Recently, there has been much debate about changing the core curriculum, what exactly might be done and how this will affect both current and future students at NYU Abu Dhabi. Different groups of faculty and students have floated proposals around, and during a General Assembly on 8 Feb. this year, the following set of ideas was approved to become a concrete proposal for the Student Government’s Core Curriculum Committee:

These ideas were passed by 23 votes to four, with six abstentions. A suggested amendment that introductory-level major classes be included in the core curriculum did not pass, on the basis that restructuring these classes to meet the core requirements would mean compromising the subject material. The ideas were then submitted to the Core Curriculum Committee as a proposal.

Senior Alex Nyikos, a member of the Committee, commented that the third point would not be considered by the Committee, but that everything else would. Nothing is set in stone just yet, and members of the Core Curriculum Committee say they welcome student feedback regarding any current ideas on the curriculum.

In addition to the GA proposal, another proposal has been detailed by Associate Professor of Literature Cyrus Patell in an article on Electra Street. Patell suggested getting rid of the core divisions and dividing the eight-course requirement into two, with four courses dedicated to exploring "cross-cultural perspectives on profound and enduring questions" and the other four into developing skills that the faculty deemed essential.

At a later GA on Feb. 22, Deputy Vice Chancellor Hilary Ballon, one of the principal architects of the NYUAD Core Curriculum, spoke about how things have been progressing towards a synthesis of different ideas among the community:

“Now that we’re four and a half years in, we have some empirical evidence about what’s working and what could be working better in the core,” she said. She added that both Core Faculty meetings, in which professors teaching core courses convene, and Core Curriculum Committee meetings have been dedicated to isolating areas for improvement.

One idea that Ballon advocated was to eliminate the writing workshops.

“We now have a much more developed four-year writing program,” said Ballon. “It’s now emerged that there are many different places in the curriculum across the four years where writing is being taught.”

She further explained that, in the future,the core curriculum could be structured to better aid the writing process, with an emphasis on Analysis and Expression or another required first-year writing course. Another objection she had against the writing workshop was the difficulty of staffing enough professors for them.

Ballon’s second personal suggestion, in alignment with the 8 Feb. GA proposal, was to merge Pathways of World Literature with Art, Technology and Invention core tracks to create a combined arts track, which may be called Cultural Expression in the Arts and Literature.

“Pathways of World Literature is the only sector of the core that is aligned with one single discipline,” commented Ballon. “It really is at cross purposes with the overarching aims of the core to have a multidisciplinary approach.”

Ballon mentioned that there is already a mixed-media approach in many courses from both of these tracks, with Pathways cores branching out into film and visual arts and Art, Technology and Invention cores incorporating textual content into their works of study. With this in mind, Ballon did not think it feasible for these two areas of the core to remain separated.

Combining the two tracks would reduce the core requirements from eight to six.

Proposed changes, if implemented, would likely only apply to incoming classes, while perhaps giving freshmen a choice of which Bulletin to use.

According to Ballon, the faculty continues to see the core as an intrinsically valuable and distinguishing feature of NYUAD, vitally important for ensuring a well-rounded liberal arts education. It serves as a convergence point for different disciplines and encourages cross-curricular thinking and discussion.

Freshman engineering student William Young agrees that there are benefits to taking courses outside of one's major but thinks the current structure of required cores is not the most effective way to do so.

“I think the distinction between the four core curriculum areas is quite blurred and each of the fields are highly interrelated,” Young commented. “For this reason, I don't see the need to categorize the cores at all. When they are categorized, students are forced to make choices based on requirements, not interest.”