From Susan McKillop: A rather moving challenge from the former president of Cornell.

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: cherny@sfsu.edu

From the issue dated September 14, 2001

A Battle Plan for Professors to Recapture the Curriculum

By FRANK H. T. RHODES

As we enter the new century, society's agreement on what defines an educated person, what constitutes essential knowledge and common discourse, has essentially collapsed. As a result, universities in the United States have a problem in the area of curriculum that has been widely recognized. Curriculum means, literally, a running track, but, in recent years, it has been called "a cafeteria with little indication of which are the entrees and which the desserts" and "Dante's definition of hell, where nothing connects with nothing."

Today's students are offered hundreds and thousands of courses in catalogs more than an inch thick, but rarely receive any overarching, meaningful statement of educational goals and intellectual purpose within a larger, coherent framework. Because professors have been reluctant to suggest that one subject is more valuable or significant than another, they have replaced requirements with electives and substituted excessive numbers of undergraduate courses for any critical assessment of their relative merits.

Three major obstacles have thwarted curricular reform during the past decade. First, while some faculty members and administrators have proposed a return to a core curriculum, others have argued that it is biased to presume that the history of Western civilization reflects the history of all U.S. citizens -- and have called for more diversification through a multicultural curriculum. The standoff between the two groups has resulted in little progress in either direction.

The second obstacle has been student demand. More students see college as the pathway to a job and tend to enroll in narrow vocational majors rather than pursue liberal-arts degrees. For example, students graduating with a B.A. in arts and sciences plummeted from 47 percent of all B.A. degrees in 1968 to 26 percent in 1986.

Third, the fragmentation of the disciplines has slowed reform efforts. Lacking a commitment to common educational goals, faculty members have added courses that reflect their own, increasingly specialized, interests. The rapid spread in most universities of free-standing programs, centers, and even departments devoted to specialized studies as well as a host of cultural issues -- poverty, peace, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference -- has also tended to compartmentalize knowledge.

The scholarly literature on the subject of the undergraduate curriculum has contributed little of practical value to the debate. Exquisitely footnoted but excessively cautious, exhaustingly inclusive but elegantly inconclusive, it seems to confirm the very lack of imaginative engagement of which its critics complain. It is learned but lifeless, knowledgeable but superficial, analytical but arid.

So what should universities do? Simply stated, faculty members must recapture the curriculum. They must collectively face difficult and divisive questions about goals, priorities, and requirements, and then design effective ways to achieve them.

Unfortunately, little has changed in the century that has passed since Horace Mann declared that to disperse an angry mob, one just had to announce a lecture on education. Every dean knows that the way to guarantee the absence of a quorum in a faculty meeting is to announce that there is to be a discussion of the curriculum. Eyes glaze over; tempers shorten; people of generosity and good will become intolerant, and those of sound judgment and thoughtful balance become rigid, hard-line advocates. Changing the curriculum, it has been said, is like moving a graveyard; it is a solemn undertaking.

But faculties must tackle the issue, like it or not, for unless they can agree on meaningful educational goals, universities can never fully succeed. The trouble with having no goals, it has been said, is that you may achieve them.

In fact, the greatest privilege a faculty member can have is to design and support a curriculum. All the riches of human experience are there. All the teeming problems and noisy issues of our society are there. All our capacity and hopes for the well-being of our planet and our people are there. How can the faculty shirk the challenge and the opportunity this presents?

No model curriculum exists for all institutions. A successful curriculum, like a successful life, is strictly a do-it-yourself job. Consultants may give advice; presidents, trustees, and provosts may exhort; students may demand. But in the end, it needs local agreement; it depends on local resources; it is conducted by local faculty members; and it benefits local students. It cannot be exported or imported; it has to be a homegrown product.

Yet to develop a new curriculum, one has to agree on a few essentials: Should all students share a common body of knowledge, skills, and values? If so, what should that be? How should universities best prepare graduates for a future in which the average American will change jobs, and even careers, six times; in which specialized knowledge has a half-life as short as five years; in which societal and ethical questions are deeply entwined with technical ones; and in which relentless learning over a lifetime is a prerequisite for professional and personal success?

Based on my experience over 50 years in five universities as a student, professor, dean, provost, and president, I believe that the best way to respond to such questions is to consider not what courses universities should require, but what qualities they should seek to nurture in their students.

My list of such qualities would probably look like the following:

Openness to others and the ability to communicate with clarity and precision. Openness is not achieved by courses on openness. It emerges as students live in a widening circle of individuals from other backgrounds and persuasions, as they begin to discover and compare the treasures of other traditions, and as they observe others -- professors, fellow students, coaches, advisers, authors, artists -- who are themselves open to others. Openness, then, should be a byproduct of the classroom, the playing field, the library, the residence hall, and the generous and inquiring climate of the campus.

But openness alone is not enough. As we move further into the information age and the age of global competition, the ability to communicate effectively has never been more important.

The typical freshman writing program will take already competent students and develop their reading and writing skills with imaginative assignments. At Cornell, for example, most freshmen take two semester-long seminars, taught in discussion sections with no more than 17 other students. They select their seminar topics from a list of about 125, including subjects as varied as Greek tragedy, jazz, global warming, and economic competition.

The seminars help students learn to write good expository prose while also gaining a greater understanding of topics of interest to them. Continuing students can develop their writing skills further through the "Writing in the Majors" program, which incorporates a strong writing component into upper-level courses in specific fields.

The ability to read with comprehension and to write and speak with precision is crucial to success and fulfillment in any career, indeed in life itself. There is no opting out of that requirement.

Self-confidence and curiosity, with the skills required to satisfy both. Self-confidence and curiosity are also byproducts of a satisfying university career. But certain skills are also needed, and those most frequently lacking in our graduates seem to be proportional thinking, analytical comparison, and a quantitative approach and apprehension.

Why should a student who plans to major in English be required to study computer science or statistics? Why should a French major be obliged to appreciate physics or philosophy? Quite simply because university graduates must be more than skilled specialists or technicians in their fields. Students of the sciences must master quantitative and formal reasoning; it is a necessary step on the path to the discipline of science. But nonscience majors must also be able to reason in quantitative and formal terms, because it is a necessary step toward being an informed citizen.

More than half of the issues before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Congress in an average year are in some way science-related, as Edward O. Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist from Harvard, has observed. To understand such issues, even as a layperson, requires some understanding of the kind of thinking that underlies them -- which, at some point, involves quantitative and formal reasoning.

But such thinking is not needed only for scientific issues. Consider how frequently opinion polls are presented and relied upon in this country, or how often businesses use surveys to bolster their claims. And then consider how easily numbers can be used to represent, or misrepresent, any alleged facts that one wishes. It is clear that even to be able to read critically what appears in the daily newspaper, to draw inferences from it, and to judge its implications calls upon specific analytical skills.

Each institution will determine how that understanding is to be achieved. But the goal itself -- the cultivation of self-confidence and curiosity, along with the necessary analytical skills -- is an essential part of the preparation required for a meaningful existence.

A sense of proportion and context in the worlds of nature and society. The responsible citizen, as well as the competent professional, needs increasingly to draw on an appreciation of the natural world if he or she is to make sense of the policy issues that are most important to us today. How can one responsibly decide whether the government should provide more support for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for example, without some understanding of the significance of its programs? And how can one even begin to consider environmental concerns such as the greenhouse effect without some grasp of physics and chemistry?

Universities need to create courses in the natural sciences that appeal to nonscientists as well as scientists if they are to prepare all students to be citizens of the world. I don't mean that universities should offer classes like "Physics for Poets" or "Chemistry for Composers." The goal is to provide an introduction to, and an appreciation of, the natural sciences within the context of human societies, rather than to study each in isolation. That can be achieved not by diluting the content of a course, but by incorporating aspects of the history of discovery and the work of individual scientists, the critical assumptions and underlying philosophy of science, the great debates and controversies, the false starts and discarded theories, the working methods, and the application and implications of such subjects.

Such an appreciation of the natural world also can be gained through courses in such areas as astronomy, geology, and oceanography because of the larger issues they raise, their dependence on and linkages with other sciences, and the fascination of fieldwork and observational experience.

When I was a professor of geology, for instance, I used to take my students on one or two extended field trips a year. One excursion involved a group of about 30 beginning students who traveled to Britain for three weeks to explore its geology. Our focus was scientific, but each student was required to present two papers on the influence of geology and landscape upon some other major topic: the Roman invasion, the location of industry, the novels of Thomas Hardy, the poems of William Wordsworth, the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the sculptures of Henry Moore, the pattern of agriculture, the location of breweries, the building stones and architecture of cathedrals, the changes in climate, the components of the Industrial Revolution, the form of cities, and so on. Any course, anywhere, offers comparable possibilities for linkage and enrichment.

But the natural world is only one part of the context in which we live; we are also part of a social web of great complexity. National concerns like poverty, crime, and drug abuse are embedded in questions of ethics, economics, politics, and the law. We need to understand problems through the particular prism of the social sciences and within social contexts. Only equipped with such perspectives can anyone offer effective recommendations for reform or cast a vote with understanding.

At the same time, we must not assume that we are the first society to grapple with such problems, or the first to experience them with intensity. Some understanding of a time and culture other than our own is one of the components of any balanced view and sense of proportion. Language and literature courses, area studies, history, art, and anthropology can all provide ready insights. So can other means beyond traditional courses: exhibitions, movies, lectures, societies, and volunteer activities in the local community or elsewhere. The presence of international students benefits everyone, and the option of a junior year abroad, or a summer research or service project abroad, offers rich opportunities.

At some universities, noisy debates on the role of Western civilization have deflected attention from the more basic issue of the need for comparative understanding of other times and cultures. Exactly how such understanding is achieved will be each institution's decision, but it is a desirable expectation for all colleges and universities.

Delight in the richness and variety of human experience and expression. Literature, art, religion, music, dance, and drama are the records of personal experience and encounters. Although many institutions are becoming increasingly preoccupied with technology transfer, entrepreneurial centers, and new revenue-producing activities, universities must reassert that the humanities are central to the curriculum, and that the values they embody remain of vital concern to every discipline and profession. Whatever the critical methods of current fashion, universities must be unapologetic about the sweeping range of issues and concerns that the humanities embody, and about their implications for all human experience.

The university years offer golden opportunities to explore literature and the arts, but the challenge is to marshal the richness of university resources so that they are appealing rather than indigestible to busy undergraduates. We must excite and interest, whet the appetite, invite a lifelong intimacy. The aim should be not so much to develop a smattering of understanding of all the arts, but to develop a taste for and curiosity about some. Better an enthusiasm for Mozart and Monet than uninspired A's in forgotten courses on Baroque music and Impressionist art.

Plato insisted that art should provide the basis of all education. It is not now and never has been some frill added to the garment of human experience. It is, instead, a basic expression of human understanding. Art is ubiquitous and influential in every culture worth the name, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Renaissance Italy. It has been in the most literal sense the embodiment of insight, an assertion of the human spirit. The most sophisticated skill -- whether technical or academic -- is barren without the insights that art provides. As in other attributes, so in this; the aim of education is to encourage the imaginative encounter, the reflective experience that can enrich every aspect of life.

Intellectual mastery and passion in one chosen area. The mark of an educated person is not the mere possession of knowledge but its comprehension, not its volume but its significance. If we neglect that greater comprehension, we shall become like Bette Davis's father: "Daddy, in his infinite wisdom, always saw the roots and not the flowers," she wrote. "He took the watches of the world apart and never knew what time it was."

Pursuing a major is often the crowning experience of the undergraduate years. But at its worst, it is a string of unrelated courses, each of interest in its own way, but all leaving unexamined the critical methodology and principles of the discipline.

The major should be the undergraduate's capstone experience, and the preparation and presentation of a thesis should be the introduction and bridge to a professional career. Thesis topics are of immense value because they require the assimilation and utilization of extensive information, whether obtained from books or from firsthand observation. This means, of course, that the thesis topic should not be overly restrictive, that it should require a broad approach, and that it should be related in some appropriate fashion to other areas of significance.

A student who maps the geology of an area of Nevada with silver deposits, for example, may be required to examine the balance among mining opportunities, economic trends, and market prices, or might alternatively be required, as part of a history project, to study the impact of silver mining on the economy and social structure of ancient Greece. A student working on the genetics of Drosophila might be required to demonstrate an understanding of the contemporary issues -- scientific and ethical -- of gene therapy or the macromutation-evolution debates of the early 20th century. A student writing a thesis on Mozart's early chamber music might be required to include a chapter on the technical development of 18th-century stringed instruments, or the physics of the cello, or the composition of court audiences, or the economics of ecclesiastical patronage.

What is needed is a faculty adviser who is attentive, creative, and committed to the joint discovery between teacher and student that a good thesis involves. What is also needed is a faculty adviser who knows the student as well as his or her own colleagues in other disciplines, someone who takes a lively interest in the larger community of learning.

A commitment to responsible citizenship, including respect for and an ability to get along with others. In the candid and noisy debate of cosmopolitan campuses is a national experiment in understanding. Ideally, disagreements can take place without those involved being disagreeable. A difference of opinion is not a misfortune but an opportunity for further understanding. It is where one interest or persuasion competes with another, and one skill or approach complements and enriches another, that freedom of inquiry flourishes.

Yet in practice, many higher-education institutions are defined in terms of groups or factions. Of course, groups will exist: geographic, disciplinary, ethnic, service, scholarly, athletic, musical, residential, religious, political, and more. It is not group identification that is at issue, but group segregation. It is not association but separation that weakens the university and limits the exchange of ideas.

That is why any attempt by one group or discipline to impose its own restraints or methods on other areas restricts the freedom that is vital to the work of the university. Those in higher education have to learn to live together, not concealing their convictions, disguising their differences, or minimizing their concerns, but sharing them, step by step, forging a larger community that unites them in their humanity.

Perhaps the best way to mobilize a campus as a national demonstration in community-building is to deliberately tackle a selection of challenging issues in the neighborhood through student volunteer efforts, research studies, development models, business plans, and environmental proposals. There is a world of difference between the energizing, demanding climate of such a university and the sheltered passivity and intellectual timidity of a campus population that is fragmented. Higher-education institutions must remain places of openness, tolerance, inquiry, robust debate, generous spirit, and welcoming inclusiveness.

A sense of direction, with the self-discipline, personal values, and moral conviction to pursue it. Fifty years ago, President Harry S. Truman appointed the Zook Commission, giving it the basic charge of providing students with "the values, attitudes, knowledge and skills to live rightly and well in a free society." Few faculty members today would accept that charge as wholly appropriate for universities. There would be careful editing, selective deletion. I can almost hear the complaint: "'Knowledge and skills' sound right, but 'values and attitudes ... to live rightly and well' gives me some problem. That seems inappropriate for a university. Too directive. Too paternalistic."

But universities have some responsibility for the moral well-being, as well as the intellectual development, of their students. That is, after all, why most universities were founded.

The rhetoric of college catalogs and university announcements gives expression to the issue. Consider Cornell's admissions brochure, which states that the university gives full consideration to those "intangible, but important factors that form good character and an effective personality."

The problem is not lack of assent to the general proposition, but rather a lack of any agreement as to how to go about forming a good character and effective personality. The situation is aggravated by the extent to which analytical abstraction and critical techniques, which are the faculty's scholarly stocks-in-trade, shake the foundations and unsettle the convictions of students. If universities succeed only in questioning assumptions or destroying convictions, while not encouraging students in their attempts to rebuild or refine or replace them, they leave students deprived.

Some in higher education may contend that, while the student is free to absorb values by osmosis, values should not be openly recognized or discussed. But it is impossible to teach without imparting values. Faculty members will stand for something, whether deliberately or by neglect, and that stance will permeate their teaching. Whether we like it or not, the teacher is a role model for his or her students.

Universities are committed to strive for rigorous objectivity, however unattainable it may be in practice. But one component of that objectivity is that we should acknowledge our assumptions, as well as accept a common responsibility for accuracy and integrity. Higher-education institutions exist neither to indoctrinate activists nor to create saints. They exist to educate students, but that has to involve more than the mere credentialing of narrow technical competence.

Yet universities must also insist that any exploration of values must clearly and deliberately leave the fundamental freedom and responsibility of choice to the individual student. Indeed, the integrity of the values themselves will be destroyed if universities attempt to indoctrinate or to moralize at every turn. Vacuous moral generalizations are as dangerous as empty neutralism. Moral development ought to be a result, rather than the purpose, of teaching.

In recognizing the need to grapple with questions of values, universities will align themselves with their past. "Knowledge is virtue and virtue knowledge," declared Socrates. If more-recent critics have been more skeptical, they still generally have recognized the link between knowledge and virtue. When Will Rogers observed, "A simple man may steal from a freight train, but give him a college degree and he will steal the whole railroad," he shared a common assumption with Socrates -- even though he reached a rather different conclusion.

It will be claimed that the qualities that I've outlined are the fruits of a lifetime rather than of four years. So they are. It is true that higher-education institutions are not charged with certifying fully mature characters at age 22.

But universities can establish a climate in which these qualities can be nurtured. Because they are contagious, they influence the growth and development of the undergraduate and, through those individuals, are carried out into the larger society. That is why the curriculum is an important topic for public debate. It shapes the society we are and hope to become.

Frank H.T. Rhodes is president emeritus of Cornell University. This article is condensed and adapted from The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University, to be published next month by Cornell University Press. Copyright © 2001 by Cornell University.

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