Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students.
Just studying the course titles at top schools is enough to show that sticker prices of $80,000-plus may buy legacy prestige, but neither wisdom nor knowledge.
At Cornell, for example, students can take “Queer Girlhood,” “Beyoncé Nation,” and “Intersectional Disability Studies.” The course list at Yale includes “Pop Sapphism” and “Comparative Settler Geographies.” At Princeton: “Shoes.” Penn offers “Reality TV and Gender” and “Decolonizing French Food.”
Worse still, these courses actually fulfill general education requirements.
Serious students can still earn a great education at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth, but doing so requires prudence and persistence. In Slacking, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan dedicate one chapter to each of the Ivy League colleges, providing specific information about the courses, content, and core requirements that serious students need to succeed at each one.
Every chapter concludes with two course lists, both of which meet the school’s general education requirements. One displays the worst collection of courses that an inveterate slacker could take to skate through the requirements for entertainment, reinforcement of political biases, and narrow specialization. The other lists the best choice of courses a dedicated striver could take to acquire a well-rounded, content-rich liberal education.
The contrast between the two provides a stark wake-up call for curriculum reform at America’s best-known colleges.
Slacking sounds the call: Make college great again!
