A President's Third Year

Core Doesn't Have to Be a Bore

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

"Core's a bore, Core's a snore." I recall walking the campus to the internal drumming of that not-quite nonsense phrase 25 years ago as a faculty member in the midst of a curriculum review at the University of Michigan. The hours, the faculty disputes, the boredom. Pop quiz: Which famous university president compared changing the curriculum to "moving a boneyard"?

Core may be a bore and a snore, but when I arrived as president of Drew University last year, our College of Liberal Arts was scheduled by edict to re-examine general-education requirements. I asked for a one-year postponement and brought in my favorite educational historian, Robert Orrill, to lead us in a faculty seminar, hoping to lift the conversation beyond the usual vulgarity of "Trade ya an English requirement for one in physics."

Even so, we all ended up beginning sentences with "Students here . . ." (fill in the blank with a complaint) or "Students need . . ." (fill in the blank with anything arbitrary in the key of pompous). I did both more than anyone, but I gained some new perspectives, to be presented herein.

First, I know what I hope doesn't happen in Drew's attempt -- aside from the terrible conversations that tend to erupt in any discussion of gen-ed requirements. I hope we don't end up with the usual categories and lists.

I read recently that a fine major university has just come up with new core requirements for all students. In seeking "better-rounded" graduates, a newspaper account said the university would require liberal-arts students to take courses on things like global awareness, diversity, and intensive writing, along with the usual courses.

Of course, as those of us in the liberal-arts business would expect, several courses will be available to fulfill each requirement. For instance, for the diversity requirement, students will be able to take courses on "minorities, women, or non-Western cultures" such as "Slavery in the Western World," "Religions of the Eastern World," and "Medieval and Early Modern Women Writers."

Then there are the 12 credits of social-sciences and humanities courses, six credits of intensive writing, six of quantitative reasoning/mathematics, and six of natural-science courses. This is state-of-the-art general education -- rational and energetic. It certainly includes those areas of modern education that I myself celebrate.

The scheme is near perfect, and yet, to me, perfectly awful.

I find myself wondering whether a single student, checking off the boxes on the complex new scorecard, will get inspired by that ideal of an arts-and-sciences education. I wonder whether that university's faculty members simply consulted their own current (and perhaps temporary and shopworn) interests. A faculty with a different collective politics, for instance, might have instituted a national-defense requirement, another on world Christianity, still another on economics and business.

It is not the politics of that particular plan but the matrix, the scorecard itself, that is snooze-inducing. I find myself hoping that at Drew we might forget about courses as the measure of attainment and consider instead experiences. I find myself hoping that someone will challenge the notion of "well-roundedness," for I really don't give a damn if a budding Mozart studies public policy, too.

Indeed, I may simply want students to get totally jazzed by any one subject enough to understand what it is to become engrossed in something -- anything.

I find myself hoping that, instead of seeking the consensus that has professors giving weak approval to someone else's idea so they can get their own in there, we allow some excited faculty members to carry out their favorite options. We could offer one curriculum that is as traditional as the trivium and another that is about engagements and experiences (say, study abroad, but we don't care how; study beyond your upbringing, but we don't care where; lab experience but not just in a course, maybe in a job or an internship). We could offer still another curriculum that is independently produced by each student in league with a faculty adviser, and one that would follow the call of such diverse educators as Harold Shapiro and Louis Menand to blend the liberal arts and professional education.

That last notion was one of the two big ideas (new at least to me) that derived from Bob Orrill's seminar. Menand argues that empowering our students by connecting the liberal arts to the practical arts may not so much dilute the arts and sciences as provide them with social sinew and muscle.

The other new-to-me idea, closely connected, came in an essay by Douglas Bennett, the president of Earlham College, who argues that the liberal arts over the last century became increasingly pure, banishing whatever could be considered material and practical, such as law or education. Academics, he implies, invited an oppositional professional education that now (and this is my extension of his thought) may be eating our liberal-arts lunch.

Were this purely my design, then, I probably would combine the notion of engagements and experiences with adding a fifth year to the undergradate curriculum designed to bring the liberal arts to bear on a social sector, anything from public education to drug development. We do that now, but via different degrees and often in different kinds of schools. I would go for healing the rifts as I might not have even a year ago.

But, of course, that is just me. And just me -- just any of us -- is the problem, because there is always also just you, and you have a different ideal.

So what I would happily settle for is a truly open conversation with an unpredicted result. Maybe a curriculum designed by each class year, so that sophomore year is not sophomoric. Or take what we now make frequently into the capstone, a senior thesis or project, and ask for several of them from the first year forward.

Or perhaps forgo general-education requirements and just do away with majors. Who needs 'em anyhow? Or maybe nothing but a major that branches out ambitiously? Or just concentrate on amazing program possibilities, like the Elon University seminar where students work on a major problem for four years, actually doing something with their learning. Something, anything, but not the same old thing.

As I say all that, though, I stumble upon a reason to salute the program described in the newspaper account and any other such attempt. It gives faculty members something to excite them, if not their students, and the result will be more professors trying a new course and bringing that energy into a classroom. We probably vastly overrate requirements and the entire curricular enterprise, for it is less a vital skeleton than a coat rack; but, to change metaphors, it encourages new tricks from old dogs and that is to the good.

A new motto drums now in my skull: no more core's a bore. Think of the liberal arts instead as the glorious grail of an education that we do cherish without any irony, as an ideal resistant to system and most honored by remaining ineluctable.

"It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one fine morning --"