In this article from Inside Higher Ed, Andy Guess interviews Rudolph H. Weingartner, author of the recently published book, A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education. Asked about whether there should be a core curriculum in the liberal arts, Weingertner responds:

I want to look at this issue of a core curriculum from three different perspectives and I’ll try to be brief. I benefited immensely — for a lifetime — from having been at Columbia College at the end of the ’40s with all those required “liberal arts” courses — from all of them, if from some more than others.... I then enjoyed teaching Contemporary Civilization for four years (and was good at it), though that was really hard work, especially the first year. I later taught a required humanities (sort of Great Books) course at San Francisco State that was not a happy experience. Many of the students didn’t want to be there and I wasn’t very comfortable teaching the course, in part for an oddball reason: I never figured out how you teach the first X chapters of Don Quixote, say, and then the next batch. And of course you couldn’t assign the whole thing at once. Philosophy really doesn’t present this problem.

But finally, let me give you my views from the administrator’s (dean’s) perspective. When I decided to undertake a major reform of undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, I decided not to push for a core curriculum like Columbia’s, in spite of my favorable attitude toward it. Faculties have become very “professionalized” for a whole set of reasons and the overwhelming majority of them very much resent teaching outside their fields.... Columbia is a powerful university with a long tradition of its special curriculum and they can use their prestige to get people to teach these out-of-field courses. But even they not without difficulty. (After three years of teaching at CC, one colleague — also still short of his Ph.D. — and I were the “senior” members — longest continuous service — of the CC staff then teaching.) Now, by definition required courses are taken by large numbers of students and many who take those required courses do so only because they have to. It is therefore particularly important that required courses are taught well. I did not think that that would happen at Northwestern if, against the odds, the faculty would have gone for a set of specially constructed required courses, on the pattern of CC. The solution, in my view — and one that I could persuade the faculty to adopt — was required courses within the standard fields, but courses that have a certain set of characteristics that make them appropriate to be required.