College is nothing if not a natural habitat for important-sounding buzzwords, and assuming you haven’t spent your time under a soundproof rock, it’s likely you’ve heard the phrase “liberal arts education” a time or two (hundred). The powers that be at Washington University—especially those in the College of Arts & Sciences—pride themselves on the diverse curriculum requirements that students must fulfill to earn their degrees. The typical Wash. U. campus tour might include a glowing anecdote about some biology major that had the opportunity to take a class on the history of modern flamenco dance. Our administrators believe that, if students expand their studies beyond a single core subject, they can discover and develop new interests, learn how to approach problems from new angles and cultivate an appreciation for the diversity of life’s academic endeavors.

(This is great, of course. Dance away.)

What’s not great is when these liberal arts requirements—supposedly designed to promote interdisciplinary study—are the very thing holding students back from taking a more diverse and exploratory course loads. What’s even worse is when the majority of the obstacles are coming from the supposed bastion of liberal arts, the College of Arts & Sciences itself.

Each school has its own set of degree requirements—general distributions of class types, such as “Ethics and Values” for the business school or the infamous “Natural Sciences and Mathematics” (NSM) in Arts & Sciences. Each school has its own process for determining which classes count for which requirements. The School of Engineering, Sam Fox Art School and Olin Business School all require that students take classes in the College of Arts & Sciences to fulfill liberal arts distributions. By nature, each of these schools take a proactive approach to identifying classes throughout the University that could benefit their students’ courses of study and fulfill requirements each year.

For students in the College of Arts & Sciences looking to branch out and take classes in other schools, it’s downright difficult. No more than 12 units may be taken outside of Arts and Sciences during their first two years. While this restriction is lifted after sophomore year, it’s indirectly enforced because it’s almost impossible to take any of these classes while also fulfilling distribution requirements because no classes taken outside the College of Arts & Sciences can count toward ArtSci distribution requirements.

You might think that an engineering class called “Logic and Discrete Mathematics” would qualify as a math class for the purposes of liberal arts distribution requirements. You’d be wrong. ArtSci students also cannot count computer science as a science course, or an international business class for a cultural diversity requirement.

As it stands, options for challenging these roadblocks are limited. Students themselves cannot bring appeals for distribution requirements directly to the Arts and Sciences curriculum committee—these petitions must be brought up by a faculty member. A dean in the college indicated that this is unlikely to change anytime soon—and the same goes for the more common requests. Technically, computer science courses are “applied” science, and that doesn’t fit into “ArtSci science.” The Arts & Sciences graduation requirements are already very flexible, the administration has pointed out.

The irony here is that the College of Arts & Sciences says that its degree requirements are “designed to provide students with strong and sustained training in writing and numerical applications” and that they “take advantage of two distinctive features of the academic environment at Washington University—the strong tradition of cooperation among faculty working in different disciplines and the fact that teaching and learning at Washington University draw energies from an environment of vigorous and creative research.”

If the College of Arts & Sciences truly wants to allow students to develop a wide variety of applicable skills, it’s worth it for them to reexamine what classes students want to take and make sure that it’s possible for this kind of exploration to happen while still meeting distribution requirements. Otherwise, students will only grow increasingly disillusioned with their so-called freedom to explore.