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

Chapter 3: Faculty Responsibility to Students

36 3 Faculty Responsibility to Students Nothing of value or consequence will happen in a democratically oriented educational system without the collaboration of the faculties. Manifestly, getting them to approve new curricular structures will be especially difficult. Of course there have been lots of faculty reports, but for the most part they have produced only minor tinkering with the undergraduate curriculum. In recent years it has been the education associations and some foundations—not the faculties—that have led in thinking about the curriculum. On the campuses there has been little general confronting of root problems, particularly of the faculty’s failure to take responsibility for educating the individual student as a whole. There are things for which no single member of the faculty is responsible that are nevertheless the responsibility of all; the most important is the curriculum in its total effect on the student . In the century or more in which research expertise has become progressively more important to colleges, the organizationoffacultiesbyacademicdisciplinehasprogressivelyclouded , concealed, and finally erased the faculty’s sense of this responsibility . The faculty’s collegial role of educating students to personhood and citizenship has changed to that of training specialists in subject matter. And the process has been attended by a damaging growth of political self-interest, as allegiance to students has given way to allegiance to intellectual disciplines and then to departments, as valid intellectual categories have degen- FACULTY RESPONSIBILITY TO STUDENTS 37 erated into power bases, as educational thinking has given way to departmental power brokerage, to dividing and defending turf. Colleges of teachers have dispersed into collections of individual entrepreneurs who use their campuses mainly as bases for national and international careers in research. One of the most deceptive features of this process, one that has seemed to validate and almost glorify it, has been the gradual establishment of the departmental major as the dominant feature of the student’s education. The major and its majors, along with the department, have seemed in fact to sum up the collegial responsibility. Academic departments compete to hustle students into their majors as soon as possible, leaving the rest to the mercy of a few professional college “advisers” who have at best a superficial acquaintance with students and no prospect of ongoing intellectual contact with them. Provide for “our” majors— recruit, advise, teach, examine, and graduate them—and we have discharged our responsibility as teachers. Complacent adherence to this withered model of responsibility has kept faculties from looking at basic questions of education for generations. It is time for faculties to confront the question of the value of academic departments and academic majors for undergraduate students. If we were planning the best possible curriculum for students as citizens or as persons or even as conspicuous successes in their careers, if we could remold the entire curriculum according to our deepest responsibilities, our best hopes, we would probably not come up with a departmental major set in a smorgasbord of “general education” courses. No—we would not be thinking about departments, and not always, even, about courses. Imagining the problems of life in the twenty-first century , the problems of coping with a future more complex and dangerous than any of us has ever faced, we would not come up with anything as abstract, as narrow, as insular, in short as “subject oriented” as an academic major. We would, instead, be thinking of intellectual powers, of experience, the ability to cope, to come to right judgments. It is hard to imagine how specializing early in such abstracted subjects as economics or French FIXING COLLEGE EDUCATION 38 or geology or math could be best for a person just setting out to seriously understand his or her world. It is the responsibility of the faculty to put the full intellectual development of each student at the center of the curriculum . Each student’s schedule should provide continuous training in intellectual skills and a progressive grounding in the basic modesofcomprehendingexperience.Eachfacultyshoulddefine for itself what the desirable skills are, but for most purposes it would do well to start with the National Educational Goal that calls for substantially increasing the proportion of college graduates who have “an advanced ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems.” This means reading, speaking, discussion, and writing, and the closely associated skills of interpretation, analysis, inference, and argument. Left to the academic departments, these skills do not necessarily get...