In order to understand the current liberal arts curriculum, one must understand how it evolved. The curriculum is based on the canon, a body of civilization’s great literature, philosophy, and history. Created by 19th-century Anglo-American universities for clergymen and the aristocrats who were expected to become public leaders, this canon of “great books” has remained the base of liberal arts education by ceaselessly changing and including new knowledge and fields of inquiry. For example, place had to be made early on for American and modern European literature – a radical inclusion at the time.
Later, although at Cornell from the beginning, the sciences and social sciences were added to the liberal arts curriculum. As time went on, other subjects were included, for example, modern Latin American literature, one of the most exciting, imaginative, interesting, and influential literatures in the contemporary world. Expanding the canon does not mean bumping Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, or Western civilization; it means including additional works that contribute crucially to the world’s varied cultures and to our understanding of them. Further, students in and of a democratic society and a world of many different interacting cultures simply must attend to political, economic, social, and cultural structures and processes beyond those of the European and American elite.
College fraternities, it should be noted, originated as societies devoted to curricular reform and innovation. They were instrumental in bringing modern European languages into the American college curriculum.
So numerous are the widely influential and path-breaking works that no one student (or person) can study even most of them. Further, each discipline, as it develops, revises – virtually always by expansion – the list of "important" theoretical work in its field. At Cornell, we believe trying to teach some uniform subset of “great books” to all students would be intellectually limiting. We all yearn for some list of books that once studied would render us educated. But that yearning is unrealistic in any rigorous and honest intellectual endeavor.