Future Hillsdale students will no longer have the option of fulfilling the core curriculum’s math requirement with an ACT score.
At February’s faculty meeting, Hillsdale professors approved a motion to require all students take a mathematics course during their four years at the college, a change that will take effect beginning with the incoming class of Fall 2016. Previously, about 40-50 members of each class were exempt from this requirement by earning a score of at least a 27 on the mathematics portion of the ACT or an equivalent SAT score.
“Mathematics has a venerable history among the essential disciplines in higher, liberal learning,” Provost David Whalen said in an email. “To study an appropriately measured course in mathematics with serious faculty is a blessing because it is foundational to a well-formed mind. While we have long had a mathematical requirement in place, I am very glad that an exam score based exemption has been removed.”
Associate Professor of Mathematics Samuel Webster said the change has been a longtime desire of the mathematics department, but a proposal has heretofore been impossible, due to staffing issues.
“Mathematics and its focus on the search for truth via deductive reasoning is essential, we feel, to a liberal arts education,” Webster said. “Historically, it’s always had a place in a classical liberal arts education, and we feel we’re doing a handful of students a disservice by not having them take a college-level mathematics course.”
Senior mathematics and politics major Sarah Onken said she, too, has hoped for this development.
“From a classical understanding, knowledge of mathematics was necessary in exploring metaphysics,” Onken said. “It was the necessary prerequisite in Plato’s ‘Republic.’ Math focuses on reasoning from premises and drawing conclusions from them, whereas metaphysics then inquires into the first things and causes. You can’t really go that last step of thinking, if you don’t really have a first step in logic and reasoning from premises.”
Webster said professors in Hillsdale’s other departments seemed unanimously in favor of this core change.
“Some faculty were concerned with scheduling concerns because this is an additional course their majors will have to take,” Webster said. “But this is not really a core extension. Every student at Hillsdale had a math requirement. We’re just taking away one of those avenues to fulfilling the requirement.”
Onken said even Mathematics 105, the math and deductive reasoning course students often take in order to fulfill the core requirement, affords students a benefit of upper-level mathematics she said she considers essential to a complete liberal arts education.
“I think what a lot of students aren’t exposed to in high school is that math is more than simply computation,” she said. “So I think, especially with a class like 105, students will be able to engage in the rigor of mathematics they may not be able to right now. It takes an in-depth look at Euclid and geometry, so there’s that tie to the classics that students will be able to explore, as well.”