Global Core

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Major Cultures is a significant component of the Core Curriculum. Get your Third World on...

Requirement

Under the Major Cultures requirement, Columbia College students are required to take 2 courses in non-Western cultures. The approved courses are grouped into African Civ, East Asian Civ, Middle Eastern Civ, South Asian Civ, and South American Civ. Students must take either two classes from List A, in different civilizations, or a class from List A and either a class from List B, which will go into greater depth regarding the civilization one studied in List A, or List C, which comprises classes discussing cultural traditions as they relate to the United States.

History

The De Bary Report of the 1980s recommended Major Cultures develop seminar classesin various non-European textual traditions. Since that time, Major Cultures has included a number of such classes (including the vaunted Asian Humanities and the slightly less laudable African Civilization) but has otherwise evolved into a distribution requirement involving mostly lecture classes culled from the lists of various departments.

The 2007 hunger strike has resulted, provisionally, in the administration's promise that Major Cultures will be reformed into a single madatory seminar-style class. The administration noted that a $50 million fundraising drive would be required to implement this scheme.

Options

East Asian civilization

Whatever you do, stay well clear of ASCE V2002: Intro to Major Topics in East Asian Civ. The course is supposedly the East Asian counterpart to Contemporary Civilization. In reality, it tries to cover 3000+ years of Chinese, Japanese and Korean history. Of course, this is an absurd goal. You'll barely have the time to learn anything about Korea, and your knowledge of China and Japan will be rather superficial. For example, most classes spend just one class on Confucius, who is overwhelmingly the most important philosopher in Chinese history. By comparison, most CC classes spend up to 3 or 4 sessions on philosophers like Plato, Smith, Marx, and Freud, none of whom affected their cultures anywhere near as much as Confucius.