Presentation:

Introduction
Speaker: William Scott Green

We all know that higher education is basic to the future of American life.  Our ability as a nation to thrive, to increase the knowledge base of a global society, depends on having well educated citizens.

The American bachelor’s degree has a set of objectives:  Critical thinking, scientific and quantitative reasoning, preparation for citizenship, readiness for work, respect for diversity, broad intellectual knowledge, the transmission of culture, and an appreciation of our national values.  You can find these in almost any college catalog.

At the root of all of these legitimate and important goals is an even more fundamental purpose, which is intelligibility.  We cannot improve a world we do not understand.  We cannot advance as a civilization if we do not understand ourselves, our strengths, our limitations, and our motivations.  By making the world and ourselves increasingly comprehensible and thereby manageable, research universities in particular establish a foundation for human growth, creativity, fulfillment, and progress.

In our education structures, at the foundation of all these goals, is what we call, for lack of a better term, general education.  All or nearly all American colleges and universities share a basic interest in general education.  This is the learning that means to equip American college skills with a set of skills-- quantitative, verbal, analytical --- that is essential to all fields but particular to none.  It also gives students an intellectual experience that can help them integrate knowledge from different fields.  You can find this in most catalogs, too.

By definition, general education has come to articulate the core educational mission of the college or university.  As such, it is the province of no discrete school or department.  It represents the institution-wide commitment to interdisciplinary learning.  Increasingly, general education assists students gain basic competence in writing, quantitative analysis, interdisciplinarity, research, globalization, ethics, and citizenship.

General education is where students are expected to acquire the fundamentals of learning that they can then apply to a more specialized area of study and the rest of their lives.  The purpose of this panel this morning is to interrogate everything that I have just said.

Innovative Alternatives to the Four-Year Liberal Arts College Model
Speaker:  Michael Schudson

I am pleased to be here today to provide some highlights of the report of the University of California Commission on General Education in the 21st Century.

Let me begin with a personal note about the origin of the Commission. In 2001, I was acting head of one of UC-San Diego’s undergraduate colleges. Each of UCSD’s six colleges has its own set of general education requirements. At my college, this included a three-quarter natural science requirement that was normally one term of biology, one of chemistry, and one of physics. I wondered whether, in an effort to acquaint students with what scientific thinking is like, it would not be as good or better to require three quarters of biology, or three of chemistry, or three of physics. In conversation with the dean of biological sciences one day, I asked his opinion about this. He responded that three biology courses would be fine, but not three chemistry or three physics.

I thought he was joking, that he was mocking his own vested interest in biology enrollments. But, no, he said, he was not joking at all. Distribution requirements are designed to make students into better citizens. Chemistry and physics were irrelevant to citizenship. But, increasingly, he observed, biology was germane to public policy questions from abortion to cancer screening to nutrition to the design of clinical trials.

The University of California Commission on General Education began when I realized that I had no idea if the dean was right. Would a little bit of college biology make students better citizens? Was basic acquaintance with the substance of biological knowledge rather than basic acquaintance with thinking, method, and outlook in natural science what general education requirements should try to maximize? What, really, at the dawn of the 21st century, was the knowledge college graduates should have?

I shared my idea of establishing a commission to examine these questions with Neil Smelser, a distinguished emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley, long involved in governance issues at the University of California. He took it from there and turned a vague idea into practical reality. The result was our report that appeared a year and a half ago, without, I am afraid, much fanfare. What enabled the Commission to produce a valuable document, in my opinion, is also what ensured that it would receive little public notice: our Commission had no formal role within the University of California. We were privately funded by the Carnegie Foundation and the Hewlett-Packard Foundation. We had the moral support of the Office of the President in the UC System and the moral support of the system’s Academic Senate but only nominal participation – nor did we ask for more. Where we did have support is from senior administrators and faculty on every UC campus who recommended to us key faculty members who would be useful members of our group. So our 25-person Commission had two or three faculty representatives from each UC campus plus members from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, as well as one UC student, then a graduate student at the UCLA Center for Research on Higher Education.

What distinguishes this report from some others is that its stance is pragmatic, not visionary.  And its broad analysis of the problem is as important as its modest list of remedies. The heart of the matter is that the modern research university has multiple legitimate purposes.

Students have multiple purposes. They may sometimes think their only purpose is to get training for a job.  They may sometimes think their only purpose is to get training for a job. They hear this repeatedly when they consult their parents. They hear it in their own hearts when they think about finding a path in life that will provide an income. (I am told by a reliable source that there are 5 million rock bands with pages on MySpace. Almost all the young people in these bands hope to get rich, but I imagine that most of them also worry about having a day job.)    In the annual national survey of college freshman that UCLA’s Center for Research on Higher Education conducts, in 2001 74% of students listed “being very well off financially” as an essential or very important reason to attend college – compared to 37% who listed this in 1971. Still, students also hear that college is a last chance to do non-vocational learning both in and out of the classroom. They take this seriously too. Two-thirds in 1971 and still two thirds in 2001 list general education as a very important goal for them in college. Students want job training, job credentials, intellectual exploration, personal growth, and a good time.

Faculty also have multiple purposes – minimally, research, teaching, and service.  They normally realize they serve multiple gods when they take a faculty position,  but they may only reluctantly accept this. Almost all the formal professional rewards for them come for their research undertakings. There is very little reward for their undergraduate teaching and their university or community service.  Their colleagues vote on their promotion and tenure, their students do not. Their peers around the country or around the world make consequential judgments on their research grant applications; their students do not. Their colleagues have at least some awareness of the teaching they do inside their departments, but normally none concerning teaching they do for general education or interdisciplinary courses outside the department. The single-minded focus on research is hard for students, their parents, or state legislators to fathom, but it has built a remarkable system that draws outstanding students from every corner of the globe to the United States.

So, efforts at general education must begin by facing the fact that students seek vocational training in college or specialization in areas in which they have a passionate interest. They find general education requirements a hurdle to “get out of the way.” Meanwhile, faculty seek to establish themselves in research careers and to contribute to the advancement of new knowledge. Teaching is often just a sideline. You are all familiar with faculty who complain that they have so much teaching and so many committee assignments this term that they can’t get their “work” done. You may have said such a thing yourself. I have. Teaching may have its own intrinsic pleasures but it is not the same thing as being in the lab or in the archive. Andrew Delbanco at Columbia, in a recent essay, sighed that “on a campus mainly devoted to research and graduate training, those of us who focus on college teaching sometimes feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale."

So this is our starting point: neither faculty nor students in research universities find general education their primary purpose, far less their singular purpose. We are prepared to give general education little or no independent funding. We are willing to reduce it to a set of distribution requirements. We are prepared to leave advising about general education to the student grapevine or to untrained staff whose job is simply to help students through the administrative paperwork of course selection. Even so, we are not prepared to let go of it. General education still has a place in the research university. Our Commission’s effort was to arrive at a realistic assessment of the barriers to securing that place in a fruitful way, identifying institutional mechanisms that might make general education more valuable.

Let me rephrase this in terms of several powerful historical developments in American higher education:

First, a powerful research-centered culture has been consolidated since World War II in research universities and to a lesser extent in non-doctoral state institutions and liberal arts colleges supported by federal dollars, by the globalization of international academic competition during the Cold War and after, and by the rapid growth of the professoriate itself. What Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in 1968 called the “academic revolution” was the increasing control over higher education by the professors and it has only grown since then with primary responsibility for courses and curriculum lodged in academic departments. It is a situation of extreme decentralization that places the greatest incentives for faculty for teaching in their department and institutionalizes faculty allegiance to a specific discipline and department.

Second, higher education in the past 30 to 40 years has been vocationalized. Since 1970, students enrolled in traditional arts and sciences programs at 4-year institutions have been outnumbered by students in engineering, business, computer science, communication, and other pre-professional fields.

Third, a consensus (perhaps never very solid) about what constitutes necessary general knowledge for educated men and women has disintegrated. This has something to do with political struggles over the curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s, with conscientious efforts to adapt the curriculum to a student body more ethnically, racially and economically diverse than it had once been, and altered intellectual outlooks that called for de-centering the United States and Euro-centric emphases on what counts as civilization, and de-centering the English-speaking world.   But the declining consensus over what knowledge is worth having can be traced back to the 1870s and the rise of the elective system at Harvard and elsewhere. There was a shift from a view that education transmits specific content to a view that schooling teaches a set of processes, methods, and attitudes in the acquisition of knowledge. From that point on, the most commonly adopted model of general education – by far – was the cafeteria model in which students choose courses from among a wide range of possibilities in a set of categories representing large groupings of different bodies of knowledge or approaches to knowledge. By the 1920s, most institutions had settled on concentration and distribution requirements as a brake on the elective principle, but this was far from an embrace of any particular content. Efforts to create a core curriculum or a common body of study for all students achieved partial success in the notable programs at Columbia and the University of Chicago and, after World War II, Harvard. But it is the exceedingly rare institution that approaches the Columbia or Chicago models and even these stand as a kind of temporary moratorium on the elective system and a focus on the concentration or major.

A fourth trend that affects the University of California and other public research universities, and affects private universities more modestly, is the growth in the number of our students who enter as transfer students. They complete general education requirements at community colleges or at four-year state universities before transferring.

So the problem of general education today is this: faculty do not want to teach content outside their research specialty that they cannot in any case agree on to students who do not want jump through the hoops of educational breadth. Increasingly we do not have an opportunity to teach them anyway because they got general education “out of the way” before arriving at the research university through transfer!

These are basic realities of the research university. We do not think they are going to change fundamentally any time soon. So the Commission asked: within these constraints, within a world in which more and more students come to colleges (and more and more parents pay for their education there) expecting college to provide vocational training; and where more and more faculty recognize that their success depends on research productivity (and quickly learn that teaching is most valued when it reinforces research productivity and the recruitment of students to the specific field and department of the faculty’s specialization), where consensus on what knowledge is most worth knowing is weak and variable, and where enrollment patterns mean many students will transfer into research universities having done general education courses elsewhere – within this world, what can be done to attend to students’ needs for a general education?
 
Our answer to this was essentially the following:

First, some one person, commanding a staff and a budget, should be in the cabinet of the president or chancellor with his or her primary responsibility to undergraduate education and especially to features of undergraduate education that transcend the interests of the departments who supervise curriculum in the major. In the past 20 years, every UC undergraduate campus has created such a position of chief undergraduate education officer. These officers coordinate, oversee, communicate, and have an eye for new opportunities. Their existence is a structural condition that helps increase the universities’ capacity to innovate in general education.  In a perfect world, general education would be on the agenda of every department chair and even of every member of the teaching faculty at a research university. But we do not live in this Utopia. We live in research universities where the emphasis is more on “research” than on “university.  We work in institutions where departments compete with one another for the next faculty position, each one seeking to enhance its national or international standing to attract more and better faculty, more and better graduate students, more and more lucrative research funding.  Competing for the loyalties of undergraduates is much lower on the list; seeking to enhance the general education of undergraduates is rarely on the list at all. Under these circumstances, assigning an able and articulate faculty member to be the administrative champion of undergraduate education is a worthy, I think necessary, bureaucratic reform.

Second, general education should receive symbolic and formal recognition as an endeavor important enough for students to be awarded not just credit-hours for it, but transcript-worthy mention.  I have been struck by how important it is to students that their every activity be granted some kind of transcript recognition, be it the a cappella group they are a part of or the beach clean-up volunteer work they do. In what way might general education be acknowledged on a transcript? We combined that question with another: how can students be required to take a set of courses across domains of learning – a set of distribution requirements – that will nevertheless be coherent and related to matters in which they have some intrinsic interest?           

What we propose is that general education course requirements be assembled into “bundles.” There might, for instance, be an environmental studies bundle in which students would take a literature course on the philosophy and fiction and poetry of nature; a biology or geology or environmental sciences course on climate change and its effects, and a political science course on global climate change and public policy. There could be “clusters” or “bundles” of courses like this that faculty could propose and that could be named bundles – the names appearing on a student’s transcript in recognition that they fulfilled general education requirements by “specializing” in the environmental studies bundle.  This proposal splits the difference between requirements and alternatives, structure and openness, a principle of political impossibility and a principle of institutional cowardice. It is a midpoint between eating what’s put before you and choosing from a cafeteria, it offers a prix fixe dinner rather than an a la carte menu.

Exactly how these bundles or clusters will operate is not something we explored closely. At least one campus, UC-Riverside, is moving ahead this year with a pilot program based on this model. But we did imagine that faculty who teach any of the courses included in a given cluster would communicate with one another and meet on occasion to compare syllabi, compare students, share ideas about the direction of thought in the general area their courses touch on. It seemed to many of us that some of the benefits for faculty of teaching in interdisciplinary courses or core curricula might be accrued with relatively modest investment of the faculty and might enhance for faculty the attractiveness of designing courses that would be approved for inclusion in one or another cluster.

Third, universities should make general education more congenial to students by educating other campus constituencies on the value, rationale, and goals of general education, encouraging in every part of the campus community a culture supportive of general education. This is in most respects a matter of fairly simple and obvious efforts. Faculty can receive a financial bonus for teaching general education courses; they may also be granted a reduction in overall teaching obligation when they teach general education courses. The Department of Chemistry at UCSD gives extra teaching credit to faculty who teach large lower-division or introductory courses that enroll non-majors as well as majors.

But faculty are by no means the only constituency whose support of general education deserves encouragement. Top graduate students are rarely directed to think about teaching and even less frequently urged to think about teaching courses in general education. Non-ladder and part-time faculty often teach in general education courses, but do so with little or no resources for faculty development. Undergraduates may do better in general education not only if they have cluster or bundled courses to get them more interested, but also if they hear from senior administrators and faculty that general education matters. Parents, chancellors and presidents, and alumni can all have the virtues and values of general education urged upon them. Many adults return to campuses for further general education, enrichment in the appreciation of the arts and literature, a chance to listen to a lecture on the sciences tailored to the non-specialist. Many others recall college fondly particularly for the taste it gave them of matters far from the occupations they chose or fell into. Chancellors, presidents, department chairs, graduate students and college students all need reminders of or from these people.

Fourth, don’t forget the transfer students. Capstone courses left to the end of an undergraduate career rather than placed in the beginning are worth developing, and coordination between universities and the two-year colleges that send students to them is also in need of greater attention.

Did the California Commission answer the question I began with about what knowledge is most appropriate to require of students in the 21st century? We did not. Did we agree on a statement of principle about what general education should achieve and how we should achieve it? No. We operated with a consensus that research universities have an obligation to help educate young people toward familiarity with and appreciation of a range of fields of knowledge, but we simply did not attempt precision here. Some people would have insisted on foreign language training but not mathematics through calculus; others would have declared calculus necessary but not foreign language training. And whatever we might have agreed on would be likely to change, perhaps very significantly, within a few years.

If we were wary of the most ambitious efforts to state the goals and outcomes of general education, we were even more cautious about endorsing any particular forms of evaluation in this age of accountability. We were happy to endorse efforts to do some kind of evaluation – at the least, exit interviews with faculty and students in general education courses on their views of whether the courses satisfied the stated goals in them. But we were not overawed by demands for accountability. In a recent essay, journalist Jonathan Rowe questioned the widespread assumption in the media that growth in the GDP is a national good and decline in the GDP is a matter for grave concern. Rowe cites Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize winning economist who developed this national accounting practice in the 1930s in the first place. Kuznets grew disenchanted with the focus on GDP and wrote later that he thought it necessary “to deny from the start that, in and of itself, the over-all rate of per capita growth means much.” What matters is, as he put it, “growth of what and for what.” And, in the case of educational outcomes, measured how and perhaps equally important, measured when – at the end of a course? At the moment of graduation? Or five or ten years later?

The Commission did agree that general education has an obligation to be civic education. We took note that the very idea of civic education has grown more complex over time, now increasingly oriented to a sense of global education and foreign languages rather than a sense of U.S. history and government. We concluded that civic education at the college level appropriately comprises several objectives -- imparting basic information on U.S. and global history and politics, developing skills in searching for information citizens might need and in learning to judge information that might be fed to them by politicians or others,, providing an appreciation of widely shared democratic values, and offering an entrée into actual civic experience in the wider community linked to the traditional classroom. We did not enter into any of the myriad problems of how to offer civic education, especially when it includes off-campus activity, when relatively few faculty have the time, training, or first-hand experience to guide students in community-based courses.   We did not dare what Anthony Kronman has in his book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, urging that colleges help students grasp the core of what is best in the Western cultural tradition – concerning freedom and toleration, democracy, respect for human rights, reliance on the market for organizing the economy – regulated by the state, an appreciation of the integrity of bureaucracy, the truth – what a term! – of science. Had we tried, I expect each person around the table would have had a somewhat different list and very likely divergent views about what is or is not Western about the items on the list and where, if anywhere, some sense of the spiritual, religious, or transcendent might belong.

The Commission attended briefly to the uses of new information and communication technologies and we were cautiously encouraging of faculty innovation, particularly in large lecture courses, that might use new media to enhance learning. A year and a half later, having recently been at a conference with yet another round of miserable PowerPoint presentations, where perhaps one in five made use of video or graphic capacities that enhance understanding and four in five found the presenter talking to a screen rather than an audience,  I am more concerned than I was at the time that we think through information-processing habits of our students. They may be very different from what we ourselves, whether 40 or 50 or 65, grew up with. I do not mean to be negative. I told my students a few years ago not to use Wikipedia; today I can scarcely teach without it on contemporary topics. But these matters do not have much to do with general education specifically, but with all education in the university.

Again, I am pleased to be able to share these thoughts with you. You can easily find the full 70 page report at the Website of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. And I cannot conclude without observing what a pleasure it was to work with my Commission colleagues and particularly my co-chair and in most of the Commission’s matters my mentor Neil Smelser.
    
Resources/References

Publications

1. Delbanco, A. (2008). The college idea. Lapham’s Quarterly, 1, 19-41
2. Rowe, J. (November/December, 2008). False readings: How the gross domestic product leads us astray. Columbia Journalism Review, 47(4), 22-24.
3. Kronman, A. (2007) Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press

Websites

1. Center for Studies in Higher Education (2007). General Education in the 21st Century: A report of the University of California Commission on General Education in the 21st century. Berkeley, CA. http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/gec/.

Innovative Alternatives to the Four-Year Liberal Arts College Model
Commentary:  Dr.  Gerald M. Gillmore

In service of full disclosure, I am no expert on general education, although I have published on article on the subject that appeared in an obscure Japanese journal.  For this reason and beyond I applaud the work of the UC Commission on General Education, its report, and Michael Schudson’s fine presentation today.  They have filled in numerous gaps for me.  I especially wish to commend the work and the report to any of you whose campus is currently undergoing discussions of general education reform.  If your campus is like mine, revision happens approximately every ten years, typically with disappointing results.  The Commission’s work can save a lot of time, and it points in promising directions.

What I do bring to the table is a long career in assessment at a major research university, the University of Washington.  The perspective from which I speak today is that of assessment.  I was there in the mid 80’s when state legislatures made their first serious, ill-conceived foray into assessing student outcomes, almost exclusively via wide implementation of standardized tests.  In the State of Washington, we implemented a major multi-institutional pilot study of the three best rising junior standardized tests of the time.  Briefly put, we found that the tests were neither valid nor useful. 

I bookend that study with a more current study completed by my colleague Cathy Beyer, who is here, Andrew Fisher, and me.  Cathy and I will talk about the University of Washington Study of Undergraduate Learning, or UW SOUL, more extensively tomorrow, but in a nutshell, we followed about 300 students through four years of college with multiple data collection methods, including quarterly surveys, focus groups, and annual interviews of their impressions of their learning.  If you want to know all of the details, and they are really worth knowing, I welcome you to buy our book, Inside the Undergraduate Experience, from Jossey Bass. 

Our purpose for the UWSOUL study and its design was much broader than general education.  We tried to approach the assessment of what students learn and where they learn it with an open, atheoretical mind.  Nonetheless, I think we gained insights on some issues of relevance to general education, and I’d like to touch on some of the implications.

Upfront I should mention that UW has what Michael and his colleagues referred to as a “cafeterized” general education program.  In our more dramatic moments, Cathy and I have said that we found that there is no such thing as general education at UW, but admittedly in so saying we were imposing too narrow a definition of it, and there is much in the Commission report with which we can agree.   

Using an assessment approach means that one’s thinking about education starts from the end – what do we want students to learn and be able to do and how well does that match with reality.  Our major finding was that essentially all college learning is mediated by the disciplines.  What we found is that biology majors learn to think like biologists; they think critically like biologists, they do quantitative reasoning like biologists, they write like biologists, they are information literate like biologists.  Critical thinking is not a generic skill, writing is not a generic skill, etc.  We also realize, like the California Commission, that faculty teach the ways as well as the content of their discipline.  With rare exceptions, we faculty specialize beyond our own understanding of the extent to which we are specialized.  That is why interdisciplinary classes often seem to students like a number of mini courses collected under one course number.  No course is a-disciplinary, not even English 101.   It makes no sense to think of a course as “general education” if by that one means that it is not disciplinary.  A historian is, of course, going to teach a history class as a historian whether it is labeled general education or not.

One implication of this reality is that when students encounter new disciplines they are often at sea as to its conventions.  This confusion may be best seen in writing.  Students leave high school knowing, to a greater or lesser degree, how to write English papers – what counts as an acceptable argument in English, where the topic sentence goes, when one can use personal experience as evidence, etc.

They probably do not know how a sociologist or a historian makes arguments and what is acceptable as evidence in those fields.  They are confused as to why their TAs have given them poor grades on their first papers.  And, frankly, we are often not very good at telling them why because writing in our discipline has become second nature to us.  Thus, courses meeting general education requirements and freshman courses in general, can be quite confusing and difficult.  It is really kind of miraculous that students are able to navigate through their first year and some don’t. 

One conception of general education is content that every student should know.  The problem with this conception is obvious – who decides what content should be privileged.  The California Commission suggested a general education curriculum could be built around civic education.  We just experienced a historic national election; civics knowledge does cry out for improvement, possibly especially in Alaska (or maybe geography should be the topic).  But, once civics is chosen, I fear the arguments across disciplines and within disciplines about what the essential student outcomes are will still produce more heat than light.  Even when several disciplines use the same words, the meaning can be quite different.  However, if agreement can be reached, which I doubt, then meaningful assessment should be possible.  But, we must remember to measure what we have agreed to value rather than value what we can measure. 

If general education is deemed to be content based, of course assessment activities would have to be designed to measure content knowledge, which is fundamentally discipline based.  If general education is determined to be skill-based rather than content based, assessment still has to be disciplinarily based.  Any kind of generalized testing that does not take disciplinary differences into account will be disappointing because it will lack validity.  To spell this out just a little, if critical thinking is not a general skill, but specific to each discipline, which we believe it is, then any test of it as a general skill cannot be valid.  Furthermore, faculty will make little or no use of its results, and it is easy to argue that assessment that makes no difference is not worth doing.

Finally, I want to comment on the Commission’s idea of structured interdisciplinary bundles—that is, students taking courses across disciplines built around certain themes.  I think this idea may have a great deal of merit in that it can potentially provide coherence to the courses students take outside of their major.  There has been quite a bit of talk on my campus about the idea of a “course compass,” by which is meant a way for students to locate topics of interest across many disciplines.  For example, if a student was interested in learning about the family, he/she might want to locate courses in social work, psychology, sociology, public health, anthropology, nursing, etc.  Given our disciplinary structure, courses across the campus relevant to the study of family can be hard for students to find. 

Structured interdisciplinary bundles would not only help students identify these clusters, it would also help students identify topics of special interest by providing a list of possibilities.  But again I emphasize that while the topic may be overlapping, the approach is likely to be quite different among the courses, and students might not see as much tie-in as they and we would like.

To finish up, I want to quickly mention one UWSOUL finding that surprised us and is relevant here. One set of questions on our quarterly survey asked students to rate, on a 4-point scale, how much they had learned that term about each of 26 skills or understandings—skills, for example, in:

• “information, theories, and perspectives from your classes,”
• “writing papers that make and support an argument”,
• “speaking effectively”,
• “understanding more about who I am and what I value,”
• “thinking critically about issues, ” and
• “critically examining one’s own thinking, arguments, and opinions.” 

It is important to emphasize that these ratings were done at the end of each term, not retrospectively. At UW few students declare a major before the end of their second year.  Nonetheless, when we looked at averages for these 26 items within seven broad areas of majors, we found essentially equivalent differences in the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years.  Thus, the data showed that the students’ eventual majors had as great an effect on what they felt they learned in the first year, when they were presumably taking general education classes and had not yet declared a major, as even in the fourth year, when they were deeply embedded in their major.  This result suggests that while students may not declare majors in their first year, they start on the path toward specialization this early. 

More research is needed, but we suspect that most students come into college with at least a predisposition toward a broad field of study, even if they are as yet unable to associate a name with that field.  We believe this specialization, brought on by latent or manifest interests, operates in course selection and timing, but also very possibly in what students find salient in the courses they chose.  This result makes an argument that general education and education in the major are not independent but are linked by students.  As students seek out courses that both meet general education requirements and their particular and perhaps even nascent interests, a form of bundling is already operating at some level, but it may be more in the form of ways of thinking about content than it is about the content itself.

Michael talked about how general education is something of an administrative orphan at a research university, with no disciplinary home.  It is equally an intellectual orphan.  As Bill Green said to me by phone, “It is not shocking that a research university focuses on disciplines.”  It seems to me that, simply put, we have at least two pairs of goals here.  Academically, we very reasonably want students to experience an undergraduate education characterized by breadth as well as depth, and we want less goal-directed students to experience various fields before settling on a major.  Practically, we have to provide courses for those students who enter without knowing the major they wish to choose, and we cannot have a lot of students bunched up in a few classes, with few students in the rest.  Whatever the solutions are, and I think there have to be many solutions to fit different types of students, the disciplinary nature of the academy has to stay at the forefront of planning. 

Resources/References

1. Beyer, C.H., Gillmore, G.M., Fisher, A.T. & Ewell, P.T. (2007). Inside the Undergraduate Experience: The University of Washington's Sstudy of Undergraduate Learning. Bolton, MA: Jossey Bass-Anker Publishing Company, Inc.

Discussion:

Panel Discussion: Three Approaches to General Education

Duke University
Panelist:  Dr. Robert J. Thompson, Jr.

It is a pleasure to be here and see so many friends.  It is great to recognize that ten years is just about the right time; it has been ten years since the Boyer Report.  What I wish to speak about is an effort that has been going on concurrently at Duke for the same ten years in which we have been going through a process of reshaping undergraduate education that was initiated by a self study conducted for our reaccreditation by SACS in 1997.

We understood that reshaping undergraduate education was not going to be accomplished by tweaking at the edges, but would require curricular, pedagogical, and cultural change.  The first step was to undertake a revision of our general education curriculum in Arts and Sciences with these goals: reshape undergraduate education by providing a liberal education-based on strengths of Duke as a research university and establishing a distinctive array of engagements common for all students.

What do we mean by a liberal education?  There are many definitions.  We view it as a way to empower the individuals by expanding their capacities to reason and to empathize by developing intellectual skills, ways of thinking, and practices of inquiry.

As a research university we recognized the strongest educational advantage offered by a research university is to connect undergraduate education to the processes of inquiry and discovery.

We began this process by putting together a curriculum committee.  This committee was instrumental in what was developed.  The committee was guided by a set of defined principles that ultimately were judged to be extremely critical.  First, its work would not be about divisional or departmental turf or the majors of students.  Second, the committee was explicitly about what the university could do to prepare students for leadership roles in the 21st century as focused on general education.  Finally, the entire process was intended for all efforts to generate measurable student outcomes.

In retrospect, the premises about this work were very important.  Here we have a connection with the previous speakers.  The first premise was that each general-education learning objective could be met by a wide variety of courses within and across departments and divisions.  Secondarily, a single course, even an upper level course in a major, can meet the criteria for one or more general education leaning objectives.

Again, in retrospect, we can think about what it was we were doing at Duke and how it would fit within the outline of a speech by Jonathan Z. Smith (Jonathan Z. Smith, University of Chicago, AACU: General Education in the New Millennium, San Antonio, TX, February 2, 2000).  This was a wonderful review of different ways general education has been conceptualized and implemented in the United States.  The first is general education in reference to a common core.  In this model general education is focused upon common human experiences, past and present, that give rise to enduring verities.  Next, general education can be thought of as generalist education.  This involves the idea of breadth as a prerequisite for depth.  Finally, a third approach can be thought of as a generalizing education.  This mode involves capstone experiences and focuses upon process rather than content.

Duke has engaged a hybrid model that encompasses these three aspects. The curriculum committee articulated learning objectives that can be clustered in these three general domains (General / Generalist / Generalizing).  We developed common engagements with different ways of thinking and key issues accomplished in a variety of ways through regular departmental courses and interdisciplinary certificates.

The committee identified intellectual skills to be fulfilled.  These included the ability to formulate and support an argument, critical thinking and analytic reasoning, analysis, integration, synthesis of information and ideas, problem solving, and quantitative and scientific literacy.

We also thought about personal skills and dispositions such as interpersonal skills, openness, empathy, self-motivation, self-regulation, cross-cultural fluency, as well as civic and moral responsibility.  We wanted our students to be able to collaborate as well as compete.

As a research university, we thought that students coming out of Duke should have an uncommon knowledge about knowledge itself.  This included how knowledge is generated, integrated, evaluated, and applied in the service of society.

The curriculum is inquiry based with writing and research as the cornerstones.  There are two dimensions that form a matrix: students are required to study five areas of knowledge and six modes of inquiry.  In addition to the broad intellectual, personal and epistemological learning objectives, learning objectives were developed for each of the modes of inquiry.

Beyond the development of this revised architecture for our general education core curriculum we have also developed interdisciplinary certificate programs.  These have been previously referred to as clusters.  These include a course of study that affords a distinctive, usually interdisciplinary, approach to a subject that is not available within any single academic unit.  They are not a substitute for a major, but rather a supplement.  They consist of at least six courses, four of which are at the mid-upper level, including an introductory and a capstone course.

The following are a list of interdisciplinary certificate programs available:

• Documentary Studies
• Early Childhood Education Studies
• Film/Video/Digital
• Health Policy
• Human Development
• Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS)
• Judaic Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Markets and Management Studies
• Neuroscience
• Marxism and Society
• Policy Journalism and Media Studies
• Primatology

Johns Hopkins University
Panelist: Dr. Ralph Kuncl (Speaking for Dr. Paula Burger)

From the Johns Hopkin’s perspective, the concept of general education is too content driven and it is not what educated people know. What is more important is how educated people know.  General education seems to be creeping up into the upper level courses (which seems like a contradiction in terms).  The antidote to a cafeteria style of general education is a serious restaurant style.  Serious diners do not do prix fixe.  We should not oversell interdisciplinary study at the introductory level.  Why should we debate content when we all recognize that content is only a part of  what is learned over the five years of an undergraduate education?  It is important to focus on how we think, how we learn lifelong - not what we think (content focus).  Thematic minors have a nice ring, but we should not do students’ thinking for them by overdesigning clusters, bundles.  Finally, these clusters or bundles could be part of a trend of over-credentializing.

University of Rochester
Panelist:  Dr. Ralph Kuncl

I will explore the food-as-metaphor as it applies to general education at universities.  If we are so willing to reduce general education to a set of requirements, why not instead energize students with the two strongest drivers of appetite?

These are choice and autonomy (ownership).

Think about it.  Requirements are never motivating.  For example, many of us eliminated foreign language requirements and then saw enrollment soar.  I do not wish to be too reductionist about distribution requirements.  I once had a colleague say “the best distribution requirement is to hire the best faculty and distribute them over the students.”

A little over a decade ago at the University of Rochester we threw out complex general education requirements and substituted a cluster system that promoted concentrated and coherent depth.
Clusters can work or can fail.  They must have several characteristics.  They must be numerous, they must be genuine, and they need to be cohesive (not glued together or fake).  The more that a cluster is cohesive the more likely it is to result in breadth, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and writing skills.

Distribution requirements are a mile wide and an inch deep.  Majors are an inch wide and a mile deep.  Clusters are highly related and highly designed three-course sequences at some intersecting, interesting multidisciplinary area.  With clusters students drill down three different mine shafts around the landscape at varying experimental depths as an exploration. The clusters are of their own design and own desire.  One of the three clusters is a major.  Students do not just declare a major in isolation; they build own desired college program – a major plus two additional cluster sequences.

Clusters systems rely on two principles.  First, choice is an enormous motivator of satisfaction and success.  One must offer hundreds of choices.  This kind of diversity is only possible at a research university that has that kind of scope.

Second, the “core curriculum” is a fallacy.  It assumes that there is a single model for the educated, intellectual person or that there is a specific body of knowledge that all educated people must possess.  The academic diversity within the faculty makes clear that this is wrong.  There are many paths to becoming educated and many examples of the educated person.

How do we know that the UR cluster approach works?

All animals prefer balanced diets:  this is called nutritional wisdom.  Food choices, however, must be abundant and high quality.  Nutritional wisdom goes out the window when non-nutritional choices outnumber nutritional.  This is called obesity by choice.

Here is the second principle on which the cluster system relies.  College education whose goal is the student’s intellectual growth should replace transient exposure to many fields with enhanced experience in a few diverse fields.  For students to understand how a field actually works they must spend sufficient time to become part of the community of inquiry in which that field lives.

What are the pros and cons of clusters or bundles?  That’s the middle position that I occupy in this continuum.

The advantage is depth rather than shallowness.  It shifts the conversation with advisors to a discussion of what way do you, the student, want to commit to three whole courses outside your discipline and to what end?  From the Admissions point of view, this type of curriculum design attracts many more self-starters and independent students.  The downsides are that a pre-designed cluster may create a path of least resistance for some students.  It is also possible that all of the courses in one’s entire curriculum for some students may be quantitative rather than dispersive (except for the writing requirement).  Finally, in a department-centric university clusters could become excessively homogeneous and not multi-disciplinary if not monitored well over the years.  Each of these problems, however, could be fixable.