivy League, but who knows. You might start a college application advice agency and overcharge the leaders of the next generation for your valuable service!

Frontiers of Science, Replace Brian Greene with any other intro-level physics professor at Columbia. People who liked Fro Sci liked it for one reason, and it’s the man who played with marbles on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. So, if we could only change one thing about this core class to make it slightly worse, it would be to keep the curriculum but get rid of the famous professor! That’s it; that’s all you need to make it slightly worse. If you want to make it completely worse, then add an organic chemistry section.

Art of Engineering (SEAS only), instead of forcing students to go to class Friday (mid-)morning, cut their day in half and make them go Friday late afternoon instead. From what I know about Art of Engineering, I can safely say that it sucks that they have a Friday class when all their CC counterparts can just frolic on the campus lawns like happy little lambs. If we want to make the poor freshmen engineers’ lives a little worse, then this is the solution. If they want to do homework before class, then they’d have to wake up early. If they want to go out at night, they’d have to delay everything by a couple of hours to make room for winding down, getting ready, eating, and maybe homework. It’s a small change, but it goes right for the jugular. Bye, bye, Friday!

Contemporary Civilizations, Don’t read Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—read Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to it instead! You know what I never said to myself ever? “This white French guy has a better idea of imperialism than literally anyone who has lived outside of the metropole.” With this modification to the syllabus, you get all the lure of actual, innovative thoughts on post-colonialism and the beginning of imagining a truly multipolar world, but you don’t actually get to read any of it. Instead, you get Sartre, who just makes everything about Marxist-Leninism! Isn’t it magical how quick Europeans are to take non-European concepts and somehow relate it back to something that Europeans invented and claimed that they were the foundation for it? Anyway, as I once learned in one of my history classes, it’s not contemporary Western Civilization if Europeans do not make everything about themselves!

Art Hum: Give even more screen time to the Renaissance painters. Modern art? What is that? I only know every single sculpture and church wall Michelangelo has ever painted. Art that deals with pure expression and challenges the purpose and conventions of form and movement? Nah. Now, I like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, fat cherubs, and a maximalist golden Cathedral on every block in a Spanish town; however, do we really think this is the peak of art? Are there any “peaks” in art? In order for Art Hum to be slightly worse, you need to give at least three weeks on the Renaissance—just exhaust that era until your students never want to look at a portrait of Jesus that’s definitely modeled after a rich Italian guy with undiagnosed narcissism again—and reserve Pollock, Warhol, Basquiat, and the other modern greats for the last two days of the semester. Totally fair and does an entire two centuries of modern art justice…

Music Hum, make everyone do an elaborate research project on Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.” Ok, Music Hum is actually really fun, so it was hard to find a way to make it slightly worse. But then I remembered the only song in the syllabus that almost made me walk out of the classroom—it’s pure torture composed into a melodramatic, 30-minute piece about a French clown having a Joker moment—and I knew exactly what to do. So, now everyone has to listen to Schoenberg’s worst piece ever composed twenty thousand times and write about it for a grade! And because it’s Music Hum, you can’t actually say it’s terrible: you just have to say the composition is effective and why. And no, writing about Insane Clown Posse instead is not a viable loophole. Only Pierrot.

The Swim Test, time the students. You’re here to swim, so SWIM. Chop chop! Columbia has been too lax on these students; have we forgotten that the British could come at any moment? We need to get out, and we need to get out fast! Under 30 minutes, actually! The Founding Fathers didn’t know about the steamboat, so we need to make those dead guys proud.

The College Logo, but Entirely Worse via Author