Yes, that is self evident. I couldn't have picked a more hypothetical point to argue, but I keep meeting people who reject the abolition of the core on principle, in any context. I hope nobody on LBO thinks we need a mandatory core because, as a prof once told me, "tastes should be educated" and "people must learn to appreciate culture." Whose tastes need educating? Which groups show a lack of appreciation for whose "culture?" The answers to these questions have a largely unrecognized class dimension, especially now that liberal arts departments drape themselves in a fashionable postmodernism that, despite its rhetoric of resistance, never gets beyond "transgressive reading" and "guerilla art."
>If the liberal arts are taken out of degree
>requirements in the context of increasing fees and tuitions, students
>who do not major in liberal arts (and their parents) have only market
>incentives _not_ to take any, even if they are vaguely interested in
>them.
No argument there.