When I was undergrad, I took a Fortran course. It was basically an intro programming course for non-CS engineering majors. I had taken some BASIC senior year of high school but this course was really literally: We assume you have never touched a computer before. It was 1976, so not a bad assumption.

I'm sure it would be considered a laughable course to teach at an elite school today. (OK. It was a bit harder because we were using punch cards and we had to beg for more computer cycles if we made too many typing errors, but still.) But I'm pretty sure it wasn't because we were a lot dumber back then.

I agree with your basic point though some students do freeze up with even relatively easy math. But, yes, you could put together a relatively easy programming course and call it CS. And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.