I have a number of bizarre compulsions. One is to read the curriculum-reform documents prepared at leading institutions. We all know bad jokes about curriculum committees, but the most naïve among us (I am a leader here) live in hope that, somehow, new truths about teaching and learning will emerge.

It was in this spirit that I downloaded the recent (September, 2008) report entitled The Curriculum at Forty: A Plan for Strengthening the College Experience at Brown. This is an ambitious effort by seven faculty members, four undergraduate students, and three senior deans (perhaps also faculty members). Unlike less impressive but more highly publicized efforts at Harvard, this report seems altogether to have escaped the notice of the press, perhaps because it is so shrewdly hidden on the university’s Web site. Too bad, for this is a genuinely interesting report.

The “40 years” period alluded to in the report’s title is the period since the adoption of the “New Curriculum,” which returned Brown to the libertine days of Elliot’s original elective system at Harvard. The report announces that the “New” curriculum is now to be called, simply, “the Brown curriculum.” Fine. Perhaps the reason is that, as several studies have shown, Brown undergraduates select courses very much as though they were actually constrained by a formal distribution system. That is, they “build their own ‘core’ curricula.” Or, to put the same thing differently, the report suggests that Brown students “control their general education.” This seems a contradiction in terms, historically, since the point of “general education” has been to force students to do “the right thing” — to become generally educated. It would be nice to think that students at Brown are more intellectually mature than those at Columbia or Chicago or Harvard, and thus do not require curricular constraint, but I wonder . . .

The report has a number of interesting and sensible recommendations, but I also wonder what the chances are that the faculty will act on them? For the moment, let me mention only the committee’s concern to buttress liberal education. It recognizes the inevitable and inexorable conflict between the inner direction of disciplinary departments and the horizontal thrust of liberal education. So it “enjoins” departments to “construe their intellectual mission as a double mission: not only to craft concentrations that provide undergraduates with a solid grounding in their disciplines, but also to create courses that reflect on the significance, and the ‘fit,’ of these disciplines within the larger intellectual and social culture of Brown and beyond.” For most disciplines, I fear that this is like trying to teach pigs to fly (though we now know that they can wear lipstick). More practically, perhaps, the committee asks each department to explain how its courses “relate to disciplinary learning objectives.” If departments could be required to explain what they intend to accomplish by teaching the narrow subject matter they normally offer, perhaps they could persuade themselves to try to do more.

Most of the recommendations of the Brown curriculum report strike me as being commonsensical and even traditional. They are no longer “new.” But they reflect a refreshing effort to rethink the recent curricular history of their university, and they are a welcome contribution to our common interest in adapting liberal education to present circumstances.