|
Comment on this article
College Comment
Does Directed Studies Need a New Direction?
November 1999
by Simon Rodberg '00
Simon Rodberg, a senior in Davenport College, writes a column on student life for the Internet magazine Salon.
My sister wrote her first Yale paper today, three years after I finished my first Yale paper on the same book for the same class. This commonality isn’t just a family affair: Directed Studies gives 120 freshmen access to top professors in interlocking seminar-style classes on Western literature, historical and political thought, and philosophy. Freshmen have no other way to get such a heady and wonderful experience in the humanities.
But if my children come to Yale, I hope that they won’t take the same D.S. As much as the program’s rigor and passion typify the best of Yale, its provincialism serves as a reminder that the University—promoter of unbiased scholarship and the increase of knowledge—does not yet epitomize its own ideals. The issue isn’t only diversity, though. It’s education.
In the spirit of critical inquiry, then: Why did Directed Studies never mention colonialism in its intellectual history of post-1492 Europe? Why is Yale-sponsored study abroad only possible in London? Why must the 70-member history department hire a one-year visiting assistant professor to teach its course on India, a country with more people and a longer history than all of Europe combined?
Yale’s fundamental view of intellectual life and historical role models is one of Great Minds (coincidentally all European males) talking to each other. Directed Studies is the way Western intellectuals want to see the world: with themselves, and only their chosen influences, at the center of things.
But wouldn’t it be more accurate, not to say intellectually rigorous and interesting, to discuss the Sumerian antecedents to the Hebrew Bible that predate it by a millennium? Isn’t the study of Paradise Lost enriched by the consideration of popular religious practices and 17th-century exploration? Why do the Enlightenment and the slave trade mature together? Of course, Directed Studies can’t cover everything, but I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the curriculum has never found room for questions that might put the books on the wrong side of history.
We’re beginning to see some evolution. This year, for the first time, Directed Studies freshmen will hear Jonathan Spence lecture on how China sees the West. But wouldn’t we learn even more from a comparison of contemporaries Plato and Confucius, the scholarly traditions of both the African griot and the Catholic monk? It’s not impossible: A new one-year World Literatures course runs the gamut from 7th-century Arabic love poetry to Macbeth to Jorge Luis Borges. What if Yale sponsored study-abroad programs in Beijing and Cairo, and finally created a permanent chair in South Asian history? What if we transformed the centerpieces of our curriculum to reflect the way the world actually is, or at least to reveal the real history of our chosen tradition?
I do hope that my children take something called D.S., with the small classes, top professors, and camaraderie of the paper-afflicted. I just hope they also receive an education that’s broader and even deeper than the one I got, with their studies directed a little closer to the larger truth. 
|
