I think that we all need to take into consideration a number of important realities in determining any changes to be made to either our present curriculum or our calendar.
1. One thing that has become increasingly obvious to our colleagues
in both other quality liberal arts programs and to professors in
top-level public institutions is that as SAT scores have gone up, the
amount of information and the quality of skills that students bring
with them to college is dropping across virtually all disciplines. Many
of us who have taught at Furman for fifteen years or more see this in
bold relief, as we commonly encounter bright young kids who score well
on the SAT, but know less about math, science, history, government,
society, the economic system, philosophy, religion, and many areas of
the fine arts than students coming to Furman in the 1970s, 1980s and
early 1990s. The notable exception is in command of computer related
subject areas.
Those of us who have taught in the Governor's School in Charleston over the years have found this to be especially true. SAT scores have moved dramatically upward among these students to the point that the average SAT for the group of 24 students I taught this past summer was over 1500. Yet, my 1989 class, which averaged just over 1200, was far better prepared and far more intellectually curious.
Many of our colleagues in other institutions find that two things seem that "jump out" at them about our contemporary students. The first is that they seem to be reading much less than even five years ago, and that interest in reading seems to decline further each year. Second, most professors see an increasing need to do remedial work at the college level, especially in science, math, and the languages, or to approach many courses as if the student has not had any work in the area at all!! Political scientists, psychologists and sociologists view high school course content as virtually useless—and the courses usually taught by people trained outside the academic area and in non-selective schools. Our department has instituted a Teachers of Government Program designed to teach certain fundamentals of social science to the approximately half of social science teachers in this state who are teaching outside their major concentration or, often, with no course work at all in the social sciences.
These deficiencies appear as our world is becoming far more complicated and technologically sophisticated. To understand our world and to be able to operate within it, students must be grounded in the knowledge and analytic approaches of a wide variety of disciplines. How can a student be “liberally educated” without knowing something about how society works (and has worked) in all its manifestations (history, government, economics, sociology), how human beings use symbolism to understand and change the natural and human environment (in mathematics, the sciences, philosophy, religion, literatures, and languages), and understand other cultures, especially in those such as Africa, Asia, and other parts of the developing world that American students know little if anything about?
What this leads me to believe is that GERs are very important and that we should actually expand and strengthen them. We should make sure that all our students (not just science majors) get real courses in math, chemistry, biology, physics, and the earth sciences. Students should have to take their social science requirements outside their major and not in the same subject area. They need to have courses in philosophy and religion, so very important in analyzing the narrow religious understandings in which so many students are steeped. We should also make sure that all graduates have enough courses in a foreign language to make them actually competent in speaking the language. And, that they have a firm grasp of the history of the society and the world within which they live. If we don't do all this, we are not broadly educating our students in the best of the liberal arts tradition.
2. Calendars will always be contentious items: no calendar will ever fit the perceived needs of everyone at any particular time in a university's life. No calendar will ever be perfect, though we should always pay attention to calendar issues and "tweak" when and if necessary.
To begin, I want the committee to understand that there is great value in the present calendar. I strongly believe that so much of what has made Furman a strong institution is rooted in the pedagogical advantages that the calendar makes possible. Yet, as a young faculty member I did not understand those advantages, nor feel strongly about its value to students, faculty, and the institution. When I first came to Furman, fresh out of graduate school and its culture of academic and professional focus (and a world of dissertation hours and relatively few if any teaching responsibilities), I was shocked by the demands of teaching—as compared to being able to spend virtually all my time on the dissertation. My friends, who took jobs in other schools with other calendars, felt the same trauma of having to teach full time and to do so as we worked on finishing the dissertation or turning it into a book. The pressures, real or imagined, of seeking tenure made us felt overworked and stressed. None of us in my cohort from graduate school, whether teaching in quarter systems, semester systems, trimester systems, or in Furman’s modified quarter system was happy with "the calendar!"
Eventually I recognized a number of things. First, it is always difficult for a young scholar to make the transition to full-time teaching. One has to spend huge amounts of time to "get up to speed" in each course and, for most of us, each course was a new course. Second, finding blocks of time to finish the dissertation or to do research seemed impossible under "the system," no matter what the system. While at Furman I taught four or five days a week in many courses and was seemingly unable to get the blocks of time necessary for scholarly work, my graduate school colleagues who were teaching in semester systems usually had three (or more often four) courses at a time, rather than two, and like me, always had at least one class every day of the week, and heavier teaching loads on three days each week. And, with the larger number of distinct courses, the "somewhat open" dates on Tuesday and Thursday were usually filled with preparation time.
I have also come to understand the real pedagogical value of our current calendar. First, I am absolutely convinced that our present calendar, by allowing our students to concentrate fewer courses at one time, is responsible for the fact that our students compete on even terms in graduate programs with students from the Ivy League and other fine institutions. It allows us to play "catch up" ball with our kids and to catapult them to the next level. As compared to "A" students from Amherst, Williams, Colby, and other schools with which our students compete, our students are "B" or "B+" when they come to Furman, yet in virtually all of our majors our students in graduate programs compare favorably with students from schools who attract entrants with SAT averages well over 1400. Changing to a calendar that adds more courses during to a term or moves us to a three hour course system would take away a "comparative advantage" we currently enjoy.
I am also convinced the present calendar, with its flexible three term system, makes possible most of our major "out of classroom" academic innovations often identified under the umbrella phrase, "engaged learning." Those experiences in turn also help explain why our students do well in the classrooms at Furman and in the graduate programs so many of our students enter. Our internships, study abroad programs, and collaborative research programs (with Furman professors) provide remarkable opportunities for academic growth, and for building confidence, maturity, and responsibility among students. These programs enhance the academic atmosphere at Furman, both in the classrooms and in the informal fora that mark the intellectual life of a university. We have students studying with Furman professors around the world, we have the largest Washington internship program of any liberal arts institution (and maybe any public institution), and a wide variety of other experiences under the direct control of Furman professors that makes us virtually unique among most institutions of higher learning in the United States. This achievement is has been greatly facilitated by our three-term system. The length of time of our terms and the number of terms makes it possible for our faculty to be with our students rather than our students being forced to participate in another school's program or in some not-very-rigorous consortium system. Given various cost factors, moving to a two-term system will inevitably diminish the number of Furman students studying abroad. A two-term system will also limit the number of faculty who can be involved in such programs. Similar problems will affect participation in internships in Washington and other locales outside of the immediate Furman area.
We need to pay special attention to these academic engaged learning programs (study abroad with Furman professors, off campus internships with Furman professors present, and collaborative research with Furman professors) as they are the very ones that, along with participation in Furman Singers and Mock Trial, are continuously identified as the definitive experiences that were of "most value" to students while at Furman and which worked to bond students to Furman while on campus and as alums. In addition, study abroad and off campus internship programs have created a more cosmopolitan, international, and motivated faculty in many departments, which has added massively to the intellectual atmosphere of the institution. In addition, the three-term system and the engaged learning opportunities it makes possible gives Furman a strong competitive advantage in attracting students and retaining students.
Finally, as one who had substantial experience in "winter term" study abroad programs I state unequivocally that a quality winter-term program overseas must be at least six weeks long. The one-month interim programs that some schools have for study abroad are pedagogically unsound for schools with standards such as Furman’s. Those programs allow schools to claim that they have a large number of students engaged in study abroad, when in reality what most "J" terms create are three-week long "tourist" programs. We must continue to offer our students real, academically sound study abroad programs, so that when they return to campus they will continue to add to the intellectual life of the institution.