Very interesting and well-written article.
I'm not sure "relativism" is really the best way to describe what's going on here. What these proposed curriculum descriptions really remind me of is the trend towards interdisciplinary "applied (fill in name of field)" programs that we've been squabbling over in the academy here for a decade now, in both the sciences and the humanities. While these programs often provide great networking and research opportunities for faculty, and exciting electives for students, I am very concerned about the increasing ascendancy of them to major (i.e., one can earn a B.A. in it) and even graduate degree status. Although I've seen a few such programs whose curricula I was quite impressed with, all too often the result is that students graduate without having gained a solid foundation in the established intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of a particular discipline. Which means, unfortunately, that they are graduating deficient in the very analytical and critical thinking skills which (here, anyway) they're paying tens of thousands of dollars to acquire.
For example, last year I agreed, as a favor to an ailing PoliSci colleague, to take over her course in Feminist Political Theory, offered through our Women's Studies major (with a cross-list in PoliSci). Although I'm a South Asianist, as a political scientist I have enough background in political theory (and enough personal interest in the topic) that I was quite willing to stretch my boundaries a little bit. Unfortunately, pedagogically speaking, it was like teaching in a straitjacket because so few of the students had sufficient background in political theory to really understand the readings. e.g., I had them read a fascinating feminist critique of social contract theory, only to discover that only 3 of them had previously read any social contract theorists. Similarly, when we got to Marxist and neo-Marxist feminism, I found that while many of them had already read several neo-Marxist thinkers (mostly of the lit crit feminist variety), NONE of them had actually read Marx himself. So, while they were able to derive some interesting ideas from these works, very few students were able to articulate a thorough analysis of any of them--since that necessitated being able to locate them in the context of the theoretical tradition they grew out of.
The worst part of it is that this trend is not being driven simply by misguided ideological commitments, but by a powerful triad of that + deep government funding cuts + the resulting redirection of research priority-setting towards external, commercial sources of that all-important grant money (publish or perish, remember!), which generally favor "applied," interdisciplinary research. At the same time, similar pressures on students are making them more inclined to search for "practical"-sounding programs that (they imagine) will channel them more directly towards a particluar job in their intended field. Unfortunately, such choices are only likely to have the opposite effect, since it means they won't develop the intellectual versatility that most employers are, in fact, truly looking for.
In addition to the above (and to go back to the original article) I also am inclined to see this as the lazy way out of dealing with what (presumably, given international trends) are abysmally declining math and science scores. If anything, they ought to be reacting to that by teaching the hard sciences earlier, not putting them off until later and (even worse) writing off the value of such skills for students who lack professional aspirations in the sciences. Again, not the way to intellectual versatility. Why else go to school, after all?
BTW...what exactly is it that you are studying?
