Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 5: Toward a New Curriculum: Colleges with Innovative Features

63 5 Toward a New Curriculum COLLEGES WITH INNOVATIVE FEATURES Despite the formidable obstacles, the new curriculum is slowly making its way into American colleges. The logic of new thinking has become too powerful to be ignored wherever student learning is a primary concern. Confidently, if perhaps optimistically , the Association of American Colleges and Universities has announced the emergence of the “new academy.” Robert B. Barr and John Tagg have described lucidly and in detail “a new paradigm for undergraduate education,” and many colleges have experimented with or adopted one or another feature of it. Examining the whole range of innovative curricula, one expectably finds a miscellany, from a few courses to whole programs, varying widely as to how many innovative traits they have, and whether they have enough coherence and leverage to produce a powerful education for undergraduates. Prospective college students and their parents would be well advised to consider seriously those colleges, such as the ones mentioned in this chapter, which demonstrate genuine attention to putting students first. Our four-year private liberal arts colleges, as a group, are educationally by far the strongest sector. Alexander Astin reports that “residential liberal arts colleges in general, and highly selective liberal arts colleges in particular, produce a pattern of consistently positive student outcomes not found in any other type of American higher education institution . . . . [They] have managed not only to effect a reasonable balance between undergraduate teaching and scholarly research, FIXING COLLEGE EDUCATION 64 but also to incorporate a wide range of exemplary educational practices.” Often the central ethos of a college has involved so deep a commitment to student learning to start with that the continuing tradition of the college—or in some cases a crisis in its health—has produced reforms. Sensitive administrators with a committed faculty over the years have discovered some of the best pedagogical ideas and gradually assimilated them. In any case, these colleges have a greater ability to change. With their relative political independence, and their comparative freedom from the research mania, they can be depended upon to continue their leadership in teaching and learning. But however visible some of them may be, they are teaching a very small proportion—less than 5 percent—of our college students. Establishing innovative arrangements in a large, researchoriented institution, on the other hand, is as rare as it is difficult. For the most part, such institutions have produced only minor tinkering with the undergraduate curriculum. At many major research universities, every decade or two someone has a crisis of conscience about the undergraduate curriculum. Committees are appointed, hearings are held, and a report is published and discussed by the faculty and then placed safely on file, rarely to be heard of again. Existing innovations tend to be modest, located mostly on the edges of the curriculum, often looking like concessions or compromises barely wrested from the departmental faculty. They are often staffed by faculty “borrowed” part-time from departments, or by temporary part-time faculty, supplemented by graduate students and even undergraduates. Unless they have been given the rare status of schools or departments , their staffs and courses operate at an obvious disadvantage in terms of appointment, promotion, planning, and funding. The University of Pennsylvania faculty recently ran a fouryear pilot program testing a new general education curriculum, so far with inconclusive results. Yale has at least produced a successful new program of freshman seminars. More promising yet, the faculty of Harvard College has recently made a fundamen- COLLEGES WITH INNOVATIVE FEATURES 65 tal change in the undergraduate curriculum that may well be even more important than those enacted by the fabled Harvard Report of 1945. Harvard has of course a virtually automatic influence on other large research universities, including the wouldbe Harvards that aspire to “national ranking.” Faculties all over the nation will shortly be considering Harvard’s decision. What is even more important, however, is that the change—unlike those of 1945—responds directly to the conclusions about student learning that I have just called “new thinking.” It implicitly challenges basic features of the conventional undergraduate curriculum. Since the faculties of the undergraduate colleges of most big universities have thus far been woodenly impervious to innovation, the prospect of Harvard’s influence is unusually important. The old Harvard Core Program—which required all students to take seven courses selected from subject areas outside their concentration—is abolished. In its...