The Marketplace of Ideas (2 page)

1.

GENERAL EDUCATION
courses are courses that all students are required to take no matter what they major in and no matter what their other interests are. The courses are called “general” because they are pitched to non-specialists: they are supposed to be courses that any student can enroll in with hopes of learning something and getting a decent grade. A college’s general education curriculum, what the faculty chooses to require of everyone, is a reflection of its overall educational philosophy, even when the faculty chooses to require nothing. Given the possibility of something, nothing is meaningful. Changing an old general education program or instituting a new one is a labor-intensive enterprise, because general education goes to the heart of what a faculty thinks college is all about. So engaging in the process of general education reform says a lot about a faculty, an institution, and the state of knowledge. Many hopes and ideals, along with many preconceptions and insecurities, come to the surface. General education has many stakeholders.

The process of designing a new general education curriculum and selling it to the faculty has been compared to a play by Samuel Beckett, but the comparison is inapt. Beckett’s plays are short. It is better compared to
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
, the lawsuit in Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House
, or to being in psychoanalysis: interminable, repetitive, and inconclusive.
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There is a political issue that needs to be addressed, which is that everyone on the faculty wants a piece of the general education curriculum even though most of the faculty will not teach in it. Every department has more immediate concerns than mounting and staffing courses for students majoring in other subjects; their first priorities are their own majors and (if they have them) their graduate students. On the other hand, every department wants its subject matter to be represented in any set of requirements. Members of department X will generally sign off on a new program of requirements only as long as a course in X is among the courses that every student is required to take.

There is also the issue of the philosophy behind the program, the rationale for the particular requirements being proposed. This is a big bone for a faculty to gnaw on, and it is the kind of subject on which all parties find that they hold surprisingly firm views, whether they have ever given it much thought before or not. Half-buried assumptions about the purpose of higher education held by professors—and students, parents, alumni, and other members of the university community—tend to emerge into the light when general education is discussed. Academics are not often called upon to articulate a philosophy of higher education, so whatever differences they may have about the ultimate purpose of what they do when they teach undergraduates are rarely on the table.

But the fundamental problem with general education is not the politics of deciding which subjects should be in the curriculum, and it is not the philosophical debates about the meaning of college. The problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on liberal education a mission—call it “preparation for life”—whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to. This is why it provokes such paradoxical reactions—why liberal arts faculties want to own general education and to have little to do with it at the same time. That ambivalence has a history.

2.

There are two basic systems of general education: the distribution model and the core model.
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The distribution model is the default system, the one that most colleges use. Ordinarily, it requires students to take three departmental courses in each of the three liberal arts divisions—natural science, social science, and the arts and humanities—in order to graduate. This is the system in place at Swarthmore and Yale, for example.
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Having a distribution requirement is a completely honorable way to duck the entire problem. Its rationale is “breadth and depth”: students study one subject intensively, their major, and they complement this study by sampling the subject matter of other disciplines.

But the breadth part (putting aside the question of whether breadth per se is a meaningfully educational goal) is somewhat wishful. Without added constraints, students can cherry-pick their way through a distribution system. They can take only introductory courses or courses known for ease of passage—Physics for Poets, Poetry for Physicists, and so on. Nearly every college has these courses; they are natural responses to consumer demand. Or they can take their three divisional courses in a single congenial specialty (three courses on music to satisfy the humanities requirement, or three courses in psychology to satisfy the natural science requirement). These may all be worthy courses, but they do not constitute breadth. Brown has no general education requirements at all, and this might be taken as recognition of the fact that students will pursue their own interests no matter how ingenious the obstacle course, and that this pursuit is as likely as anything else is to give them breadth.
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Some colleges refine the categories or limit the number of courses that count toward satisfying their distribution requirements. The University of Virginia requires courses in each of five divisions of knowledge: social science, the humanities, historical studies, non-Western perspectives, and natural science, including mathematics. Princeton requires one or two courses in each of seven categories: epistemology and cognition, ethical thought and moral values, historical analysis, literature and the arts, quantitative reasoning, science and technology, and social analysis. Many colleges (Wesleyan is one) identify the courses in their catalogues that are considered appropriate for general education. The key element of any distribution system, though, is that the courses used to meet the requirements are departmental courses. The reason that distribution systems finesse the problem of devising and administering general education is that they leave the task of generating courses appropriate for the non-specialist up to departments. The theory is that departments have an incentive to offer such courses because they will enjoy increased enrollment, but there is rarely a penalty for ignoring the whole issue and letting students find their general education courses in the department next door.

The key element of the core model, on the other hand, is that all, or almost all, general education courses are extradepartmental. These courses are designed specifically for non-specialists; they stand in a separate place in the catalogue; and they represent the things the faculty believes every educated person ought to know. These may be courses that all freshmen have to take—Pomona College, for example, requires an interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry Seminar in the first year (followed by a loosely constrained distribution requirement). Or it may be a full extradepartmental program, as it is at Columbia and Harvard.

A distribution system is cheaper and simpler to administer than a core program, and there are colleges that mix the two approaches.
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But in their standard forms, the two systems reflect very different conceptions of what education essentially is. The idea behind a distribution system is that liberal learning is the sea in which the various departmentalized fields of study, from physics to poetry, all swim. Liberal education is not reducible to a specific body of knowledge. It’s a background mentality, a way of thinking, a kind of intellectual DNA that informs work in every specialized area of inquiry. This DNA is what college tries to transmit. So that any liberal arts course that is properly taught will impart to the student, over and above specific information, a set of intellectual skills and attitudes, the acquisition of which constitutes what it means to be a liberally educated person. These skills and attitudes may change over time: for the last twenty years, for example, there has been an emphasis on “values” and “diversity,” terms that were not heard much in the 1950s and 1960s, when “disinterestedness” and “science” were more prominent in definitions of liberal education. However it is defined, though, this mental disposition is the takeaway of the college experience. This is why, in a distribution system, it doesn’t matter very much which courses students end up taking.

The idea behind core programs is that it does matter which courses students take, because there are certain things that they need to know. Columbia College believes that there are certain books that everyone ought to have read by the time they graduate. Harvard (under the program it has used since the late seventies) believes that there are certain methods of inquiry that students need to learn. At Columbia, not just any literature course will give students what they need; they must take Literature Humanities, which is a great books course. At Harvard, not just any history course will do; students must take a course that introduces them to the methods of historical analysis. Having a core program means believing that there is a discrete body of knowledge that constitutes a liberal education, and this is why some colleges go to the trouble of creating an extradepartmental roster of general education courses.

Where did the concept of general education come from? Requiring courses in prescribed subjects seems to belong to an ancient idea of learning, a holdover from the era of the pre-modern college, which was an institution in which almost everything students took was prescribed. But when almost everything is prescribed, there is no need for a concept like general education. General education is not a ghost from the past. It is a twentieth-century phenomenon, and it is, in some respects, the most modern part of the modern university. And it is just what is modern about general education that makes proposals for general education reform so difficult to negotiate.

General education was a response to the rise of the research university in the United States, between 1880 and 1920.
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The research university is characterized by specialization. Its teachers are trained as specialists and its undergraduates are encouraged to follow their own interests by choosing a major field of study and then some number of electives from the other courses on offer in the catalogue. This kind of education attracted two types of critics, both of which are associated with the idea of general education.

The first type thought that education in the modern college was too narrow and utilitarian, that it led to pre-professionalization and overspecialization, a process unleavened by an ad hoc smattering of electives.
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For these critics, general education became the name for whatever it was that a curriculum of majors and electives failed to provide, and it could be defined in various ways. (Arthur Levine, of Columbia Teachers College, lists a dozen meanings of the term “general education” in his
Handbook on Undergraduate Curriculum
, published in 1978.)
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Sometimes general education was imagined as what turn-of-the-century educators called “liberal culture,” a cultivation of values distinct from, or opposed to, those of the professions; sometimes it was moral philosophy, an attempt to make up for the displacement of religion by science in the modern university; sometimes it referred to what was permanent or universal in culture, to knowledge that transcends specialized scholarship. All of these goals still cling to the concept of general education today. They are behind the belief that a college education should get at something bigger than any single discipline, or even than any group of disciplines.

But it was the other type of criticism that led to the establishment of the two general education programs that served as inspirations for many others, the programs at Columbia and at Harvard. This second type of criticism was not that the modern university was too utilitarian, too focused on the ambition of “making it.” It was that the modern college was not worldly enough, and that devotion to knowledge for its own sake led professors to neglect the socializing aspect of what they were doing. The stories of the general education programs at Columbia, beginning in 1919, and Harvard, beginning in 1945, suggest that general education programs are almost always motivated by what is going on in the world outside the academy—and this is a case in which the exceptions, precisely because they are so self-consciously different, tend to prove the rule. General education is where colleges connect what professors do with who their students are and what they will become after they graduate—where colleges actually think about the outcome of the experience they provide. General education is, historically, the public face of liberal education.

3.

Columbia’s famous general education courses are called Literature Humanities (officially, Masterpieces of European Literature and Philosophy; unofficially, Lit Hum) and Contemporary Civilization (officially, Contemporary Civilization in the West; unofficially, CC). The first is a year-long survey of Western literature starting with the
Iliad
and is required of all freshmen; the second is a year-long survey of moral and political thought from the Greeks to the twentieth century and is required of all sophomores. The syllabi have changed since the 1940s, when Literature Humanities was added to Contemporary Civilization as a requirement. Between 1940 and 1995, more than one hundred different books were taught in Literature Humanities. But the changes are relatively insignificant—one Shakespeare play or nineteenth-century novel for another. The basic impression is one of canonical stability.
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