Columbia University and Hostos Community College may be less than three miles apart, but the two institutions couldn't be more different. One is an elite university in Upper Manhattan; the other an open-access college in the South Bronx. They do, however, have something in common: Columbia's famed core curriculum.
For the past three years, professors at Hostos have been teaching a version of the Columbia Core in their freshman composition classes. Students dive into Plato's Apology of Socrates,Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. In doing so, they debate the same questions about human experience as do students at Columbia: What is freedom? What is self-awareness? What is one's place in society?
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