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Last year, I wrote pointedly about my dissatisfaction with Stanford’s COLLEGE program. As a freshman at one of the top universities in the world, I was disappointed to find how little was asked of me in my first academic experience at Stanford. This year, as a sophomore, I’m tempted to forget all about COLLEGE and let bygones be bygones. But with an impressionable new crop of students settling into life at Stanford, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a look at the updated COLLEGE 101 syllabus and ask what has changed since last year. The answer: not much.
As I scanned the updated syllabus, I noticed a few welcome changes. Thankfully, Andre Agassi’s insipid ghost-written celebrity memoir is no longer required reading for America’s best and brightest. In its place is Determined, Stanford’s own Professor Robert Sapolsky’s wonderful exposition of scientific determinism. But I rejoiced too soon, for only two chapters are assigned. Which means students are deprived of the opportunity to engage meaningfully with Sapolsky’s magisterial takedown of free will, and will instead spend that time discussing the themes of race, gender, and colonialism at play in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s vapid novel, Nervous Conditions.
One thing I hoped to see on the updated syllabus was a greater presence of the Western canon. And behold! In an apparent capitulation to widespread calls for the reintroduction of Western thought into the COLLEGE curriculum, Nietzsche now makes an appearance on the syllabus. But alas, this too is pyrrhic: Only one measly paragraph is assigned, a grand total of 219 words. You can’t make this stuff up.
It is worth lingering for a moment on this addition of Nietzsche to the COLLEGE 101 syllabus, because it gives us some insight into the COLLEGE team’s process. It’s not hard to imagine the committee meeting over the summer, considering which great thinker they could add to the curriculum as a concession to the program’s critics. But Stanford students, they decided, are too busy to read—or else can’t handle—more than a few words of Nietzsche. So they chose to assign a single paragraph: just enough to include his name on the syllabus, but barely sufficient to introduce students to the complexity of his thought. (Not to mention that there is something farcical about a committee of academics debating which paragraph of Nietzsche to assign.)
One notable adjustment from the 2024 syllabus is the expansion of the discussion of AI, especially as it relates to education. The COLLEGE team has now set aside two weeks for this important topic. James D. Walsh’s essay, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” is assigned, presumably to shame COLLEGE students out of cheating their way through Stanford. To be sure, last year, cheating was all too common: Many of my classmates openly admitted to drafting their final COLLEGE papers using ChatGPT.
Perhaps as a result of this rampant cheating, the COLLEGE team seems particularly bent on persuading students not to use AI to write essays. Also assigned is Hua Hsu’s recent piece in the New Yorker, which asks readers to consider “What Happens After A.I. Destroys the College Essay?” But my dear COLLEGE team, you have already done that. Instead of a final paper, COLLEGE 101 now has a final exam, which accounts for 20% of the final grade. But don’t worry, students, COLLEGE is still contract graded. So even if you get a 0% on the final exam, you’re sure to have “Satisfied” on your transcript.
Have the venerable scholars of the COLLEGE committee considered that one way to prevent students from cheating would be to assign full books and ask them to construct arguments that AI is not capable of conjuring up 30 minutes before the deadline? Have they considered that asking so little of students encourages cheating? After all, it’s easier to skim short readings than long ones, and to cheat on simple assignments than difficult ones. I am convinced that the primary cause of cheating among COLLEGE students is not laziness, but rather a lack of investment in an enterprise they intuit—correctly, I might add—will not reward them, even if they apply themselves fully to it.
The fine print of the COLLEGE 101 syllabus is no small matter. This course is, for hundreds of freshmen, a first introduction to academics at Stanford and to the humanities at the college level. Those responsible for designing the COLLEGE curriculum must ask themselves, as lovers of knowledge and proponents of a liberal arts education, whence their affection for these principles arose. Do they sincerely believe that they, as college freshmen, would have taken so eagerly to the life of the mind if they were forced to sit through the tedium of COLLEGE 101? Or was their first introduction to the liberal arts perhaps more invigorating?
These individuals, whether they recognize it or not, hold the power to shape the minds of the future leaders of the free world. They have the responsibility to decide what should be required of students arriving for their first year at Stanford. The way to prepare students for success in the world is not to ask less of them, but to ask more. In doing so, the COLLEGE team will instill in Stanford freshmen the love of learning, and of the liberal arts, which they themselves claim so much to value.
