Imagine no electives, no choices, no majors. Imagine one required program which everyone has to take. If this sounds appealing, transfer to St. John's College in Annapolis, Md.

"There are no choices, no majors. We have a virtually all required curriculum based on the so-called Great Books. That includes math and sciences," says Thomas J. Slakey, dean of the college at St. John's.

The course of study is based on the Great Books program in which students read works in literature, philosophy, science and mathematics.

The courses are all taught in discussion seminars of 15 to 20 students by "tutors," who are usually tenured faculty members. "The only authority in the classroom is the author," Slakey says.

In fact, professors often teach outside the discipline they did graduate work in. At St. John's it is not uncommon to find a historian teaching calculus.

"The most radical feature of the program is that the faculty teaches throughout the program. A person may begin teaching mathematics regardless of his education," he says.

However, the faculty decides which books undergraduates will read. "When we read French literature, it's mainly Racine, Moliere and Baudelaire. We make a judgement that those three are more worth reading than other authors. I will just be dogmatic about that," Slakey says.

But Slakey admits that the St. John's program provides students with a knowledge of Western white male civilization and little else. "There is some truth to it, and this is a choice we've made. We're not trying to hide that," he says.

But Slakey feels the highly-structured St. John's program provides a common intellectual life at the school which Harvard's more diversified Core Curriculum does not.

"In my opinion [Harvard's Core] is not a core at all. A true core implies that somebody has decided that there are certain things that everybody should read, and it could provide a common intellectual life," Slakey says. "You have distribution requirements. It is not a core. To call it a core is a misnomer."

UC's got it

The University of Chicago has recently revised it's Common Core Curriculum, which like Harvard stresses modes of inquiry as opposed to bodies of knowledge. However, Chicago's program is much more structured.

Students must take one specially-designed Core course in the humanities, one in the social sciences, one in civilization studies, two in the sciences, a year or more of a foreign language, at least two quarters beyond precalculus in math, and one course in art or music, says Nancy M.C.G. O'Connor, associate dean of students for the college.

In all, one half of a student's courses are required in the school's Common Core, O'Connor says.

"We're not interested in a program which is simply a smorgasbord of departmental courses. They [the courses] are mounted in the core with special core faculty and are created for the Common Core. They are part of special curricular initiatives," Steven R. Loevy, assistant dean of the college says.

"The attempt is to determine the major areas of knowledge, the major body of intellectual skills which every educated college person should know. A special faculty comes up with the answers to those questions," Loevy says.

"Currently, no specific department in the humanities or social sciences is able to represent both the set of humanistic ideas and the body of skills necessary in dealing with humanistic texts," Loevy says.

Students can choose from five different sequences in the Humanities, three different sequences in the Social Sciences, and one sequence centering either on Near Eastern, Far Eastern, African, Western, American or Judaic Civilization to fulfill the Civilization Studies portion of the program.

The other requirements under the Common Core can be filled through departmental courses since the "standard disciplines cohere with the Core's objectives" in those areas, Loevy said.