“The requirements serve as the nucleus around which students build their four years at Stanford.”

This is how Stanford passionately describes the Undergraduate General Educational Requirements (Gen-Ed) on their official website, but has any student ever actually thought of them this way? The answer from this year’s frosh class is no.

According to Aaron Henschel ‘29, “the general perception of the COLLEGE program is that it is something to get out of the way.” It seems that the prevailing opinion on campus is that COLLEGE, WAYS and PWR classes are tedious units to finish as quickly as possible, not the “nucleus” of the Stanford experience. This leaves many students lacking the strong foundation in fundamental disciplines required to be an informed citizen. 

Stanford is a place that trains the future leaders of our society. 139 Stanford undergraduate alumni have founded startups worth over one billion dollars, the most of any university. Additionally, Stanford has produced dozens of state governors, U.S. senators, house representatives and four Supreme Court justices. At this point in time, many technologies are both at the cutting edge of science and raise complicated ethical questions: AI, gene editing and autonomous attack drones, to name a few. From a societal perspective, the intellectual formation of those operating in ethically novel territory is paramount. The people designing these new technologies will have immense influence on how they are marketed, regulated and implemented. Accordingly, they must have a broader understanding of the intellectual tradition in history, philosophy, religion and the humanities as a whole. Often, the best way to deal with the future is to look to the past.

In a recent opinion piece, “Stanford needs more rigorous humanities” by Shiven Jain, Jain advocates for the reintroduction of “factual knowledge” in the humanities in addition to the typical subjective inquiry. This factual knowledge is what is missing from the Gen-Ed requirements. The bulk of the humanities requirements are encompassed in the Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing (WAYS). By definition, these classes are focused on how students implement their knowledge rather than the facts they learn. In order to have true command of knowledge, students must have both an understanding of the facts and the skillset to engage critically with them.

When designing Gen-Ed requirements, one must consider both the factual knowledge students must learn and the ways in which they engage with and pass on that information after graduating from Stanford. Across the board, there seems to be a lack of understanding that, just like STEM subjects, the humanities are cumulative. In the same way that one cannot hope to understand calculus without first learning arithmetic and algebra, one cannot understand, for instance, the current rise of populism without understanding the historical and political forces in preceding centuries. Without this perspective, learning about new developments lacks crucial context. The same is true for the new ethical frontiers we confront today. You might draw solutions to AI’s ethical problems with no historical context, but you would be neglecting thousands of years of moral philosophy and historical lessons on new technology that could point you in the right direction. Even if faced with novel ethical or societal problems, going back to past thinkers gives you the frameworks or tools to approach the issue.

This all sounds great in theory, but how should Gen-Ed requirements be structured to give students both a consistent set of factual knowledge and a broad set of intellectual skills? I propose three guiding principles: prioritization, standardization and rigor. First, prioritization and standardization. For many students, Gen-Ed classes are the only time they will be required to learn about subjects outside of their field of study. This begs the question: what are the essential topics that a Stanford student must know to be an educated member of society? Currently, students select courses that fulfill the different WAYS based on their interests, or more likely, what will require the least work. Instead, I propose that students be required to take a set of standardized courses that will expose them to the most fundamental subjects in the humanities and sciences. I am certainly not an expert, but a few classes that should be required are: introductory courses in philosophy, English literature, religious studies, U.S. history and civics. In STEM, students should be required to take an introductory course in statistics and a fundamental science such as physics or chemistry. The remaining units could be completed through a tailored list of courses designed to dive deeper into the subjects above or explore other foundational disciplines. 

A problem that Henschel noted is that students’ experience in COLLEGE is “completely dependent on the professor and section you get assigned.” This points to the need for standardizing the content, structure and assignments in Gen-Ed classes to ensure consistency. In order for these classes to be meaningful, they must also be rigorous. They must evaluate students’ understanding of factual knowledge and command of skills such as critical reading and writing. Most importantly, there needs to be real stakes if students fail to engage critically with the material.

Stanford is a place that builds leaders. Stanford students should be able to build the technologies that will shape the future with the intellectual breadth to contemplate their ethical and societal impact.