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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, March 02, 2007

Brown University:
Land of Paradox


What do you call a curriculum when it's not a curriculum?

At Brown University, they call it a "curriculum," although "students create their own course of study with no core requirements. Traditional letter grades are optional," etc.

They also call it a "success."

If it were, it's unlikely they'd be gearing up for a long-expected major reckoning with it. Brown's national and international ranking, astonishingly low for an Ivy, is no doubt related to its intellectual chaos, a chaos made worse by routine cancellation of tons of courses each semester and their sudden replacement by whatever.

UD has chronicled, on this blog, the faculty cynicism and student confusion created by Brown's array of obscure, restlessly morphing courses.


UD doubts this first attempt to confront chaos will get anywhere. Another paradox about Brown is that though it thinks it's experimental and open and daring and free, in fact it's crochety, in the way of most institutions, about changing established procedures. Expect campus reactionaries to fight to the death to keep things the way they've been for years.