It’s a student right to question curriculum design, and the people who design and manage the curriculum do listen. With regards to requiring a certain number of Writing Enhanced courses, here’s what the designers have to say:
Writing is structured thought that is “fixed” in time. Once the ideas are on the page, they stop developing. But as those words are read, they begin to live again, interacting with the reader’s current state of mind and body of knowledge. That is a lovely process. It means that the writer can discover new information and bring it to their existing understanding, written out in all its complexity, to see what fits and what needs to change. The writer can do that without having to worry about all the moving parts. The bottom line is that writing makes learning complex ideas more efficient. That is the writing-to-think/writing-to-learn element of the Writing Enhanced design. Many academic disciplines do not traditionally include writing-to-learn in their typical educational methods, not because writing-to-learn is inappropriate for those disciplines, but because the historical development of education in those disciplines has privileged other methods and other types of writing. The Writing Enhanced program encourages students to use writing to think, not just to communicate.
Writing to communicate is probably what you think of when you think of academic writing. Learning how to write to communicate ideas to others is, obviously, an important skill, both for on-the-job success and success in other areas of life (e.g. civic engagement). Mastering writing to communicate involves a great deal of practice and a healthy writing process. Both practice and process are essential to a Writing Enhanced course.
And maybe you don’t need reminding, but here it is anyway: skill in written communication is a top-three desired skill (often No. 1) among employers. Look it up. If you know all this, but your complaints are more about the way that writing is used in your Writing Enhanced class or classes, let us know: write@truman.edu.