Core curriculum at Rhode Island College

I'm visiting Rhode Island College, participating in a mini-conference on Darfur. One of the organizers is my old friend Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, and turns out she was in charge of reorganizing RIC's core. They came up with an interesting hybrid model: four courses that everyone has to take, and then a set of distribution requirements. Turns out that one of the four core courses is more like a distribution requirement, illustrating nicely the institutional problem of designing a core but then not necessarily having the right incentives in place to have it remain a "core"... "It's growing," is the comment of one RIC prof. I was chatting with.