edited by

Charles Landesman

A Publication of Nu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Hunter College

2000

Charles Landesman

Introduction

Jerry L. Martin

"Home Truths" About the Curriculum

Alan Hausman

Expanding the Core

Ezra Shahn

Crisis in the Curriculum?

Sandi Cooper

General Education - Should Every Student Study

the Same Curriculum?

Paula Sutter Fichtner

Living with a Core Curriculum: Some Brooklyn

College Reflections

On October 16, 1998, as part of the Hunter College Fall Celebration, Nu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa sponsored a symposium with the eye-catching title: "Desperately Seeking Solutions: The Hunter College Curriculum in Crisis." Four of the papers in this collection (those by Martin, Hausman, Shahn, and Fichtner) were based upon talks delivered at the symposium. The fifth paper (by Cooper) was solicited later.

The issue that the participants in the symposium were asked to discuss is the problem of the nature and content of general education in the undergraduate curriculum. The participants were selected in order to provide a variety of opinions on the controversy.

Undergraduate education in the United States typically consists of a sequence of eight to ten courses in a major subject, a smaller number of courses in a minor subject (although many colleges have now dropped the minor), a number of elective courses chosen by the student, and a substantial general education requirement of about ten to fifteen courses. Within the general education requirement, one usually finds a course in freshman composition and enough courses in a foreign language to produce minimal competency in speaking and writing.

With respect to the bulk of the general education courses, colleges fall into two main groups. One group (and this includes Hunter College as well as most of the baccalaureate colleges within the City University of New York) offers a distribution requirement that consists of a menu based on the standard classification of fields (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics) from which students are to make a selection. The other group offers a core curriculum, a relatively fixed set of courses all or most of which are required of all students.

The idea of a core curriculum assumes that, at any given time, there is a body of knowledge, of texts, of ideas, of experiences, that should be made available, because of their great value and importance, to every college student. The writings of Plato, the music of Beethoven, the novels of Tolstoi, the paintings of Rembrandt, the theories of Newton and Darwin, the religious ideas of Confucius and the Buddha are examples of works of inestimable value that should be incorporated into the general education requirements of any worthwhile education in the liberal arts and sciences. Let us call the collection of such items the canon. Those who favor a core curriculum assume that there is a valid distinction to be made between those works that are canonical and those that are not. A valid general education requirement will make available a substantial selection from the canon. Since the set of canonical works is much larger than can be absorbed in a lifetime, a core curriculum will make a selection from it. Different selections are possible, giving rise to a variety of approaches in different institutions to solving the problem of general education.

In recent years, various doubts and questions about the very idea of a set of canonical works have been raised. First, even if a set of canonical works exists, can the faculty agree on what they are? Faculty are notorious for protecting turf, and the persistence of the standard distribution requirement in many institutions often reflects an inability or unwillingness to yield any ground.

Second, some have argued that there is no objective way to demarcate works of great value from works of lesser worth. In our culture, there is a strong current of relativism and subjectivism according to which any person's list of so-called canonical works is just an arbitrary preference; any attempt to require a core curriculum is, in this view, more an expression of power than of valid judgment.

Third, there is the influence of certain versions of multiculturalism according to which the traditional canon reflects an unjustified preference in favor of the works of European and Western culture. It is sometimes alleged that those who favor a core curriculum are simply attempting to assert the superiority of the achievements of one culture over those of others that have been marginalized.

Fourth, there are practical reasons, it is said, why a distribution requirement is superior to a core curriculum. Some allege that most of the canonical works are too difficult for many of the current crop of beginning college students to assimilate. Others claim that students today come from such a large variety of backgrounds that it is just not true that one size fits all. Still others favor faculty autonomy above all, and if a faculty decides against a core curriculum, then there is nothing more to be said.

You can see that the disagreement over general education reflects deep conflicts not only within our educational institutions, but in our culture as well. The essays that follow reflect some of these disagreements. Jerry Martin presents the basic arguments in favor of the core curriculum; it is the obligation of the faculty, he says, to offer a general education that is "comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous." Alan Hausman defends the core curriculum against the charge of Eurocentrism by pointing out that non-Western perspectives can and should be incorporated into the canon. The core curriculum should "reflect multicultural values without abandoning the Western tradition."

Ezra Shahn, on the other hand, believes that a core curriculum will not solve the problem of realizing educational opportunity for all. For him, the goal of education is literacy which consists of "the ability to follow an argument, to read between the lines, to know what someone means as well as what he says." There are different roads to literacy, and different approaches should be tried out. Sandi Cooper expresses skepticism about applying a core curriculum throughout all of the CUNY colleges on the grounds of the "ever changing content of general education" and the "meltdown of certainty." There are no fixed universals on which an unchanging canon can be based.

Finally, Paula Fichtner reports on the core curriculum that has been in force since 1980 at Brooklyn College. It represents both a common intellectual experience for all students as well as the faculty's willingness to provide educational guidance for the students. On the whole, she thinks, it has functioned well, but advises any college thinking of replacing a distribution requirement with a core curriculum that a successful core requires financial support from the administration and willingness on the part of a knowledgeable full-time faculty to teach core courses on a regular basis.

At the present time, there are efforts to raise standards throughout the educational system. At the college level, the large increase in the numbers of students over the past generation together with publicized deficiencies in their college preparation has caused many observers of higher education to worry whether standards have been seriously compromised. A core curriculum may be an answer to the search for higher standards, but, as we can see from the essays that follow, agreement will be difficult to achieve.

This publication is supported by funds from the Nu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and the Provost's Office of Hunter College. The cover design is by Vera Junkers.

President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Everything I have to say is obvious, so obvious I am almost embarrassed to present such comments to educated readers. But those of you who have studied the history of rhetoric know that the device of "commonplaces" -- the enunciation of well-known truths in familiar language -- was used to remind us of what we already know and sometimes forget. Ludwig Wittgenstein called this activity "assembling reminders." A writer friend of mine calls them "home truths."

The home truths I will offer today imply, to my mind conclusively, that students need and deserve a core curriculum -- a comprehensive set of required courses designed specifically for a liberal education.

What seems obvious to me evidently is not so to everyone. According to a massive study by Alexander Astin, while over 90 percent of colleges claim to have a core curriculum, only 2 percent have a "true core." A report issued a few years ago by the Association of American Colleges, Integrity in the College Curriculum, found that:

As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes. We have reached a point at which we are more confident about the length of a college education than its content and purpose.

So my comments may be more revolutionary than I imagine -- since they would require fundamental changes at 98 percent of colleges. In any case, here they are:

2. Unless it is at a trade school or technical institute, "education" means something more than just vocational or pre-professional education. It means "education in the liberal arts."

Defining the liberal arts is itself an exercise in the liberal arts. It is therefore a determinate but open-ended process. There are three formulations that I have found useful:

-- Among other things, the liberal arts are literally "the arts that make free."

-- The liberal arts include an encounter with, in Matthew Arnold’s words, "the best that has been thought and known in the world."

-- The liberal arts encompass "what every educated person should know."

Such formulations are valuable heuristically: they open but do not answer the hard questions:

-- What are the arts that make free?

-- What works express the best that has been thought and known?

-- What should every educated person know?

These are not easy questions. Only an educated person could answer them. Students are, by definition, not yet educated persons. They do not know how to answer these questions on their own.

Faculty, who have studied the subjects and read the books, are in a better position to decide which ones are important to study than students, who have not.

Therefore -- point 3 -- faculty owe it to students to prescribe a course of study.

The faculty of a department is collectively responsible for designing a major, based on the most important subjects and works in a particular discipline. Liberal -- or what is called "general" -- education is the collective responsibility of the faculty of the college, based on the most important subjects and works for living an informed, thoughtful, and imaginative life. That is point 4.

Education in the liberal arts is different in aim and scope from education in a major. Consequently, the student seeking a liberal education in the sciences is not well served by a course designed for future geologists.

Therefore -- point 5 -- required courses in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences should be specifically designed for general education. In some cases, they should be multidisciplinary to allow greater breadth and coherence.

Just as the student is not well equipped to determine the subjects and works most important to a particular field, he or she is even less prepared to put together a coherent sequence of courses. A graduating senior once told me, "I had a lot of interesting courses. I wish they added up to something."

Point 6 -- faculty owe it to students to give them an entire education, not just the bits and pieces of one. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan once commented, "The tax code should look as if it were intended." So should the curriculum.

From these "home truths" it follows that the faculty:

-- have an obligation to the students (point 1)

-- collectively (point 4)

-- to prescribe a required course of study (point 3)

-- designed specifically for liberal education (points 2 and 5)

-- that is comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous (point 6).

That is what I mean by a core curriculum -- and why 98 percent of colleges are wrong.

__________

Dr. Jerry L. Martin, President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, is a former Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I strongly favor a core curriculum, but not at all for merely traditional reasons. I think it unquestionable, as E. D. Hirsch argues in Cultural Literacy, that cultural literacy is a key to both personal happiness and good citizenship (which I, of course, see as intertwined). Cultural literacy in a college education is, I believe, best insured by the study of a core curriculum. The hope is to produce a graduate who knows certain basic things about human civilizations and their history. When I taught at Southern Methodist University a few years ago, I read a document that had been prepared by a faculty committee that favored a core curriculum. The goal, the document stated, was to have a graduate who, if she was in business and was about to build a new building, thought not only of monetary profit for her company, but the aesthetic profit of the community, or who, if he was an engineer, loved and supported the arts. This is the kind of education I think we owe our students.

Can such a core be reconciled with the multicultural aspirations of Hunter College? I believe that it can. I strongly reject the polarization that has resulted from the culture wars, that pits an academic right against an academic left in a death struggle that neither side understands or can win. I do not see that, to give full due to the cultural diversity at Hunter and outside of it, we must reject traditional western culture, or that we must embrace a variety of cultural relativism that legitimizes anything that anybody believes is worthy of study. Nor do I see a "return" to the world envisioned by Alan Bloom or William Bennett -- a world that never was. I do believe, as Gerald Graff argues in Beyond the Culture Wars, that we can greatly enrich the traditional core, both by the addition of non-Western European studies to it, and by the study of Western Europe through non-Western eyes. We rob ourselves of a unique opportunity to educate our students if we either revert to the alleged virtues of yesteryear and ignore multiculturalism, or erect multiculturalism into a total attack on Western culture.

Graff gives an example that I take as a model. When he first began teaching Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he reports, he treated it as a work whose discussion of truth, beauty, and justice transcended culture. The fact that Conrad had set the story in Africa, Graff felt, was only minimally if at all relevant to the discovery of its transcendent glories. Then he read Chinua Achebe's work on Heart of Darkness. Achebe, an African, argued that Conrad's book, despite many virtues, was racist to the core. Achebe's essay forced Graff to rethink his entire approach to teaching. Now, he says, he "teaches the conflicts." He does not accept the claim that Conrad's work is racist. What he does accept are the insights which Achebe presents, and which enhance and restructure the important characteristics of the book. The basic point here is crucial. By using feminist perspectives, or African-American perspectives, or African perspectives, or perspectives of the Arab world, one enriches oneself, not only by studying these other cultures, but by enriching the study of traditional Western works themselves.

Of course this model is not immediately exportable to all disciplines. Core knowledge is not just knowledge of literature, but of the sciences and the other liberal arts. How can we teach the conflicts in the core, and thus integrate multicultural studies into the core program? The heart of the matter here is the contention of the academic left that the classroom is by its nature political. Since I know this notion drives many people on the academic right to despair, I want to be clear about what I mean by this. The easiest examples come from, say, English literature courses. Insofar as a selection is made in a class of which novels to read and which to exclude, of which secondary sources to read and which not to read, one is making a choice based on values. It seems to me naive, even disingenuous, to claim that such values are totally a function of the "quantity" of truth, beauty, and justice carried by the work or that the only other considerations are economic (how much money it will cost the students), or otherwise politically neutral. Such choices reflect social norms. Is this really a far-fetched idea? I must confess that to me it seems so obvious that I scarce know how to argue for it, and to deny that the classroom is in any real sense political must reflect the belief that politics is something not fit for professors to engage in. The view that academia is above politics invokes a very narrow sense of the concept of the political. I shall content myself with one example which I noticed as a freshman in college. A history book I was reading stated that there were no survivors of Custer's Last Stand. When I thought about that statement, and that it had reflected a belief I uncritically had held for years, I began to see what is meant by claiming that the classroom is political.

Once one sees this basic point, even the sciences become amenable to teaching the conflicts. To give one brief example, it seems to me that there could be core science courses in which students are taught not only the elements of the discipline, but its political structure - everything from which universities are the best in the field, to information about journals and how papers are accepted, to discussions of research and how projects are chosen and funded - things that professors know but rarely impart at the undergraduate level. Teaching our disciplines as if they are untainted by political pressures from within and without is, to me, like parents refusing to teach their children the facts of life.

For the past two Autumn semesters, I have taught a Humanities class, Map of Knowledge (Humanities 110), in what is called the jumbo lecture format (over 400 students each semester). I designed this course as a realistic orientation to Hunter College; I try to accomplish this by giving students a look at academia - its organization and structure, problems about funding, promotion and tenure of professors, the adjunct problem and, most of all, the culture wars between the academic right and left. I do not exactly teach the conflicts but, rather, what the conflicts are. The idea is to show them what cultural literacy is, and some ways in which it might be accomplished. The course, judging by evaluations, student comments and letters to me, has been tremendously successful. The reasons very often given, and this very often by minority students, is that now they knew why they are in college, now they understood what the institution is and how to go about getting benefit from it. They want to be culturally literate, and they want to study other cultures and they liked Graff's idea.

Hunter already has distribution and diversity requirements. The issue is whether a student can fulfill these and still not get the kind of core, pluralistic education we want them to have. My observation in teaching advanced philosophy courses is that the students are NOT getting the background they need to become culturally literate. I cannot, for example, expect them in a junior-senior course to know anything about the scientific revolution. I should be able to assume this. It is crucial background for teaching 17th and early 18th century history of philosophy. I am sure there are few disciplines that escape this sort of problem.

It is a problem that can be solved. Southern Methodist University had an interesting solution, I felt. When I was there I taught in their core course program. Besides a kind of distribution requirement, students at SMU must take, early in their careers, a set of courses in intellectual history. Some cover the arts in the west from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth; some cover the period from the late Middle Ages through Romanticism, some cover Asian and African art, etc. All are team taught, all require a great deal of study of non-western culture, or the history of women, or African-Americans and their history in America. These studies are quite amazingly detailed, and they build on the traditional canon rather than abandoning it. Professors who teach these courses must have a feel for the interdisciplinary. But is this really so hard to find among us? We have an intellectual community here, and I would be very surprised to learn that most of us were such narrow specialists that we were totally confined to basic knowledge about just our own field of study. I think such a set of courses would be enormously successful and enormously popular at Hunter.

In summary: I favor a core curriculum, but not for traditional reasons. I want this core to reflect multicultural values without abandoning the Western tradition. I see no obvious reasons why this cannot be accomplished, and many reasons why it is desirable.

The structure of this discussion has been driven by a consideration of a possibly dichotomous approach to general education: either it is provided by a core or a distribution requirement. A core consists of specific courses required of all students; a distribution requirement is satisfied with courses selected individually by each student from a menu of approved courses. In part this structure has been adopted at this time because of a report released last summer by the Empire Foundation which was highly critical of the general education provided by many of the CUNY colleges which did not require students to take courses in particular areas. Essentially, these colleges, including Hunter, did not give their general education as part of a core. What we did, and what we do, is require students to fulfill a distribution requirement with choices from a number of well- defined areas, each of which has specific courses in it. Since we are continually in the process of reviewing this menu, and currently our Senate has a Select Committee for this purpose, it was perceived that our curriculum was in a state of crisis.

I do not agree with this formulation of the state of education at Hunter. While we may be enmeshed in a critical situation with regard to education, it is not restricted to Hunter, nor even to CUNY or New York City. The problem of how to provide adequate educational opportunity to all people in our country is national in scope. It has existed for years, and in all regions. It extends from K through 12, and on to college. While it is critical, I think it has been with us for so long that it cannot reasonably be called a crisis. And in terms of the vast nature of this problem, I do not think that focusing on the titles or topics of courses that students take to satisfy the general-education parts of the baccalaureate degree requirements is going to get at a solution.

So, since I am not comfortable with taking sides in a discussion so narrowly framed, let me approach a stand by stating what I believe to be the basic goal of education in terms of which we may judge our efforts. Most simply it is pursuit of the three R’s. This has a traditional ring to it, but it must be seen immediately that two of the traditional R’s really aren’t, and so I must make clearer what is on my mind. My R’s are reasoning, rhetoric and the search for relationships. I submit that at appropriate levels, the drive to enhance and apply these skills should inform all of education. But more than this, since I believe that education is ultimately delivered to or acquired by individuals, our success cannot be measured simply by looking at what we do or require of our students in terms of courses; the success of our efforts must be seen in terms of our students’ continuing growth in these areas.

Having said this, I must immediately add that these are not skills to be developed in a vacuum; they must be honed and strengthened in a context, and it is the courses that students take throughout their schooling that provide this context. (Of course, students grow by living as well, and no less a person than Dewey suggested that schooling should in many ways mirror life. But here I am limiting my considerations to schooling.) To some extent, the context may be seen as the content or subjects of the courses, but such content – or the closely related construct of course title – cannot be seen as the goal of education. The goal, I would maintain, is "literacy," in any of its varieties.

Now, a further brief digression is necessary to explain my concept of literacy. Specifically, it is not "having read" a particular work or body of work, or being aware of a defined set of facts. While we might easily agree that familiarity with Shakespeare’s work is a hallmark of literacy in the Western world, it is not clear what a person entering this world must do to become literate (and increasingly, there are many people entering our Western corner of the world from all other corners). Does it mean reading one of Shakespeare’s plays (which one?) or all of them? Does literacy also require reading the sonnets? Is reading enough, or...? I think you get the point.

Let me continue. With regard to science, C.P. Snow is often credited with introducing the concept of science literacy into our consciousness, and, in the process, adding it to the goals of general education. He, himself, was trained as a scientist, worked as a civil servant during World War II, and made a mark for himself as a novelist. His point in the Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures," was a critique of the British educational system in which students planning to attend university chose one of two paths at the age of 11+; they pursued either the arts or the sciences. Because of this early choice and the general lack of work in the complementary area, Snow concluded that many arts graduates, who made up the bulk of the civil service, were not science-literate, and that the country’s policies suffered because of this. The solution, of course, was to enhance science literacy, and a mark of this, Snow said, an equivalent with having read a work of Shakespeare, was that one should be able to describe the second law of thermodynamics.

Such a choice may be understandable given Snow’s training as a physicist, and the period in which he was trained. The second law indeed represents the unification of the study of many diverse phenomena during the nineteenth century. But jump forward four years and ten printings to the second edition of this work. This was not a major rewrite, but in it he replaced knowledge of the second law as the necessary criterion of science literacy by "molecular biology." Again, this may be reasonable; rather than looking backward Snow was looking forward to an age of genetic diagnosis, engineering and therapy that was at that time still over the horizon. All well and good, but what did it do to those arts graduates who had spent the intervening years struggling to master the second law? Were they to be again consigned to the science-illiterate category? Is attaining science literacy measurable by mastery of any one subject? I think the answer is clearly "No."

Well, if one were able to master the second law in four years, I would say that such a person would be able to master, in the sense of understand, molecular biology as well. That is, literacy must not be judged on what one knows so much as what one can reasonably know. In another context I said, with a bow to David Bohm, literacy is the ability to follow an argument, to read between the lines, to know what someone means as well as what he says. And, returning from my digression, I submit that assisting our students to acquire this skill, this habit of thought, should be the goal of our educational process and system.

We do this, of course, by stressing language, the ability to decipher and to use words to convey meaning. As we go beyond declarative sentences and use tone and voice and complexity and implication as we write, and inference as we read, we engage rhetoric. And as we structure argument, and use formal interactions when and where we find them, we use reasoning – and realize that this is not an abstract form but assumes various guises in different disciplines, and in part serves to define these differences. And, as we proceed outward from the problem areas that might serve to anchor these different disciplines, we have pointed out to us, and we see, and eventually we search for relationships that make sense of our interactions with the world, with our societies, and with ourselves.

Now, this may be done for some people with a set of required courses, but I doubt that all of our students come to us with such similar backgrounds that this would really be appropriate. So, somehow, students have to be encouraged to reach these ends by making choices that build on what they have, and provide what they have missed. In this sense, throughout education we are engaging in both a constructive and a remedial process.

Because of my own background, I would like to look only at the sciences. Unlike math, where we have a (mistaken) idea of what an eighth grader or a high school graduate has been taught (not to say has learned), and unlike English, where some common reading level might be agreed upon, until recently there was no consensus regarding the content of pre-college science. This meant that students falling short of the mark in math and English might be directed to remedial or developmental courses at the beginning of their college work. It seems to be fairly well accepted that a sizable proportion of all college freshmen need remedial work in one or more areas. Science was not in that position, so remedial work did not make sense, and by the same token, neither core courses nor distributionally required courses could be designed with the assumption that almost all students would be able to cope with them.

Now, that has not changed, but there is a new framework for discussion. Several years ago the National Research Council completed a draft document on the goals of a K-12 science curriculum. It turns out to be largely parallel to an essentially independent effort pursued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which serves as the end point of Project 2061, the projected date by which all Americans should achieve that level of science literacy. And this view of literacy does go well beyond factoids to include historical context and practical application.

Well, we are still 63 years short of that date, and most high school graduates have not had the benefit of this consensus curriculum. They, and their elders, are still by this measure science-illiterate. This means that we cannot yet build on a common background, and much of what we do might have to be considered "remedial," but there is no real hope that it can be otherwise for many years, and there is no reason to think that in this realm it can be accomplished outside the academic walls of the colleges. One might suggest that, if the situation is really that dire, we might simply ignore it; if we deny the problem, we won’t have to solve it. Why do we need science anyway? Well, our teachers do, because they will have to teach it. (The K portion of this consensus dealing with grades K-4 is by no means trivial. If science is to be taught reasonably, these teachers should be conversant with the concepts covered in grades 5-8 as well.) But important as these people are, they still make up only a small part of our population. How about the rest of us? My guess is that 90% of our students are, or will be, parents, and they owe it to their children to be able to answer their questions about dinosaurs and the moon, the color of grass and the sky, the causes of thunder and the colors of the rainbow. Kids really ask questions, and science provides a way of answering these questions that rewards curiosity. Not being able to understand the roots of the question leads down the path to not answering the question and to destroying the inquiring mind. Yes, that really happens. And to avoid that, in science and in other areas, students need a liberal general education.

But, as I’ve already shown, this education cannot be defined in terms of specific courses, or even – at least in the sciences - with a selection from a small list of courses. However, if we can accept the NRC consensus, we may have an out. Especially for teachers, we may be able to agree on a list of competency areas which must be mastered. Depending on the quality of the background that students bring with them, they will have less, or more, work before them in order to meet these standards. We should not be surprised if the pluralism in our society were reflected in differing roads toward individual academic fulfillment. Unfortunately, this approach is not prescriptive, so we cannot say "Take this," or "Take your pick," and we will certify you as complete. But if we accept this as a goal, we can find ways of working toward it and comparing different approaches to see which are better able to achieve success. In that framework I would be able to say which of the approaches we have been discussing today is to be preferred.

Professor of History, College of Staten Island and the Graduate School of the City University of New York

What should everyone know who has passed through college or university-level education in the United States?

In my estimation, whatever leads to sharpening critical skills, grasping innuendo and complexity, and deepening understanding of human life, social structures and environmental conditions must be privileged in a curriculum. For some students, this mix will come from 12 to 16 courses over a three- to-four semester spread drawn from the usual range of disciplines; for others, it will come from highly structured blocks of canonical work in western culture and a smattering of quantitative studies. For students whose primary interest in college is a job, and the faster the better, the longer-range objectives of a liberal arts education may have to wait ... perhaps until the student enrolls in a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program.

Following several years of thought, meetings and discussion, the Committee on Academic Policy of the (CUNY) University Faculty Senate prepared a statement, "Towards a Definition of General Education." Committee members came from the spectrum of colleges that compose CUNY – older four-year senior colleges which emphasize liberal arts and science curricula; newer senior colleges that specialize in a few majors which mix liberal arts and career or professional training; comprehensive colleges which offer associate, baccalaureate, master’s and, occasionally, doctoral degrees and, finally, community colleges (there are six in CUNY at this point; several years ago, there were nine). Committee members benefited from a two-year study of the subject conducted by the SUNY Faculty Senate, carried out by faculty from a range of SUNY colleges in response to trustee and administrative intrusions into curricula organization.

In CUNY, frankly, we face a major problem which continues to rankle. A Board resolution mandated that students graduating from or passing 64 credits from a CUNY community college must have these transferred to the senior college which has accepted the student. The resolution also respects the right of senior colleges to require course distributions, specific courses and major courses for its own degrees. Students find themselves in a conflict between two sets of expectations, and some faculty and administrators are tempted to believe that a standard general education curriculum with very similar syllabi would eliminate the often overwhelming problems that students face in transferring.

For others, a near standardized curriculum with specific course content is justified on intellectual and academic grounds, particularly since students arrive with generally dismal preparation. This group of faculty also seems to believe that there is a knowable group of courses so self-evident that everyone should agree to offer them.

Personally I would love it if we did not have to face the facts of the current preparation of many of our students – if they came with sophisticated creative, cognitive and literary skills as well as sufficient comfort-level numeracy skills. As one who began teaching in a very selective institution in 1959, I can indeed recall another era when fewer than 10% of the U. S. population went to college. And among the young women who went, there was no doubt that they were usually the most intellectually gifted of their classes (I am not referring to young women of means who attended expensive private institutions as part of a coming-of-age ritual).

However, that era is history, and as a historian, I am persuaded that none of us can scroll back to that past. And just as that era is past, so are the canonical mantras which composed the required courses. At City College, for instance, there were 64 credits during the 1950's, including four speech courses of 1 credit each (but many hours per week), to teach us how to communicate properly (the faculty was determined to eliminate "ng clicks" and Noo Yawk accents).

Were all these courses necessary? Certainly that set of distribution requirements was crucial to guarantee departmental viability and defend turf. In fact, the value of any one of the parts of those presumably indispensable course requirements was entirely tied to the excellence of the teacher and not especially the nature of the content. One memorable faculty member in 6 semesters of a foreign language left more impact than all the memorized verbs of the other 5 semesters.

For most of us, the security of knowing that certain ideas and facts had to be known by every educated person is also an irretrievable piece of daydreaming. A course once deemed essential that traced "democracy" from antiquity to Cold War America could never again be taught as if the world were composed of permanent universals; it would have to be an interplay between and among generations of ideas as well as differences in the way we know what we think we know. It would not satisfy those who believe that higher education forms a part of the socialization process of patriots.

For CUNY, on practical as well as intellectually moral grounds, each college must struggle to shape its general education offerings. If Brooklyn has finally decided on a core (following brutal faculty meetings about a generation ago), this hardly means that Queens or New York City Tech must follow suit.

What each campus concludes must be required of its graduates to earn a respectable degree must, in the final analysis, be the curriculum -- until it is re-defined.

What CUNY could do is distribute copies to all colleges of what sister colleges require; distribute copies of the excellent report by the SUNY University Faculty Senate on general education to all colleges and, at least, try to reach curriculum committees; distribute copies of the CUNY University Faculty Senate statement (only 3 pages) and periodically convene conferences, perhaps sponsored by the University Faculty Senate, to discuss and debate the validity, value, content and objectives of general education.

For faculty who have been around perhaps a bit longer than others, the exposure to new, younger colleagues, fresh from other institutions, is a tonic – though sometimes a bit intimidating. For the younger and newer faculty, conferences across the university might help them move beyond the understandable limitations of scholars suffering the tunnel vision of dissertation or monograph authors, and begin to wrestle with the permanent and ever-changing content of general education.

If we have learned anything in the past half century, it is that we have to live with the meltdown of certainty.

Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York

Since 1981, all undergraduates at Brooklyn College must have completed 34 credits of Core studies as part of their work toward a baccalaureate degree. The courses, which represent most, though not all, of the standard liberal arts disciplines, are program-specific. While there is obviously an informative side to anything one hears for the first time, these offerings are not the coverage-driven surveys which often introduce individual disciplines to possible majors. Their chief purpose is to outfit students with the mental tools they need to negotiate the challenges of the adult world, rather than to prepare them for academic specialization. Some departments use Core courses as initial prerequisites for more advanced study, but many do not. Very limited course substitution is possible to accommodate transfers and some exceptional curricular needs. The latter problem often comes up in the natural sciences where foundation courses touch upon some of the material in Core science offerings but are generally more complex than core requirements. By and large, however, the Core is an all-but- universal experience for our students.

The program arose when it became clear to several members of both the faculty and administration that Brooklyn College could no longer support its reorganization into schools which had taken place in the late 1960's. Some of the units, most notably the School of Humanities, had held on to fairly prescriptive distribution requirements that forced students to take courses outside of the school itself. Other "schools" leaned toward intra-divisional general education requirements. Nevertheless, influential segments of the entire Brooklyn College community believed that serious undergraduate institutions defined themselves through the quality of common intellectual experience they provided for all students. Robert Hess, then president of the college, had concluded that young people were ready once again for the academic guidance that their counterparts of the 1960's had noisily rejected. His Provost, Ethyle Wolfe, was a long-time activist in the cause of broad-based liberal arts education.

Some instructors at Brooklyn College believed that a uniform Core would put less well-prepared students at a serious disadvantage. This was a weighty consideration, since the advent of Open Admissions in the City University had brought large numbers of students with poor academic backgrounds to all campuses. Several faculty members also vigorously opposed any prescribed curriculum which stressed the culture of European-American civilization to the exclusion of others. Some are convinced to this day that the Brooklyn Core has never taken account of these issues. Nevertheless, this opinion did not prevail. After much rewriting to accommodate some of this criticism and considerable campus debate about the issue, the Core was adopted by Faculty Council in 1980. It has been in continuous operation ever since.

The Brooklyn College Core quickly drew national attention, less for its content, which is not overly imaginative, than for the intellectual and moral fortitude required to put it in place. Commentators noted that it took real courage to tell students that the days of the self-designed BA were over, at least at Brooklyn College. But to the surprise of many, the dreaded student uprising against the reimposition of requirements did not take place. To be sure, there was initial grumbling, which still goes on. But on the whole, the student body accepted the Core as a normal part of college routine. Many openly approve of its goals. If nothing else, the experience bonds them in common suffering, an altogether useful social outcome for any academic institution eager to create long memories among wealthy alumni.

As is so often the case in ambitious undertakings, parts of the program proved unworkable. President Hess had grand visions of each course having a home-developed book which would eventually find its way to the commercial market. While a few of the Core departments did complete this project--Classics, Political Science /Sociology, History, and Computer and Information Science/Mathematics--most never did. The volumes which did find out-of-house publishers were never widely adopted in other colleges and universities. Moreover, as originally planned, the Core asked that students take the first five segments--Classics, Music and Art, Political Science/Sociology, History and Computer Science/Mathematics--before the second "tier"--Literature, Biology/Geology, Physics/Chemistry, Non-western Studies, and Philosophy. The stretched-out nature of BA education today, which makes it very hard for students to complete their degree in four years, plus often inadequate funds for staffing the program, encouraged undergraduates to sacrifice sequential niceties for course availability in completing the Core.

Notable intellectual gaps in the Core have never been filled. Such central disciplines as psychology and economics are not represented in the Core curriculum. Coverage of the pre-modern world is thin. Some administrative problems have never been overcome in the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental segments of the curriculum. One of the interdisciplinary units--Core 3, which the Political Science and Sociology departments offer--is fundamentally a course in political sociology and works well. It has been far more difficult to synchronize staff and course syllabi in two other interdisciplinary offerings--Core 5, given by the mathematics and computer science departments, and Core 9, a team-taught, broadly interdepartmental course in non-western societies. Inertia does set in. Once in place, academic programs are often hard to update; the Brooklyn College Core is no exception. The college has sponsored Core faculty development seminars at least once a year, which have often come up with some very useful suggestions for improvement and change. Most of these, however, have fallen by the wayside.

Some student problems with the Core have also defied solution. There are those among the religiously observant who resist parts of the program for cultural or philosophical reasons. Questioning the existence of God even as a hypothetical proposition bothers many among this group to the extent that they seek out other CUNY campuses with less rigid general education requirements. Transfer students, particularly those with fixed professional goals or very good secondary preparation in some fields but not others, often struggle against taking even parts of the Core. Indeed, the more high school work students have had in any field which the Core touches, the more they resent having to redo secondary-level work at Brooklyn College. This feeling is especially common among students who come with very good academic training in the sciences.

But overall, the Core has functioned as its proponents had hoped. Student discourse still falls short of what we like to think went on in Plato's Academy, but the Core has given undergraduates enough information to allow any instructor at Brooklyn College to mention Bismarck or Plato in a class without getting blank stares in return. Diversity itself has gone far to solve the problem of persuading a multi-cultural student body to accept a prescribed curriculum. The enormous variety of students at Brooklyn College makes it impossible to privilege any culture at the expense of another. Most in our classes seem to genuinely appreciate learning something of the western world in which they find themselves; when an instructor presents this material descriptively and with some comparative referent rather than normatively and as part of a provincial canon, most students seem to take to such work quite readily.

There has been only one serious study of the impact of the Core on the student body at Brooklyn College, and that done in the late 1980's. While that document did identify some serious student dissatisfaction with certain elements of the Core, it did not provide any basis for generalization about the relationship between the Core requirements and enrollment at Brooklyn College. The college has struggled through the 1990's to keep registration up, but this has been true at other units of the City University where general education requirements are less tightly structured.

The faculty has also benefited from the Core in important ways. The Core has made students aware of departments they would have ignored had they not been forced into the acquaintance. Having sampled one history or sociology course, they venture into electives they certainly would not have tried if the Core course had not piqued their curiosity. Sometimes that interest is permanent, leading to higher enrollment in advanced courses, which almost all disciplines in the arts and sciences can use. In the financially hard-pressed CUNY environment, some departments exist and continue to get new lines largely because of their Core service, classics in particular.

Should the Brooklyn College Core be imitated in other institutions, as has sometimes been suggested? Clearly, if an undergraduate college is seeking a quick way to an intellectual profile, a prescriptive Core helps immeasurably. If nothing else, the Core has been a remarkably effective public-relations device for the college. It has enabled Brooklyn to raise substantial sums of money from large foundations and federal agencies sympathetic to such programs. However, before moving along this path, any academic institution should keep in mind that the Brooklyn College experience is likely to be replicated only under the following conditions:

1. The presence of a strong administrative commitment to such a program. Cores are expensive undertakings; they often draw instructional staff from other classroom obligations to teach in it. Departments with heavy credit requirements for the major are especially burdened. Only the administration is positioned to provide replacement funding for affected departments. Only the administration has the resources to cultivate the publicity network needed to persuade students, faculty, and the general public that the program is worthwhile and worthy of support.

2. The presence of a critical mass of faculty to push such a program through to completion and adoption. Once the Core is in place, enough full-time faculty members must teach in it regularly and willingly to authenticate these requirements in the eyes of their colleagues and among students. While some adjunct staff is almost always necessary, it should not dominate the teaching corps of the Core program. The best arrangement is one where a full-time faculty member normally carries one Core course in his or her program. Two-class faculties, where only some teach in the Core and carry heavy student loads in doing so, create departmental morale problems.

3. The presence of a faculty which itself is knowledgeable enough to teach general education courses within a given discipline. This was not a problem in the past, but it is about to become one. Any institution planning to adopt a prescriptive Core program should keep in mind that doctoral training today is more specialized than ever, focused more on the production of the Ph.D. thesis than on acquiring breadth and depth in a chosen discipline. This development is not new, and may even be necessary, given the immense production of knowledge in the last half of the twentieth century. Many young scholars, however, come to their first job far better prepared to teach in the area of their dissertations than to develop general courses in their disciplines.

Not too long ago, solid training in a carefully constructed undergraduate major could offset the inevitable professional narrowing. Baccalaureate education, however, is also rapidly changing in ways that have already had a noxious effect on instruction in the liberal arts. Today's institutions of higher learning eagerly push undergraduates into interdisciplinary study. That these programs are often little more than responses to fads is bad enough. However, such colleges and universities also forget that a student will profit from such work only when he or she understands the strengths and the weaknesses of at least one disciplinary component of such a program. When the methods of one discipline are found wanting, the methods of others become interesting and even helpful. Without such training, a student in an interdisciplinary program picks up a smattering of information about a very specialized theme at best, and little beyond a set of attitudes about that theme at worst. That these same colleges and universities increasingly allow undergraduates to custom-tailor disciplinary majors further decreases the broad mastery of a given field. When students learn from those whose range of vision is largely confined to their own research, the vicious circle has been closed. Thus do the fields of the liberal arts die.

Thankfully, however, the United States is a very big place, producing enough Ph.D.'s for search committees to sort scholars who have fallen victim to these programs from those who have not. Undergraduate records are as important as doctoral ones in hiring decisions. For academics committed to sound general education at their institutions and to the survival of the liberal arts in general--careful scrutiny of the educational background in new faculty is very much recommended. Indeed, it is crucial.