How Central Is the Core?

December 15, 2011, 5:41 pm

The City University of New York is in the midst of adopting a thirty-credit common core curriculum. Hooray? Unfortunately, no. The CUNY core is actually a dilution of academic standards—another instance of adopting the rubric of intellectual rigor to advance the cause of intellectual relaxation.

Core Considerations

My organization, the National Association of Scholars, generally believes that a college curriculum should have a “core.” That is to say, undergraduate students almost always benefit when a college makes deliberate and thoughtful decisions about the body of knowledge and particular intellectual skills that it would like all of its students to acquire. When such a core is established, students have a base of shared knowledge that enables them to engage in deeper and more constructive conversation with each other. Upper-level courses, built on the foundation of a common core, can reach higher levels of sophistication. Faculty members can count on their students having a well-rounded understanding of the basics instead of finding in each new group of students a Swiss cheese of randomly distributed holes.

The process of establishing a core curriculum has its own benefits. It forces faculty members in disparate disciplines to sit down together and talk about what, if anything, is essential to an undergraduate education. What, ideally, should students learn first? Are there any books that are indispensable to a bachelor’s degree? What are the skills without which a college education will just sputter along?

Like most academics, I have my own answers to questions like this, but they are just my answers, not a proposal for a universal college curriculum. That’s because colleges (and universities) pursue diverse intellectual missions. Each mission really should entail a core curriculum that captures its pedagogical purpose. The St. John’s Great Books curriculum isn’t right for M.I.T., and the core curriculum requirements at the University of Texas at Austin, which includes “American and Texas Government,” wouldn’t be a good match for the Honors Core Program at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, which is strangely silent on the latter career of Davy Crockett.

This might sound like an invitation to anything-goes, but that’s not what I mean. Merely calling some collection of courses a “core” doesn’t make it so, and the widespread dodge of labeling a set of very broad distribution requirements as a “core curriculum” doesn’t begin to pass muster. Distribution requirements can buy peace with the faculty by promising a slice of the curricular pie to every department, but they are a weak substitute for a faculty (or an administration) coming to terms with what students really need to know. Distribution requirements, at least when they are used as a substitute for rather than an enhancement of an actual core curriculum, are easily gamed by students, who all too often figure out the expedient path around the subjects they care least for. If we want to know how so many students manage to earn degrees without learning much of anything, anemic distribution requirements loom as a big part of the answer.

While I am not an advocate of a one-size-fits-every-college core curriculum, I am perfectly ready to advocate that some core curricula are better than others. I think it would be wise for every college and university in the United States to require every student to pass a survey course on the history of Western civilization, and one on American history. I also think it would be wise for every college to set a high standard for expository writing that every student has to pass in his freshman year as a prerequisite for further study. My judgments on these matters are not likely to be adopted with acclamation by today’s colleges and universities, but they are grounded in a well-established body of thought about how higher education can serve students in a free society.

That larger body of thought deserves more attention than I can give it here; I mention it as one might an Adirondack stream and say this is the Hudson River. You have to stay with it to see it whole.

A college that has a core curriculum is, other things being equal, better than one without. That goal of establishing a core curriculum, however, has become elusive since we decided some decades back that students are by and large ready to judge for themselves what is worth knowing. Today’s curricula are shaped by several large forces that run counter to the idea of a faculty deliberating over how to provide a coherent and integrated college education. Among these forces are:

The idea of the student as a consumer who essentially shops for the courses that suit his taste.
The related idea of the student as an individual who pursues education as a quest for self-definition.
The idea of the “multiversity,” first enunciated by University of California’s first head, Clark Kerr, in 1964, in the Uses of the University. The multiversity is a congeries of enterprises with no philosophical center.
Behind the multiversity lies the older tradition of American pragmatism, which is ready and willing to extol an ideal of “excellence,” but emphasizes that each human pursuit has its own forms of excellence and defers any effort to put these many excellences in an encompassing order, let alone a hierarchy.
The idea of “critical thinking” as an educational end separable from any specific content. (Some of my recent comments on this have provoked some of the self-appointed champions of the critical-thinking doctrine to declare that I have it all wrong, but the record here pretty much speaks for itself. “Critical thinking” is the term of choice for explaining what a liberal-arts education accomplishes when its apologists can’t point to anything else. Yes, the term points back to a rich philosophical tradition starting with Socrates, but that tradition has little to do with today’s liberal-arts curriculum.)

I don’t mean this list to be exhaustive. The large forces also include institutional dynamics and market realities, and I wouldn’t want to leave out the antiphilosophical, postmodern temper of our times, in which the very idea of intellectual order is seen as an imposture or an exercise of domination by the powerful over the weak.

In truth, the “powerful” in contemporary higher education are those who prefer a curriculum that embodies no significant judgments along the lines that some subjects are more important than others. We live under the rule of happy fragmentation. The weak are those who believe this fragmentation shortchanges students.

Coming Soon

So what’s happened at CUNY? The basic story is that, over widespread faculty opposition, the university administration is seeking to impose a “common core” on the university’s nineteen undergraduate colleges. The aim is to make it easier for underprepared graduates of community colleges to transfer their credits into the baccalaureate programs. The controversy at CUNY spotlights a collision between academic standards and the university’s emphasis on increasing graduation rates. I will take this up in part 2.

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chuckkle

Has anyone actually ever argued against the idea of college students achieving a high standard for expository writing? I never encountered this in my years of teaching in a variety of places.

Chuck Kleinhans
anon1972

No, but on the other hand I’ve also never encountered a program where NOT meeting that high standard got a student kicked out. If you had to be able to write two full pages with a clear argument and no grammatical mistakes in order to be allowed to proceed to sophomore year, about 80% of the first-years at my competitive private four-year institution would not make the cut. It would close us down instantly….
theatheist

Your point about grammar is certainly true but also misleading. Students come to college with 12+ years instruction in the language arts already under their belts. Apparently, it has little effect, perhaps even a deleterious effect, on the majority. Most of them don’t read unless forced to, so they can’t even recognize standard written English when they see it, let alone produce it. Anyone who thinks a semester of English 101 can “fix” all that is simply mistaken.
baruch2

There’s an old expression about politics making strange bedfellows. When we find the National Association of Scholars lined up with CUNY’s faculty on the same side of an issue, it’s clear that something really strange is going on. Faculty at the four-year campuses remain entirely dumbfounded by these changes. The Chancellor’s claims that they’re “faculty-driven” are pure hogwash and the rationale he’s been giving, that is, to improve the transfer process, cannot possibly explain the degree of havoc the process is causing: we’re being forced to rewrite entire curriculums merely to resolve what are no more than technical and bureaucratic problems. We’re still hoping that someone, somewhere, will get to the bottom of this and provide us with a comprehensible, believable, and reasonably accurate explanation of why this is being done.
Anon1972 doubts whether many students anywhere can “write two full pages with a clear argument and no grammatical mistakes.” Aside from the fact that I’m not sure many of my colleagues can write two pages with no grammatical mistakes (and I’d probably have to include myself as one who makes a slip at least once every few pages), I think this is a gross exaggeration. The overwhelming majority of the freshmen in my CUNY senior college introductory anthropology courses write many clear and convincing essays over the course of the term. I’m not talking about perfection, but they’re doing far better than they’re being given credit for, and the quality of writing is significantly better than it was when I started teaching at CUNY 40 years ago.
betterschool

Peter,

The problem in addressing this topic, whether from your perspective or mine, is that we are prescribing an intervention to achieve a goal that is vague and largely undefined at the empirical level. Here is your prescription and goal (benefit) statement:

“My organization, the National Association of Scholars, generally believes that a college curriculum should have a “core.” That is to say, undergraduate students almost always benefit when a college makes deliberate and thoughtful decisions about the body of knowledge and particular intellectual skills that it would like all of its students to acquire. When such a core is established, students have a base of shared knowledge that enables them to engage in deeper and more constructive conversation with each other. ”

You see good in a common core of study for students. I agree but the question is where do the lines of the various benefits (assuming we can get them sufficiently clarified so as to be measurable) cross the various lines of cost (the same questions of clarity apply)? Few would disagree with a benefits statement associated to speaking the same language and knowing how to add and subtract. Far fewer will still be on-board if we include the kings’ plays in the mix, and so on.

Much as you point out that “critical thinking” has no meaning unless it is “of” something and is therefore a context-dependent construct, are you willing to consider that the notion of “common core” might be more robust if we allow it a dimension of context dependence? In my view, a common core for a pre-med student, a philosophy major, a teacher, an engineer, a pre-law student, and a nurse, should reflect the uniqueness of each of these human endeavors. It is a small example, but consider what we know about critical thinking. The standards for critical thinking in nursing are substantially different from those in, say, philosophy. Applying the latter to the former might kill a patient or lose a license.

I readily admit that I have no more empirical support for my position than I see in yours. As I consider that question, I can’t offer much more than an analogy from the biological sciences. Survival is facilitated by diversity. I think there is a way to have a family of common cores and that such questions are separate from those pertaining to standards. Conversely, I think that increased standardization in the core for all undergraduate students — were it ever to happen — would diminish the very synergies that we both appear to value.
tgroleau

We have the same problem with mathematics. Too many college students come with poor basic math skills from their K-12 experience. Then we’re supposed to fix it with a single course gen-ed math requirement. Not likely.
CUNYProf

Yeah, Yeah. Wouldn’t it be so much more believable if the faculty complaining about this weren’t fighting so hard to protect their many turfs.
baruch2

In response to CUNYProf:
Actually, on my campus, I’d be willing to bet that a good half of those actively opposing the Pathways changes expect to see little or no change in their departments’ enrollments—or perhaps even think their departments will benefit—as a result of Pathways. One of the primary leaders of the University Faculty Senate’s opposition is a Finance prof and head of a Center; he has no turf at stake in this at all. No, this isn’t primarily about turf, though I wouldn’t say that it’s not a factor. There’s much more to it than this.
peterwwood

Betterschool–You raise good questions. My short essay was intended to create a context for my comments, still to come, on the CUNY situation. But I am happy to have opened the door to a wider discussion. As I argued above, I favor the principle of undergraduate colleges having common cores. That is to say, a college should go through the deliberations of choosing which courses, books, idea, skills, and values to present to its entering students as a shared curriculum. Each college, ideally, should do this on its own. What should be “common” about a “common core” is that it should be common to the students who choose to enroll at a particular college. Yes, I would like to see certain courses adopted as part of the core at most if not all colleges, but that is a secondary consideration.

Should there be as many different “common cores” as there are fields of undergraduate study? Your suggestion that, for example, that a pre-law student a nursing student have different common cores has some attraction. Surely the student entering any field as a major or as a specialized degree program ought to be taught the “common core” of that field. But such disciplinary “cores” don’t really get at the problem that all students in a college benefit from a foundation that precedes specialization. The system of secondary school preparation in the United States does not currently supply this, and despite its name, the “Common Core” for K-12 education currently being adopted by most of the states will do little to repair the gap.

As for empirical evidence in the form of cost-benefit analysis of the value of “common core” approaches, I don’t have an answer. It seems to me possible that using an instrument such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, it might be possible to construct studies that compare the later performance of students who took common core programs with the performance of students taking distibution requirement-style curricula. A fair number of universities, such as Boston University, offer an elective “common core,” which of course strains the notion of “common,” but conveniently creates two cohorts of students within the same institution,

Are such studies are actually needed? Maybe. But I suspect that the debate really turns on the ideals we, the faculty, uphold. Do we want students to have a shared foundation? If so, some version of a core curriculum is needed, If a “shared foundation” isn’t seen as that important, no amount of statistical evidence in support of its pedagogical benefits will make a difference.

Peter Wood
betterschool

This is an important topic, made even more so by the increasing diversification of what there is to mean by “higher education.”

One thought that fits in somewhere in the above: the optimum mix of elements of the shared foundation and elements of divergence is probably defined by the specifics of the goal and is ultimately an empirical question even if not one that is particularly answerable. If the goal is feeling good (and perhaps feeling “right”) or if the goal is preserving heritage, I suspect that the shared foundation becomes more important than concatenations of various elements of divergence. On the other hand, it is possible that the opposite holds if the goal has to do with innovation and synergy in problem solving. It may sound like I’m relegating the shared experiences to matters of lesser importance. That’s not the case.
profmmm

Like baruch2, I teach at Baruch and have been part of a year of conversations about what effects these curricular changes will have on our students. Of course we recognize that some faculty, particularly those in foreign language departments, are likely consigned to pedagogic oblivion by the “core” that Wood so aptly characterizes as an intellectual ‘relaxation.’ In our discussions, we are seeking ways to protect disciplines likely to be undersubscribed in the new framework, but our overriding concerns are student-focused, about the quality of the education we can provide. In the foreign language example, we speak less about preserving jobs or departments (thought I find these to be worthwhile aims) than about what a BA student with no foreign language competency can hope to achieve in an increasingly global job market. We are at Baruch unified–business school with arts and sciences, large departments and small–in our desire to maintain our effectiveness. Right now Baruch is credited (in a report by the Education Trust) as one of only 5 colleges in the nation producing acceptable graduation rates for a high percentage of low-income students. I fear for our ability to continue.
sandicooper

As chair of the University Faculty Senate — a body chartered by the Trustees — to deal with cross campus curricula issues, I can state clearly that the process by which this core was developed did not reflect any campus or university wide elections and involvement of faculty with experience in general education. Our General Education committee which was wrestling with a proposal to improve transfer and preserve much of what was good in general education was ignored in the process of developing this common core. The process was driven entirely by a Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.

Carefully constructed general education programs in the senior and community colleges are overturned. In the seniors, credits range from 45-60 depending on student competencies and most have at least a year of lab science, a history requirement, one to two years of foreign languages and classes in literature. Choices in other fields are not scattered over 8-10 disciplines and interdiciplinary ideas — ethnic studies, eg. This includes Brooklyn’s famous core which probably will survive by dropping languages. We all fear for languages and philosophy.

The MLA, national Phi Beta Kappa and a plethora of faculty senate resolutions weighed in before this process was launched with criticisms and alternate proposals — all ignored.

I am not an NAS member but I also do not believe this is a political issue between lefty and righty academics. It is political when you realize that most CUNY students arrive with severe deficits (two thirds of NYC high school grads need remediation) and for most of us, this new core represents little more than an effort to insure that more students get degrees by a far less challenging curricula.

We are NOT opposed to a smooth transfer process and we supported a variety of approaches — resembling what SUNY and CAL State achieved. The CUNY process claims to have been faculty driven. The faculty driving it were picked by administrators and paid a stipend, presented with an outline of how a 30 credit common core plus 12 in the senior colleges could be developed (outcomes, not disciplines) and emerged in 6 months with this drastic upheaval in our curricula — much of which, originally, took years to shape.

It was not turf wars that had faculties at many colleges struggling with the issues of the fundamentals of general education. We wanted to find a useful shared undergraduate experience so that when students went off into their specialties, they would have some common reference points.. And NO ONE proposed ONE semester of a foreign language!

Sandi E Cooper, Chair
University Faculty Senate – CUNY
Professor of History, College of Staten Island and the Graduate School
R117532

Sniff. Where’s my tissue? Another ineffective ersatz leader, whining in public instead of learning how to become effective in private.
sandicooper

Anonymity inspires dismissal

S E Cooper
bsarchett

If what Sandi Cooper says is true, then the new program, without ground-level faculty support, will simply be unsustainable. Shared governance, when taken seriously by any administration, will result in sustainable programs. Top-down decisions about academic policy not only result from a lack of leadership skills on the part of the administration, they will inevitable fail.
richardtaborgreene

It is important to force faculty and force students and force administrators and force this and force that—-the rhetoric of the writer reveal his/her/its underlying agenda—forcing people in the “right”. Dictators always need to appeal to force because virtues of non-dictators are never enough. YUK

AND there is the little matter of what a “core” is, some useful definitions from our past:
1) mass killers study–great men of history
2) a bunch of seeds in tough fibrous material to be separated from the juicy good stuff
3) a study of how people white and male like me are the source of all goodness and rightness
4) a repetition of the past 2000 years of my history as a kind of act of worship
5) a collection of really racist imperial deluded male ideas taken as a cultural neutral
6) a good excuse to kill poor people globally, vietnamese, iraqis, aphaghanistanis,
7) proof that Harvard’s elite research methods produce evil.
peterwwood

richardtaborgrrene–goodness. For the record, I used the word “force” three times in the article. First I wrote that the process of establishing a core curriculum “forces” faculty members in disparate fields to talk with one another–not exactly a recipe for the fascist state, The other two uses of the word are references to existing social “forces.” Would you want to expurgate such language from the social sciences?

I do find it helpful that someone who disdains the idea of a core curriculum should provide a nice seven-point summary of the depth of thought and insight that informs his position. From time to time, I am admonished by readers who think I exaggerate when I point to the loathing of Western civilization that seems to have become the basic stance of some American academics. It is handy to have this example.

Peter Wood
pianiste

Richard Tabor Greene at least has put his passport where his mouth is. He has taught for a long time, I gather, in Japan. He’s eccentric and he wildly overstates things, but he has a perspective on the contrast between Japanese college students, and the way they’re taught (although RTG doesn’t approve of everything in the way they’re taught), and what goes on in American universities.

Core curricula are fine, to me, when they mean a) competence in writing with some sophistication in English, b) getting to the edge of fluency in a foreign language, and c) acquiring or maintaining a reasonable level of knowledge of mathematics and the hard sciences. The areas of disagreement and suspicion arise with (d), the humanities.

Granted, that one ought to graduate from college with a reasonable acquaintance with the methods of Western philosophy and its achievements in literature, art and music. But whether students should be propagandized as to the “greatness of Western civilization” and should be required to read certain literary works that supposedly prove this greatness is debatable. RTB puts his skepticism in extreme form in (3), (5), (6) and (7), but he has an aggregate point. Not that I think that the works of Toni Morrison should be studied in lieu of Shakespeare, but if one really wants to get along in the mid-21st century, one might want to study Chinese history and culture more closely than all those endless wars in Europe.
richardtaborgreene

for the record (I will be dead soon so I have just enough time to get this in):

unable to stay awake reading fatuous opinions on what educatedness SHOULD be from philosophers, I decided to make my own definition of educatedness my own way—by asking 8000+ eminent people I knew in 63 fields and 41 nations who was best in their own field and how they got to be best there. That produced 54 routes to the top of nearly all fields that I called 54 Excellence Sciences, one of which was rising to the top via being highly educated-acting in though and behavior. 150 people nominated as rising to the top of 63 fields THAT way were then interviewed to determine their particular capabilities, published as 64 capabilities of highly educated acting people (two of my books).

So I HAVE an EMPIRICAL definition of a CORE candidate—64 skills that people at the top of 63 fields in 41 nations share. I prefer it to Peter Wood’s opinion-based crap. Lofty opinions of great men tend to justify Vietnam wars and Wall Street thefts—I do not trust them as the core of anything not rotten.

For the record, again, my best MBAs at U Chicago were always undergrad philosophy and literature grads—because mastery of LANGUAGE was more important in business than ANY OTHER SKILL, and god help the morons who study finance or economics that behaves.
betterschool

I find this an exciting post not because of whatever extent to which it may align with my thinking but because you mention a very rich and unusual form of empirical evidence. Is there any way to share the results of this particular inquiry in a more detailed way?
peterwwood

richardtoborgreene–”dead soon?” I have no way to tell from this whether you are mortally ill, suicidal, or indulging in some odd form of sarcasm. I trust from the rest of your post that it is the latter.

Some observations. Your claim to “know” 8,000* eminent people seems a bit doubtful on its face, although perhaps you have broad definitions of “eminence” and “knowing.” Be that as it may, the opinions of 8,000+ people, or the unnumbered subset who answered your questionnaire, are still just opinions. Attributing expertise or wisdom to the respondents to a questionnaire also seems a doubtful step. This is the kind of “empiricism” that gives empiricism a bad name, Counting things is helpful when you know what you are counting. What you have really devised is a way of amplifying your own opinions by dressing them up as though they are the result of scientific analysis. That doesn’t make your books uninteresting, but it makes your larger claims rather specious.

Sixty-four skills in 63 fields in 41 nations– a nice compendium, and yet at the end of the day you engage in ad hominem attacks grounded in pure ignorance. You know nothing whatever of my views on the Vietnam War, or Wall Street thefts; you have no grounds to think whatever my views might be that they have any bearing on how or why colleges might go about establishing core curricula; you license yourself to project fantasies and then to sneer at those on whom you project such fantasies; and offer up a buffet of vanities about your accomplishments in lieu of any actual argument. Are ungrounded personal attacks, argument ad ignoramtam, and idle boasting among those 64 skills? Your manner of proceeding hardly builds confidence in your claims to authority.

Peter Wood
pianiste

Richard Tabor Greene has been commenting on Brainstorm for a long time. He’s also been saying most that that time that he isn’t long for this world, and implying a terminal illness. In the absence of his offering anything specific information about his condition, he’s beginning to sound a lot like the old sitcom’s Fred Sanford (clutching his chest and looking heavenward whenever he was trying lay a guilt trip on his disagreeing son): “This is the big one. I’m comin’ to you, Elizabeth!”
boiler

It’s one thing to take against someone because he or she has bad manners. But to object to what the person orders in a restaurant is foolish and unprofessional. There are any number of different reasons why a person might not eat Mexican or any other kind of food, including the simple fact that he might not like it. Projecting racism or close-mindedness onto his choice of chicken strips is idiotic.