Editor’s Note: This is a column and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Daily Barometer.
When I first sat down to write this article, I planned on harshly criticizing the lack of prerequisite course requirements in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion.
As a student of philosophy myself, I have sometimes felt that the course work here is “slowed down” by students not majoring in History, Philosophy and Religion, and that certain topics were omitted or discussed more briefly because they required too much background knowledge.
I had identified the main problem to be the lack of these prerequisite requirements.
However, upon doing further research, discussing the issue with a couple of students in the SHPR and reaching out to the director of the SHPR, I realized this issue is far more intricate than I had previously thought.
If you poke around in MyDegrees for a while, or head to the course scheduling application looking to register for a course in the SHPR, you will quickly find that most do not have any prerequisite course requirements.
The only courses that do have some mention of background knowledge are upper-division and merely have a “recommended” tag that reads: “Upper-division standing or PHL 101” or a similar variation.
My claim is that this creates a weak learning environment and can water down the course work for students majoring in History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies.
For example, I imagine it would be difficult to teach the History of Western Philosophy 302 course to a group of students who had not taken the 301 course. The latter covers Western Philosophy in the Greek and Roman periods and the former covers the “rise of modern philosophy through Hume.”
On a philosophical level, reading David Hume and other modern philosophers without any prior knowledge of Aristotlean and Scholastic philosophy really removes the possibility of understanding the gravity of his works at a much deeper level. But in a more general sense, no matter the topic, I believe that learning requires context and background.
The same can be said about the History of Western Civilization courses: none of them are locked into a series and one could take the History of Western Civilization 102 course, which covers the years 1000 A.D. to 1789, before they take the 101 course, covering the ancient world up to 1000 A.D.
For myself, taking such courses out of order would be confusing and unhelpful.
This setup means that professors can’t expect students to have any knowledge from prior courses, or really any knowledge in the subject matter at all besides that which is required for entrance into the university.
It also means that many of these courses are filled with STEM and other non-SHPR students. This forces professors to tailor the amount of reading and pace the course to the students enrolled for Baccalaureate Core credit.
The issue also seems to mainly be in the SHPR. For example, 22 of the Anthropology courses have prerequisites, as well as 11 of the English courses. By contrast, the philosophy program has none, history has one, and religious studies has two, however one of the prerequisites for the religious studies program is a PAC course for an advanced yoga teaching seminar.
After some background research, I had the opportunity of speaking with a couple of students, both studying in the SHPR here at Oregon State University.
Wren McClure, a fourth year philosophy student, claims that the areas of “writing, reading and background knowledge is where non-majors are lacking, especially if they’re from STEM. This is where some upper division classes, especially in the SHPR, suffer and are unfortunately slowed down by non-majors.”
David Safina-Massey, a third year student also studying philosophy, finds a similar flaw, “I think the classes have been weakened in order to accommodate non-philosophy students.”
However, this issue is not one-sided; I was wrong in not seeing some of the benefits of a more open course system.
McClure used to study biology and said, “after seeing both the STEM and liberal arts sides of (the) university, I believe it’s increasingly important for STEM students to engage in classes from liberal arts and the SHPR because they lack exposure to the ethical and analytical discussions that we so often rely (on).”
“In the lower level courses, I do not feel that having non-majors participate weakens content and rigor of our programs,” McClure said. “However, at the higher levels, I do think it would be beneficial to place prerequisites on some courses to better train our PHL students specifically for grad school.”
Safina-Massey makes a similar claim towards increasing the rigor of the programs. “I don’t think there should be prerequisites, however I think the classes should be much more demanding,” he said.
I also had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, the director of the SHPR and a philosophy professor.
“OSU’s philosophy program, in any event, does not seem to me particularly out of line with other programs,” Kaplan immediately pointed out.
This is quite true, especially regarding the prerequisite problem I am discussing.
“I thought back to my undergraduate education at the University of California, Irvine, and my graduate work at Stanford, and tried to remember what the pre-requisite situation was like at those places. I couldn’t remember many details, so I had to look it up. Long story short – very few philosophy courses at either program have prerequisites,” Kaplan said.
The same is true for University of Oregon, our close relative down the road, although most of their upper division philosophy courses, for example, require at least one prior philosophy course.
After correspondence, it seemed clear that the biggest setback to teaching more advanced courses that would require prerequisites is low interest and therefore low enrollment.
“We used to teach a mathematical logic course here at OSU, and it had as a perquisite our formal predicate logic course — we stopped teaching it because it enrolled very poorly,” Kaplan said.
He explained that both the philosophy and religious studies majors are very small and have fewer than a hundred participants. Offering classes that only one or two people would actually sign up for just isn’t realistic.
Kaplan also said that in “an ideal world, we might for example have wanted everyone to take ‘Reasoning and Writing’ (PHL 121) before taking any upper-division courses.”
However, he indicates that it would likely negatively impact the program. “Many students find the topics covered in our upper-division courses to be of particular interest…So if we instituted a rule requiring that one first take this writing-focused class, we’d lose many of the students who most wanted to take those classes, and who would go on to become majors. That would be a big loss,” Kaplan said.
It was after this discussion with Kaplan that I realized I had likely misplaced the root of the problem in the lack of prerequisite courses when, in actuality, it is in greater part affected by interest and enrollment rates.
So what could be done to increase the rigor of these programs and add more opportunities for advanced courses?
It is a very tough question to answer, to be honest. However I do think that a sentiment expressed earlier by Safina-Massey is an achievable and pragmatic option: increase the difficulty of the courses and demand more of the students, regardless of whether or not they are in or out of the major.
History, Philosophy and Religion, as areas of study, are no less important for society and ought to be just as demanding as STEM subjects. One could even argue that they are more important than ever in our current philosophical and political climate, although that is for another column.
It has been my experience at OSU, as a former computer science major, that it is significantly easier to get higher grades in a liberal arts class as opposed to an engineering or science class.
For example, Vector Calculus I, a 200-level class, was significantly more demanding than any of my 200-level philosophy classes, unfortunately, but I don’t necessarily think that one topic is more or less difficult than the other.
While I can only speak personally about the philosophy classes, I think it is fair to argue that calculus as a subject is no harder than correctly analyzing the argument being made in a dense philosophical text, although they are different. Both are difficult and require patience and deep study.
I think most of the reputation that the liberal arts is “easier” or “less demanding” than STEM comes from most liberal arts courses being far less rigorous than they should be. To clarify, I mean that these courses don’t seem to go into as much depth in their field as do their STEM counterparts.
For example, many folks in a history or philosophy class seem to be able to get A’s without doing the readings whereas if I missed more than one written homework assignment in vector calculus it would have been very difficult for me to get an A, let alone pass the class.
While prerequisites might not be a feasible solution to the problem of less demanding courses in the SHPR, a push to make the classes more demanding, through more focused assignments, more readings, reading quizzes and other changes that deepen the learning of the students, would greatly increase the rigor of the programs and better prepare students in the SHPR for graduate school and life after college.
