There's been a lot of talk this semester about the future of Frontiers of Science. CCSC held a town hall to discuss problems with this newest addition to the Core, and Spec Editorial Page Editor Lanbo Zhang and Columnist Leo Schwartz weighed in on the debate in a podcast.
Discussion of the Core this semester has also included another freshman course that needs reevaluation—University Writing. While a lot of gripping focuses on Frontiers, I think that University Writing deserves some attention, too. The course has always seemed to me to be the weakest link in the Core.
Although I will admit that I came out of University Writing a better writer, I think that the fundamentals the course teaches can only take students so far. I quickly learned that each discipline has a distinctive approach to writing—an approach that’s not necessarily the same as the one UWriting takes.
