At this point in the year, everyone reading should be familiar with the Core program.   Core has been the subject of a great deal of controversy, and has withered assaults from many quarters, but still perseveres.   This article has two parts and will attempt to shed some light on why exactly Core might not be doing its job, and why the job it purports to be doing might not be such a great thing in the first place.Core is an extremely important class for Whitman College.   By making it the sole mandatory course for all students, the college is making a deliberate choice to approach knowledge and community in a very specific way.   Because Core is one of the few academic aspects of the college that all (or almost all) Whitman students interact with, it plays a powerful role in shaping our community norms and standards.   By positioning the course so centrally, the identity of Whitman and the identity of the Core program are tied together.   But what do we learn when we learn Core, and how does the discourse of Core shape our experience at College?The Core program has a sizeable scope.   In the course description, it bills itself as covering, “the continuity in the transition of dominant world views, but also to competing and alternative visions.”   That’s a lot of material, and the way in which its covered leaves a lot to be desired.The choice of texts for the Core curriculum was not one that was made lightly.   Choosing the few texts that every Whitman student must read to be a member of the community has a lot of implications, and I think the texts that have been chosen reflect a very upsetting worldview.First I would like to ask who speaks in the Core curriculum.   With the exceptions of Toni Morrison and Emily Brontë (which I will address in a moment), all of the authors in the “modernity” unit are wealthy white men.   This is not to say that people occupying such a subject position have nothing valuable to say.   Quite the contrary; I think that everyone has valuable things to contribute.   But for a course that is supposed to cover both the creation of dominant worldviews and competing and alternative visions, I’m left wondering what role that non-whites and non-males have played in the creation of these “dominant” and/or “alternative” worldviews.I don’t believe the inclusion of Toni Morrison in the Core curriculum reflects a good faith interest on the part of the Core program to meaningfully integrate non-white voices in the program.   The subject matter of the book differs greatly from that of the other texts that are read in a way that makes its cross-application difficult, and little to no context is given for the events which it discusses.Similarly, Brontë’s work is rendered toothless by the context in which it is placed.   Although it is not impossible to use Brontë to make a feminist reading of other Core texts, her critique in Wuthering Heights fails to “rattle the cage” of the other authors in any serious way and rather attempts to find a voice within the meta-narrative of Enlightment thought.Core is all about “classics,” and nowhere is this more evident than in the first semester of the course.   The texts that are chosen to represent “the ancient world” come, without exception, from Western sources.   Pardon me for not having known that all “dominant or alternative” worldviews originated in Greece.   The culture and ideology that one learns about in the first semester of Core is a White one.   Whitman’s priorities here are quite clear.   There are no texts from non-western sources, and no attempt is made to discuss such texts.The notion of a “classic” itself needs to be problematized.   For whom are these texts “classics,” and what about them makes them such?   Is there an essential character or quality to their writing that marks them as different in kind from other texts written during their periods?   Dominant worldviews do not spring into existence independently from people.   They are shaped and fashioned by works of all kinds, but they are articulated and reproduced by dominant social groups because they support the interests of these groups.   When we learn Core, we are learning the history and the voices of dominant social groups (in this case, rich white people), and the token voices of others that are sometimes given lip service.   To me, this means that Core is not doing its job.   Part II of this article will address criticisms of these dominant views.