Where a Geneticist Can Teach 'Gilgamesh'

At Ursinus College, not only does every freshman have to take a liberal-arts course, but almost all professors have to teach it

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Forums: Join an online discussion about whether it makes sense for faculty members in all disciplines, including the sciences, to teach core courses in the liberal arts, as is required at Ursinus College and other institutions with similar programs.

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By BURTON BOLLAG

Collegeville, Pa.

One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles.

But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched out on the carpeted floor, his head propped up on a bent arm, and asked a small class of bright-eyed freshmen sitting along the walls to reflect on Gilgamesh, the world's oldest-known epic poem. Gilgamesh, the virile Mesopotamian king who may actually have lived around 2700 BC, is both hero and villain in his failed quest for immortality.

"Is there an absolute right and wrong?" Mr. Dawley wanted to know, springing to his feet to underline the urgency of the question. "Or does it depend on your point of view?"

Mr. Dawley is a professor of biology. Yet, like most faculty members at Ursinus College, a small liberal-arts institution 20 miles outside Philadelphia, he teaches a core liberal-arts seminar that all first-year students take. Introduced in 2001 and known as the "Common Intellectual Experience," it is meant to get students to think together about life's big questions by discussing the works of great writers through the ages.

Students read from the Bible and the Koran and writers such as John Locke, Charles Darwin, and Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz. They attend lectures on fine art, a performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and several films, including Glory, about a black infantry regiment that fought on the Union side in the Civil War.

Ursinus is one of a handful of liberal-arts colleges that expect all faculty members to teach such a course. Lawrence University and Eckerd College have similar programs. These institutions view the yearlong courses as an affirmation of the value of broadly educated graduates, and as a way to unify faculty, to integrate new students, and to promote teaching based on student discussion across disciplines. While no complete survey of such core-curriculum courses exists, the national pendulum seems to be swinging in favor of such courses, and Ursinus and the other institutions may help lead the way with their unusual approach.

In an era when students appear preoccupied with their future careers, says John Strassburger, Ursinus's president, the yearlong program is meant to help them "create meaning in their own lives."

View From the Classroom

Does it make sense to require a professor of, say, chemistry or economics to teach Plato? "We claim liberal arts will make you a better person," says Mr. Dawley, the biology professor, who directs the program at Ursinus. But that claim rings hollow, he says, "if we're not willing to do it ourselves."

Mr. Dawley admits the requirement takes time away from professors' work in their own disciplines. The burden is particularly heavy on junior faculty members, who feel pressure to publish in their quest for tenure. Some professors consider it a waste of resources.

Mr. Dawley says it is worth the sacrifice. It has made him, for one, look more deeply and critically at his own work, and be a more complete mentor to his biology students.

"I used to relate to my students 'scientist to scientist,'" says Mr. Dawley. "Now I'm constantly bringing up John Locke and Aristotle. It has made me a better scientist in a deeper sense. It has definitely made me a better person."

Mr. Dawley says the program promotes faculty cohesion. Where previously professors from different departments may have had little more than pensions and cafeteria food to talk about, they now share the weighty philosophical issues they are all teaching.

The biggest challenge for professors outside the humanities, says Mr. Dawley, has been learning to teach discussion-based classes. But these colleagues have brought other strengths to the course, like a rigorous analytical approach and knowledge of scientific subjects, and, he insists, they have performed well.

He says that having all faculty members teach the core course is a good antidote to the tendency toward ever greater academic specialization. Mr. Dawley points out that no less a promoter of workplace specialization than the 18th-century economist Adam Smith understood the enriching nature — if potential loss in efficiency — of dealing with the wider aspects of a problem. Overspecialization can deaden the soul, Smith wrote in the mid-1750s, to the point where "all the nobler parts of the human character may be ... obliterated and extinguished."

While Ursinus's faculty members are becoming more rounded scholars, students' evaluations show that they strongly value the course, college officials say.

Lisa C. Injaian, a senior majoring in biochemistry, remembers the start of her freshman year, when she and her dorm neighbors would discuss Gilgamesh late into the night. "We left the doors open," she recalls. "People walking by would come in and join the discussions. We had all read the same things."

Jaynine D. Vado, a senior neuroscience major, says she liked being able to compare the different teaching styles of the two faculty members who taught her first- and second-semester "Common Intellectual Experience" courses. One, a physics professor, was more analytical, she says. The other, a professor of theater, favored role-playing. After reading Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, students staged a mock trial of slavery and had to argue opposing sides of the issue.

Nicholas J. Dobkowski, a senior majoring in psychology and classics, grew to value the course more as he looked back on it. At the time, though, it seemed to have an awful lot of required texts. "I didn't always — what they call — 'do the reading,'" he concedes.

Corvée or Delight?

The program was developed in the late 1990s when a group of faculty members was anxious to replace several required humanities classes — which could be taken at almost any time during undergraduate studies — with a coherent, intensive, first-year seminar. Mr. Strassburger, the president, says he initially thought it was "pretty nigh on impossible" that the faculty would approve the idea.

The sticking point was the proposal that all faculty members, no matter what their discipline, teach the course. Some professors steadfastly rejected the idea. But after long discussions, a majority eventually approved the plan. Since then, academics applying for jobs at the college have been informed that they will be expected to teach the course — at least one semester out of four — and will not be considered for tenure if they don't.

The administration saw no point in trying to force this on senior professors. Those who already had tenure were invited, but not required, to participate, and 47 of 60 tenured faculty members have accepted.

Albert C. Allen, a professor of biology, is not one of them. He thinks that obliging even younger scholars from outside the humanities to teach the course is both foolish and unfair to all involved. "Chances are, they are not going to do a good job," he says, "and the students are going to suffer." But many others appear to have been won over.

"I started out thinking it was just the dues I'd have to pay to get my tenure," says Gabrielle F. Principe, an assistant professor of psychology. "But I was wrong. I just love it."

Teaching the course, "opened me up to the idea that you could teach classes in other ways than just lecturing," she says. She invited students from the drama department to act out a murder and then submit to questioning in a mock police investigation in her class on psychology and law this fall. "I never would have done that without the 'Common Intellectual Experience,'" she says.

Rebecca E. Kohn, an associate professor of neurobiology, says teaching the course spurred her to add a new book to her course on molecular neurobiology, which includes the subject of drug addiction. The book, Losing Jonathan (Spinner Publications, 2003), was written by parents whose son died of a heroin overdose. The work explores the social and psychological aspects of addiction and "definitely made it a better course," says Ms. Kohn.

Teaching the freshman liberal-arts course has turned out to be a delight, she says, though she admits to some difficulty getting her mind around Nietzsche.

Having biology professors teach the German philosopher may sound extreme, but Eckerd College, in Saint Petersburg, Fla., has taken the idea even further. Not only do all faculty members teach the yearlong liberal-arts core, but each also acts as an academic mentor for the whole freshman year to each of the 20 students he or she teaches.

Eckerd administrators say the resulting personal and academic bonds give students a boost during their critical first year. "Faculty members really get to know students as individuals," says Lloyd W. Chapin, Eckerd's vice president for academic affairs. "We find that's a big educational plus."

Richard L. Wallace, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Ursinus, who used to teach at Eckerd, found Eckerd's programs "truly transformational for students." At Ursinus, he says, "I don't think we're there yet."

A Controversial Idea

The idea of a common, core liberal-arts program for all undergraduates dates from early in the 20th century. Institutions had witnessed the development of academic disciplines and growing specialization and wanted to ensure that in addition to gaining knowledge in their chosen specialties, students graduated with a minimum level of general education to prepare them to be thoughtful and engaged citizens.

In 1919, Columbia University became one of the first American institutions to introduce such courses, with an approach that was then known as "great books." Since then, and especially after World War II, many others followed.

But the courses have frequently been a lightning rod for controversy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many institutions dropped them after critics charged they were intellectual straitjackets that typically perpetuated a Western, male-dominated view of the world by mainly teaching Western, male authors.

In only a few years, however, the pendulum swung back. In part, this was due to complaints from business leaders. More young people than ever were going to college, but many graduates could not write a coherent text presenting their thoughts on a problem.

A growing number of institutions have since established core courses, though the label "great books," and the almost exclusive reliance on the writings of "dead white men," has fallen out of favor. In the wake of the upheavals of the 1960s, today's courses tend to contain a number of non-Western texts. At Ursinus, some of the texts used are the Bhagavad-Gita, a founding text of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and a short novel by the contemporary Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Eckerd's Mr. Chapin says the goal is to produce "a liberally educated person who can deal with a subject in which they are not expert, but engage with it intellectually."

An Endless Struggle

There are constant tensions over what, and how extensive, such required programs should be. "Many colleges are trying to protect and maintain core curriculum against the ever-present pressure for professional courses," says Michael R. Jones, associate dean of the University of Chicago's undergraduate division. "We're always explaining why a culture of intellectual virtues is beneficial for any career."

In the late 1990s, Chicago was the venue of a heated and well-publicized "battle over the core," after the institution announced a small reduction in the number of courses all undergraduates were required to take — from 21 to 18. Critics charged Chicago with abandoning its intellectual tradition.

In 2003, another prestigious institution, the University of Notre Dame, ended a yearlong core seminar for sophomores in its College of Arts and Letters. With a large number of required courses, and faculty members feeling overstretched, Notre Dame felt students could do without the program. But the move was controversial.

"I think it's a real tragedy," says Phillip R. Sloan, a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Notre Dame, and president of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, an advocacy group for core curricula. The dropped program, he says, had helped counter a lack of general education among graduates that critics have complained about in recent decades.

Despite several such reversals, the tide at colleges has gone mostly in favor of a strengthening of required core courses — at least according to advocates of the courses. "Slowly but surely," says J. Scott Lee, executive director of the association for core texts, more institutions — about 300 today — are adopting them. Most common is a yearlong course for freshman, like the one at Ursinus.

Meanwhile, the level of faculty discourse there appears to have risen a notch or two. Mr. Dawley, the biology professor, never used to know much about philosophy. But now, five years into the "Common Intellectual Experience," "I talk to my friends about Nietzsche all the time."