Faustian Bargain Analysis

The Faustian Bargain was a letter written by Gregory A Petsko to George M. Philip, President of the State University of New York at Albany. The letter was in response to the University eliminating the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts department. President Philip claims that he would not have had to pass this decision if not for the legislature that passes a bill that would have allowed the university to set its own tuition rates. Gregory tries to defend the Arts and explain its importance to the president of SUNY Albany. He gives various examples on why it is important to have those departments in a university. He argues that there should be a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of those courses

He thinks there should be a distribution requirement for the students coming into the universities. It would be foolish to give students that kind of freedom. They don’t have enough knowledge to make the best decisions. I totally agree on his standpoint. As an Example I think Rutgers makes every student take the core curriculum which gives the students a broader range of varities to learn about different things in the world. In this way the students are not just constricted to learning and are be build a better foundation. If there was a mandate distribution requirement, then more student would be prone to take more classes on the humanities. He also criticizes the poor decision making of the president of the university and how he did nothing to stop it. Gregory Petsko even compares him to a character name Faust in a play by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil to sell his soul in return for anything. Gregory argues that like Faust president Philip has also sold the soul of the institution. It was very clever for the author to give many examples of stories from the humanities and