Curriculum Review: Proposals

A new calendar plan (#10)

This system provides the greatest flexibility for professors to match their meeting periods with the structure of the course, creating the best learning environment for the students. Some courses do better maintaining a daily continuity. Others require more processing time.

A. Overview:

1. Split-Semester System:
Two 16 week terms.
Each term is divided into two 8 week midterm sessions.

2. Daily Periods:
Days are divided into the following periods:
8:00 - 9:00
9:00 - 10:00
10:00 - 11:00
11:00 - 12:00
11:00 - 12:30
12:30 - 2:00
2:00 - 3:30
3:30 - 5:00

3. Course Meeting Schedules:

4 HR. COURSES CAN MEET:
3 days/week, for an hour, using one 8-12 hourly slot.
2 days/week for 1.5 hrs, using one of the later slots
or
4 days/wk for 1.5 hrs, using one of the later slots.
*** These classes will last for only 8 weeks.***

2 HR. COURSES CAN MEET:
1 day/week for 1.5 hrs, using one of the later slots
or
2 days/wk for 1.5 hrs, using one of the later slots.
*** These classes will last for only 8 weeks.***

THUS, A 4 CREDIT COURSE MEETS FOR 48 LECTUE HRS. THIS IS FAR MORE CONSISTENT WITH MOST OTHER SCHOOLS THAN OUR CURRENT REQUIREMENT OF 56 CONTACT HRS. MOST COURSES WILL BE 4 HR, SEMESTER LONG COURSES.

4, Student Loads:
Students would typically take 16-18 hrs. of course credit per semester. They would be able to overload for 20 hrs. in a semester ONLY if in good academic standing. All grades would be finalized at the end of each semester, even for 8 week courses.

5. Teaching Loads:
Professors would typically teach 20 hrs. over the course of a year, as currently arranged by department.

B. Justifications:

1. Why the split-semester system?

This system provides the greatest flexibility for professors to match their meeting periods with the structure of the course, creating the best learning environment for the students. Some courses do better maintaining a daily continuity. Others require more processing time.
In addition, this system allows for international travel opportunities of either a full semester or ½ semester. If students go on international travel for two courses for ½ a semester (equivalent to many of our existing Winter Term programs), they will pick up their other two courses when they return. Likewise, professors who teach an international travel program will be able to teach when they return an will not need to overload their other semester to fill their load.

Finally, the split-semester allows for the development of new novel experiences at any time in the academic year, not just in a Jan-term or May-mester. Coupled with the 2 hr. option, these experimental courses should be both attractive to take and attractive to offer. We need to break to yoke of the 4 credit course - some information/topics parse in smaller increments.

2. Why the rigid daily schedule? (Or, why can't I offer my 1.5 hour class in the morning?)

At a school our size, it is important to impose some restrictions on course time offerings to minimize scheduling conflicts. There are a number of ways to do this. Many schools have hour-long classes M,W,F, and 1.5 hour classes T, TH. However, this would not allow for the "half-term class" as easily, because you cannot increase the number of contact hours per week without increasing the probability of scheduling conflicts. In other words, to create a half-term class that meets four days for 1.5 hours, it would not only meet on T, TH but also on M,W, or F. This would likely conflict with hourly classes meeting those days. So, with the split-term schedule, conflict is minimize and course flexibility is increased by locking in daily periods. The only overlap is in the 11-12 hour.

Also, this allows professors to meet their hourly classes on any days they like during that hour (M,W,F or M,T,W). This might be very attractive for many courses where a large reading/writing block of free time is allocated, and then sequential analysis classes that dissect student work in three consecutive days - maintaining continuity.

So, this system maximizes the flexibility in the length of the class (7.5 weeks or 15 weeks), the length of each class period (1 or 1.5 hrs), and the days on which the class meets (maximizing continuity or processing time). However, to minimize course conflicts and to maximize the number of classes available to students, the time the course is offered becomes somewhat restricted.

C. How Might This Work?

1. Student Load:
Students would typically take four 4 hr. courses in a semester. These might be all semester long courses, or they might take three semester long courses and a half-term course, or two semester-long courses and two half-term courses. Students will be prohibited from taking more than 2 half-term, 4 hr. courses simultaneously.

2. Faculty Load:
The typical 20 credit hour load could be divided a number of ways. Typically, this might be two 4 hr. courses in one term and three in the other. Remember, however, that these courses will meet only 2 or three times each week. Or, professors might teach 2 4 hr. courses and a seminar course each semester. In addition, some of these courses might be half-term classes. However, even in a half-term course, class will not be expected to meet every day (as in the current winter term). That is why a 16 week semester is required - we do not want to simply quadruple the winter term experience!!

3. It seems too complicated….
Well, it is. But it is also flexible. The goal is to give faculty the ability to teach courses in the way that maximizes learning efficiency for that course. It is unlikely that a single calendar model can do that. In addition, the goal is to impose some structure on when courses are offered to give students the greatest opportunity to take the courses they need and desire without scheduling conflicts.

The complexity can be relieved in the following way:

- Pre-registration and registration is conducted on a SEMESTER basis. Students would register for their "half-term" courses at that time, as well, so all students have their entire semester mapped out.
- Courses would each carry a designation for when they are offered: "1", "2" for semester-long courses, and "1a" or "1b" for half-term courses.
- Courses would also carry designations for the skills and content areas that they each cover.

Fundamental educational principles (#9)

These comments are provisional – that is, I will stand by them ‘provided’ that no better ideas come along to change my views. I appreciate the statements already submitted, which are in my mind as I think about these matters. I also will need to flesh out the implications of these principles in a concrete curricular structure.

I suggest the goal of education is to help students find truth – truth in themselves, truth of other people, and truth in the cosmos – that is, of the totality of their world. This is an unfashionable way to talk, such that many of the baser sort in academia would have already, after that last sentence, have formed a prejudice that will distort their thinking independent of anything I might say in support of this claim. I hope my current readers are not among their number!
I affirm this goal because of my antipathy to individualistic, self-centered educational visions which see learning primarily in terms of sharpening individual minds, or helping students give birth to their own best selves, as if those students are not already embedded in a cosmos to which they are tied by bonds of dependence, mutuality, and obligation. Against the individualistic mantra of “be all you can be,” I would pose a counter thought, that ‘knowledge is acknowledgement,’ or as German pietism put it, “bedenken ist bedanken.” This approach to education affirms that a world exists prior to the student, and that the student’s task is to find a place, a home in the world. To begin in this way suggests that human beings not atomic selves, isolated in minds so complete that teaching is simply “unpacking” a powerful, fully-equipped computer. Instead of simply subordinating themselves to students, professors should subordinate themselves also to truth – that is, to the way things are constituted in the world, so that their teaching becomes a connecting of student openness, curiosity, and passion to the reality in which that student is already immersed, and to which their adult life will be related in thousands of ways. [One of our colleagues] spoke of head and heart, and gave primacy to the head; I give primacy to the heart, that is, to the bonds of sympathy (“feeling together”) between people.
Thus I place corporate, communal life above individual. Mine is an ecological approach to education, avowing with John Muir that “everything in the cosmos is hitched to everything else.” For liberal learning, this means that our professional obligation as teachers is to help students see those connections – between economics and poverty, between chemistry and their own bodies, between advertising and upper middle class values, between mathematics and painting.
This is also to claim that our students will have obligations to the world, and though only careful thought will disclose what those obligations are, academic institutions have the responsibility to reveal the painful truth to students that they cannot be educated and also be islands to themselves, free to be paid handsomely for maintaining the American economic machine, and free to spend that wealth mainly on themselves. This is so because of the way the world is put together, which reflects the ethical bonds that all human societies recognize. [A colleague] has helpfully pointed to Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” as a guide to our thinking, and while I am much more critical of Emerson than he, the Sage of Concord does write that “a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his being.” If this is true, how much does Furman need change, so that we do not attract students who expect us to prepare them for a comfortable life! “Self-reliance” is responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions, not a permit for admission to an upper-class life free of limits or duty. We do not teach ethics because it sharpens the mind, or because it exposes the weaknesses of other people’s (“conventional”) morality, but because students need to act responsibly, and we need to help them learn how to do that.
Believing as I do in the connectedness of students to people and to world, I think a sound education must include study of the past, of the variety of human cultures and values, of the physical world and humanity’s connection to it. The degree to which the institution should direct that study along particular lines is debatable – I fall somewhere between the completely open Amherst approach, and the degree of constraint that our present GERs impose. But that a good education should include these various dimensions seems clear to me.

Thus far, I have preferred to say we are to help students find truth, or the way things really are, beyond all cant, be it social, sacred, or academic. I affirm we can use these words meaningfully, but I have not predetermined where this truth lies. I have also consciously used a word other than “think,” or “reason,” since I want to push the learning experience beyond the boundaries of philosophic dialogue, to include the myriad of ways human beings come to understand things. In carrying out experiments, in painting, in the give and take of classroom argument, in watching film, in listening to lectures or debates, in giving speeches, in writing notes and assignments, in doing research in the library, in running laps or singing an aria, in reading, students put together a world of meaning that is hopefully more satisfying than the one with which they arrived. I think a good college should teach this rich sense of rationality, and if it does, then I would agree that “critical rationality” is one way to describe the truth-finding faculty we mean to develop.
Another of my bed-rock convictions is that human beings are normally extravagantly self-centered, that their self-absorption is so powerful and ubiquitous that it infects everything they do. For this reason, helping them to see what is outside them, what is often indifferent to them, can be difficult. This is why reason must be “self-critical,” and this is the truth in Emerson’s attack on convention. But a virtual lifetime in academia has convinced me that academicians are no more immune to illusion, to convention, to rote thinking, than non-academics – it simply takes a different form, and is expressed in a richer language and a more elaborate grammar. One of the conventions of the Ivory Tower is that non-academic society is limited by its conventions, by the beliefs, loyalties, customs, habits of mind and thought passed down through the generations, but my ideal educational environment would be open to the frequent conventionality of its own thought. This is widely agreed, but rarely practiced.
Because the reality we are trying to connect students with is not structured departmentally, a good education would privilege interdisciplinary learning, seeing departments as necessary, but of limited importance. Let me suggest provocatively that majors should have to prove that they could best be taught by one department – lacking such proof, majors would be interdisciplinary (Religion, for example, being taught by professors of literature, anthropology, philosophy, and politics, as well as religion). Specialization is a necessary technique of training, but at an undergraduate liberal arts college, it should not occupy pride of place as the highest level of learning. Interdisciplinary teaching would also enhance, in a natural, unforced way, the unity of purpose that a university should espouse.
Finally, the current world to which we are connected is a much larger one than the world of our institutional ancestors, and I think we must help students to see that their particular place is part of a larger world. We must help students come to understand this larger world, its languages, patterns of living, its habits of organization and practice, its tradition of thought. Such a global perspective is not an add-on to, not a replacement for traditional education, but a re-conceptualization of “western” and “non-western” to better express the new reality that we are beginning to apprehend (as Robin suggested). Students may begin as “patriots,” as lovers of the familiar, but they should also come to be “cosmopolitans,” that is, lovers of the unfamiliar, recognizing that though a world is given to us, what we make of it need not be a given.

Principles of education (#8)

1. Learning by reading dense and discomfiting texts: with critical awareness of medium, purpose, and voice, context and subtext, ambiguity and ambivalence.
2. Learning by talking: discussion, question, and argument should be central to the liberal arts classroom and college ethos.
3. Learning by doing: research, writing, visual and performing arts, science, etc. Engaged learning defined as theory-into-practice.
4. Learning by traveling: beyond the self, the familiar, the national, i.e. study abroad or away, fluency in a second language, study of other peoples’ histories, beliefs, and practices.
5. Learning by connecting: one discipline with another, the classroom with residence and social life, academic knowledge with future life choices.

Curriculum:
Our students should develop a level of pre-professional expertise in one subject (an interdisciplinary concentration or a traditional departmental major) and a general knowledge (beyond high-school AP level) of four disciplines from the following divisions: humanities, social sciences, arts, math and natural sciences.
I would be in favor of the following requirements: physical education, writing, foreign language, study abroad or away, and an internship. I would like us to offer a first-year seminar (with the focus on grounding the student at Furman), a sophomore-junior seminar (focused on experiential learning such as study abroad and internships), and a capstone seminar for seniors (focused on graduate-level work in the major or concentration, e.g. a thesis).
I am not in favor of such specific requirements as an African-Asian course or a Religion course. I would reduce the number of courses designed solely as GERs, such as HES 10 or English 12, suggesting that students choose from among upper-level courses to meet divisional requirements. This would encourage them to build on their AP-level knowledge in, say, US History by taking a more specialized course in that area, for example American Women’s History.
I would propose that we offer core courses as an alternative way to meet the divisional requirements, but I would like us to avoid the “West versus the rest” construction of most of these core sequences. This would be an opportunity for Furman to develop new interdisciplinary core courses that transcend the outmoded, simplistic, and ideologically suspect West/Non-West split and the limiting disciplinary splits between the arts and sciences. These courses are less likely to become ideological battlegrounds or to ossify if we leave them open to design by a changing contingent of interested faculty and do not require all students to take them.

Calendar:
I like the suggestions put forward . . . for a split-semester schedule. I am convinced by their arguments that this would be the most flexible calendar for Furman’s diverse courses and teaching philosophies. It would help us to extend study-abroad and internship options to a wider group of students. It would allow professors more choices in balancing teaching and research, and in integrating teaching and research by offering more specialized two-credit courses. The half-term option also would encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation.

Campus Life:
Faculty should work more closely with student services, the chaplain’s office, the residence advisors, athletics, and admissions staff in order to ensure that our vision of liberal education sets the agenda for campus life. The Nominating Committee should assign faculty liaisons to all of these groups. These liaisons would be responsible for reporting to the faculty and conveying our academic priorities to the other constituencies.

Proposal for curriculum revisions (#7)

The main intent of this proposal is to offer some possible courses that will strengthen our students’ critical thinking skills gained through the study of the various modes of inquiry that are characteristic of the natural sciences, social sciences as well as, and humanities. Most of the courses, or course series, allow students to gain a greater understanding of the interrelations between disciplines, show how many disciplines share similar methods of critical analysis or compare these methods, and present a more complex view of the interrelations between various parts of our natural, social, and cultural world. These revisions also attempt to introduce students to a wide range of content related to the natural, social, and cultural character of the western and non-western world.

This proposal does not posit how many total GERs there should be nor how many should be delegated to each division (of disciplines). Instead, this proposal leaves this decision, as well as any decision on foreign language requirements, etc. up to the CRC. The proposal does hold that these areas of study should be included in the GERs: Critical Thinking and Writing, Humanities, Non-Western Thought and Culture, Natural Science, Social Science, Health, Fine Arts. Also included in this proposal is a Foreign Language GER and a GER in Mathematical-Analytical skills. This last requirement however would include courses in formal logic or statistical methods. This change acknowledges that similar analytical skills gained via the study of mathematics can be obtained through the study of the formal structure of arguments and/or the systematic use of mathematical and logical reasoning employed in statistical methodologies.
One possible advantage of the courses offered below is that it allows for more “double dipping” of GERs so that one course may receive more than one GER. It also posits that any course could have a specific focus on critical thinking and writing and thus could fulfill that GER, so long as such a designation is approved by the Curriculum Committee. Some may argue that such “double dipping” may not reduce the overall amount of GERs and might be confusing and difficult to operationalize. Perhaps this is true, such interdisciplinary study demands proper accreditation.
The courses listed below could be one or two terms (semesters) long, depending on the amount of material covered. One faculty member may teach some of these courses although most may need two (or more?) instructors from various disciplines. Courses sizes would be based on 1 faculty/ 15-20 students ratio.
There can be a great deal of experimentation with these courses, some of which has already been done here at Furman and elsewhere. Such experimentation, however, must receive a great deal of support from the university and individual departments. Summer funding could be earmarked to allow faculty to develop these courses, including refresher courses on grammar and composition for any faculty seeking to gain the Critical Thinking and Writing GER for their course. In addition, a faculty member’s work in preparing these courses should be given special recognition by their departments and the Status Committee.

Possible Courses or Course Series and the possible GERs they might fulfill
The Trivium: Studies in Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric: This course would return to the study of the fundamentals disciplines of the liberal arts. The course may focus on a variety of texts or issues such as diversity, cosmopolitanism, or the freshman reading book.
(1-2 Courses: Possible GERs: Critical Think/Write, Humanities, Math/Analy)

The Western Tradition: Survey of the major developments in the cultural history of the west. May include discussions of literature, history, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, and the fine arts.
(2 courses: Possible GERs: Humanities, Fine Arts).

Cultural Studies: 2 courses that focus on the methods of inquiry employed in many humanities disciplines: 1. semiotics, narrative theory, ideology theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction;
2. cultural studies, new historicism, feminism and queer theory, orientalism and neo-colonial studies. Course could cover a range of literature, film, and other (popular) texts.
(2 courses: Possible GERs: Humanities, Non-Western)

The Cultures of the World: A course that moves beyond the Western World to discuss world histories and cultures. This course could compare the west and non-west or focus solely on the non-western world. (2 courses: Possible GERs: Hum, Social Science or Fine Arts, Non-Western)

The Natural and Social World: Innovative course that take up themes addressed in works like Guns, Germs, and Steel that look at the natural world’s effect on the social world.
(1-2 courses: Possible GERs: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and/or Humanities)

Modes of Communication, Modes of Understanding: This course would concentrate on how the various mediums of communication (oral, written, print, digital, etc.) shape our understanding of the world, the subject, the text, etc. (1 course: Possible GERs: Humanities, Critical Think/Write)

The Science of Art and the Art of Science: This course would explore how developments in science and/or mathematics have affected painting, architecture, music, etc., and conversely how artistic and cultural developments have spurred innovations in the sciences.
(1 course: Possible GERs: Natural Sciences, Fine Arts)

From the Atom to the Universe: A course that presents the study of the natural sciences from the smallest to the largest constructs of the natural world. (2 courses: Possible GERs- Natural Sciences)

The Environment: This course could focus on how the natural sciences understand the environment, compare literary and scientific representations of the environment, or with the addition of a public policy component, introduce issues related to the social sciences.
(1-2 courses: Possible GERs: Natural Sciences, Humanities or Social Sciences).

Individual and World Health: A course that focuses on the body, health, the environment and national and international issues and policies related to health.
(1-2 courses: Possible GERs; Health, Natural or Social Sciences, Non-Western)

The Challenge of Genetics and Cognitive Studies: A variation of the “nature-nurture” debate, this course could address new developments in the study of genetics and cognition and their challenge to how the humanities and the social sciences traditionally view such issues as sex and sexuality, thinking and language use, and behavior and socialization.
(1-2 courses: Possible GERs: Natural Sciences, Humanities and/or Social Sciences)

Intercultural Discourses and Practices: This course offers a comparative study of the communicative and social practices of various western and non-western societies. Possible areas of focus are variations in oral and written communication texts, gender communication, private (familial) and public (political, social, religious) discourses, rituals, and celebrations.
(1-2 courses: Possible GERs: Humanities, Social Sciences)

From the Individual to Society: This course takes students through how various disciplines understand relationships between the individual, groups, and society. Theories and concepts such as the individual, subjectivity, race, class, gender, etc., from both the social sciences and humanities can be addressed. (One course: Possible GERs: Social Sciences, Humanities)

Globalization: A course that focuses on global economic, political, social, and cultural issues such as economic trade and development, immigration and population, human rights and women’s issues, global terrorism and cultural imperialism, etc. (One course: GERs: Social Sciences, Non-Western study)

A somewhat revised curriculum (#6)

The following draft toward a somewhat revised curriculum assumes that Furman would change to a semester calendar and that students would take 4 courses per term. Each semester would consist of thirteen weeks of classes, a reading period, and a final exam period. Earning a degree would mean meeting all of the general education requirements, fulfilling the major requirements, and taking a total of 32 courses (4 of which might be met through AP credit). (This curriculum assumes there would not longer be a Cultural Life Program). Typically classes would meet three times a week (MWF) for fifty-minute periods or twice a week (TH) for 75-minute periods. Half-term courses could be offered. The teaching load would be 5 courses a year, with no one teaching more than 3 courses a semester.

This revised curriculum assumes that, on the whole, the general education requirements are a good idea but could be cut back some. It assumes that Furman professors have been hired with the general education requirements in mind and have become accustomed to—though perhaps frustrated with—teaching courses that fit these requirements. The cutting back, though there is not much, is meant to give the students more time—in some cases perhaps even allowing a student a year away from Furman but perhaps under Furman auspices pursuing something like the “Chew” experience. The expansion of the Asian/African requirement is an attempt to enlarge the students’ and Furman’s thoughtfulness about the world. What follows imagines interdisciplinary first-year courses and an expanded—in course time and in scope—Humanities sequence. Although not everyone would need to become involved in such interdisciplinary courses, such courses could help to make Furman a more intellectually stimulating place for students. This draft also assumes a change in calendar—in hopes of getting away from the numbing pace of winter term, in hopes of providing a break from the daily meetings of our current calendar, and in hopes that being flexible about when semesters begin and end might help overcome some of the problems a change to semesters might seem to create.

(This curriculum tinkers with the general education requirements, the first-year experience, and the calendar. Can we do more to help the students to focus on being intellectually vigorous and more thoughtful about the world? For instance, should Furman follow Williams’ lead on fraternities and sororities? And what can we learn about making Furman more attractive to international students?)

The General Education Requirements (10-14 courses out of 32):

To be taken during the first year:
1 writing-focused course (Either a writing class like those presently provided in English 11 or another first-year course that is writing focused. Writing focused would mean that the course required at least twenty pages of writing and that essays would be required on a regular basis [a least once every three weeks but preferably more often].)
1 HES course (presumably like the current HES 10)
To be taken at the discretion of the student:
3 humanities courses not in one’s major (History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion)
2 science and/or math courses in the sciences and math not in one’s major (Biology, Chemistry,
Geology, Math, Physics)
2 social science courses not in one’s major (Anthropology, Economics, Political Science,
Psychology, Sociology)
1 or 2 courses in a foreign language not one’s major. At least one course for those who place
above what is the current 12 level (a literature course can also count as a humanities
course); at least two courses for those who place at the current 11 level or start a language
from the beginning.
1 course in fine arts
3 courses focusing on subject matter relating to Asia, Africa, and/or Latin America (Australia?)
(any of these courses could count also toward GER or major requirements)

(A note about AP credit:
AP credit could not count toward completion of any of the general education requirements, except
that in the case of foreign languages an AP score might help determine if a student needed to take
only one course to meet the requirement. As many as 4 AP course credits could count toward
graduation, in most cases as general education credit; departments could decide if AP credit would
count toward major requirements.)

A major at Furman would preferably consist of 10 courses—with students allowed to take nor more than
12 courses within the major (unless additional hours involve foreign study).
There would be no minor.
The typical student could take around 8 elective courses. Decisions about foreign study and concentrations
would of course affect the student’s freedom to take courses.

The first-year experience in terms of course work:
The general education requirements would ask the students complete a writing-focused course and an HES course by the end of the first year.
The faculty would make available a number of First-Year Experience courses (here logistics as well as faculty willingness could affect what Furman can do). These would be team-taught, interdisciplinary courses (for example, The Science and Politics of Ecology in South Carolina, Jesse James: The History and the Stories, Creations Stories and Economics, Memory and Autobiography, Scruples: The Ethics of Management, Being Good as Opposed to Doing Good, The Executive Branch and the Political Novel, Arriving Late?: Nationalism in the Global Era). The teachers could decide whether the course was writing focused or not. The teachers would so structure the course that it would require work equivalent—in terms of reading, studying, thinking, writing—to that of two semester courses. A student would receive two course credits for taking such a course. In many cases—as determined by a First-Year Experience Curriculum committee and agreed to by the teachers’ departments—such a course could help a student meet two of the general education requirements. The capacity of each class would be 18. (Teachers would receive credit for teaching two courses; no one could teach such a course as an overload. Summer grants would be given to those developing such courses.)
The faculty would also make available a course called Humanity (in the senses of people, civilizations, and kindness), a two-year, chronological sequence that would earn credit for two courses a term (a total of 8 semester courses). A reworking of the current Humanities sequence, the course would expand the current western focus of the course to balance the kind of material now covered with material from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The course would not be writing focused, though essays would be required. Offered to a class of one hundred students, it would meet three days a week (MWF) for whole-group lecture discussions and twice a week (TH) for discussion groups, each led by one of the teachers. Each semester of the course would have five primary teachers—with at least two having been chiefly trained in focusing on non-American (U. S. A.) and non-European material. Guest teachers would lecture as needed. Planning during the summer and meeting regularly as they teach, the teachers of the sequence would develop and present courses that encourage appreciative critical understanding of the accomplishments and frustrations of some of the world’s civilizations—in terms of literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and science and technology. By taking the entire sequence, the student would meet all three of the humanities requirements, two of the non-Western requirement, and one of the science/math requirements. If the student majors in a humanities discipline, the course could also meet one of the course requirements for that major. The two or three remaining course units would count as electives. (For each semester taught in this course, the teachers would be credited with two courses. Guest lecturers would receive suitable honorariums. Support would be provided for work needed during the summer. No one overloading could teach one of these courses.)

Some possible first semester course loads for first-year students:
Student A: A writing-focused course: English 11?
A course that helps fulfill the humanities requirement: Religion 11?
A course that helps fulfill the science/math requirement: Biology 16?
An HES course
Student B: Humanity 1 (one course receiving two-course credit)
First-Year Experience course (The Executive Branch and the Political Novel): writing
intensive and a course helping to meet the social science requirement (one course receiving two-course credit)
Student C: First-Year Experience course (The Science and Politics of Ecology)—not writing
intensive but helping to fulfill both the science/math and social science
requirements
A writing-intensive course: English 11?
A humanities course: History 11?

Calendar idea (#5)

The goal:

Provide a comprehensive, flexible, administratively feasible calendar structure for Furman that will further our curricular aims. The proposal strives to retain the strengths of the current 3-2-3 model, including all of its “off-the-books” adaptations we’ve generated in the past 35 years, while it harmonizes us with peer institutions and the larger higher education community.

The calendar:

The traditional academic year would consist of two 14 week semesters each further divided into 7 week terms. A full week final exam period would be conducted at the conclusion of both 14 week semesters. A two day mid-term exam period (independent of class days) would occur at the conclusion of the first seven weeks of each semester. The fall semester would typically begin on the last Monday in August and conclude with grades due the Tuesday before Christmas Day, the winter/spring semester would typically begin the first Thursday after January 2 and conclude with commencement on the first Saturday in May.

"Summer" would consist of two 4 week short terms (designed specifically for intensive seminars and limited budget travel experiences) and a 7 week term that would mimic those found in the traditional academic year. The first short term would typically begin the first Monday in May and conclude the Friday after Memorial Day. The 7 week summer term would begin the first Monday in June and conclude with a two day exam period in mid-July, while the second short term would begin on the fourth Tuesday in July and conclude mid-August. The three "summer" terms could also be combined into a traditional semester situation or an 11 week experience (short term one and summer OR summer and short term two). Summer commencement would be held the third Saturday in August each year.

Courses would meet for 56 or more contact hours, regardless of meeting pattern for the term:

During the 14 week semesters, courses would meet four times a week for 50 minutes (MTRF), two times a week for 1 hour, 50 minutes (MR or TF), or once a week for 3.5 hours (M or T or R or F). Wednesdays of each week during the academic year would not typically be a class day. Most Wednesdays could be dedicated to non-course intellectual invigoration through whatever means we see fit. Wednesdays could also be used to compensate for a Monday or Friday holiday observance, allow for a graceful recovery from inclement weather, or permit us to deal with other unforeseen events that would cancel scheduled courses.

In 7 week terms, either contained in a semester or the summer, courses would meet four times a week for 1 hour, 50 minutes (MTRF, MTWR in the summer), or twice a week for 3.5 hours (MR or TF, MW or TR in the summer). The "off-day" in the summer term would be shifted to Friday to allow students and instructors to enjoy long weekends.

Finally, short term courses would need to be seminar-based; they would meet every weekday (19 class days) for 3.5 hours to meet contact hour standards.

Student course load:

Assuming we will retain 32 "full" courses as the minimum standard for the award of the bachelor's degree. Students typically would be expected to complete four courses each semester. Three or more courses would be considered full-time. Students would be permitted to overload to a fifth course on a space available basis consistent with current policy provisions.

Students could combine term and semester courses in many ways to suit their needs. All student registration and billing would only need to occur twice each year as long as the student stayed between 3 and 5 courses for the semester as a whole.

We would strongly encourage participation in at least the first short term of each summer as the desirable alternative to overloading during the traditional academic year. Students would pay separately for this term potentially increasing our revenues.

Faculty teaching load:

Assuming we will retain 5 "full" courses as the standard teaching load. Faculty members would be expected to teach three courses in one semester and two in the other. Half-year sabbaticals would retain a two course release and be significantly easier to plan. Three course loads in the fall would be advantageous if we were to implement a freshman experience course which would require a heavy fall for participating faculty.

Instructors could combine term and semester courses in many ways to suit their needs.

We should permit instructors to meet their load obligations in the first short term of each summer to further increase their flexibility.

Further advantages:

Retain basic construction of all current courses.... fall and spring courses could easily be re-fitted for 14 week semester, while winter courses would match 7 week term well.

Allow for more travel study opportunities... trips could now be of 14-week (depart August, January or May), 7-week (depart August, October, January, March, or June) or 4-week (depart May or July) varieties.

Increased flexibility and sequencing possibilities.

Potential pitfalls:

Misunderstanding about days of the week. Shifting course meeting days to accommodate for holiday observances could confuse students and faculty.

Centralized planning efforts must increase. Increased flexibility and sequencing possibilities will create frustration and hostility if offerings across departments create conflicts for completing major programs or concentrations.

GER principles (#4)

The most important American essay about liberal education does not contain the words ‘liberal education’ at all. The essay is Emerson’s “Self-reliance,” published in 1841. Its thesis is deep but simple: what makes a human life most worth living is the capacity to think and to act for and from oneself; the most insidious enemy of human excellence is a complacent, perhaps unconscious, conformity, the parroting of opinions and actions one has, knowingly or not, taken over thoughtlessly from others. For Emerson, and for me, what we most admire and cherish in our fellow humans—you, at your best—is the cultivation of a genuinely individual way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting. We want, for ourselves and for others, a mode of life that is not routine, boring, and common; we aspire to freshness of perception and depth of response. We admire those who can see things in novel ways, who recognize possibilities for good (and for evil) most of us are blind to; we cherish those whose life bears a stamp of originality, who speak with their own voices and do not pass along the comfortable words of convention and cliché. Emerson calls this capacity for original action and thought self-reliance.

Neither he nor I thinks self-reliance is the only good, of course: loyalty, kindness, curiosity, courage, patience, good humor, and lots of other virtues are important elements in a life well-lived. But without self-reliance—the spice of an authentic originality—those other virtues are timid, one-dimensional, and sometimes even dangerous.

Rather than talk about the “principles” of liberal education, I would rather talk about its goal. If that goal is the cultivation of self-reliance, as I believe it to be, the question before us is: what habits of mind and heart tend toward such originality?

I would mention two, the first a habit of mind, the second a habit of the heart. Both are, in their statement, crashingly obvious, I’m afraid. Everything depends on the way they are instantiated: the authenticity, if it comes, resides in the particular fashioning of a life defined by these habits. As Goethe had it, theory is gray, always gray; but the golden tree of life is green. (A useful reminder for our committee, I think.)

Self-reliance requires the capacity for genuine and sustained self-interrogation. Originality of thought or action demands that we be able to distinguish the real from the fake, the authentic from the conventional, the truthful from the sentimental. If liberal education aims at self-reliance, then the first step is the cultivation of those powers of mind that both encourage and empower one in one’s attempt to speak and act for and from oneself. Appropriately enough, Nussbaum calls these powers of mind “Socratic rationality.” Liberal education should cultivate Socratic rationality.

A second habit necessary for self-reliance, this one a habit of the heart, is the ability deeply to appreciate the world from a point of view not one’s own. Although of course we know, intellectually, that our own experience of things is peculiar and limited, in fact this is amazingly easy to forget. We blunder through the world assuming we know what we are doing, because we assume we know how our words and actions are perceived by others. (Think of Iraq.) A liberal education should foster those powers of heart that make it possible for one to recognize real differences among persons and their fates and to appreciate those differences for what they are. A good eighteenth-century word for such powers of recognition and appreciation is ‘sympathy’. A liberal education should cultivate the capacity for an active sympathy.

So, there are, for an Emersonian like me, two touchstones of liberal education: Socratic rationality and active sympathy. Other things are good to have; these two are essential. Is there a single curriculum or course of study best suited to their cultivation? I don’t think so. There is no royal road to self-reliance: authenticity is possible for chemists, philosophers, and musicians. Sir Francis Crick may never have read a novel or played the clarinet, Emerson himself may never have solved a quadratic equation or fired up a Bunsen burner; but both were models of liberal education. We don’t know how to program for authenticity. We know what is necessary; we don’t know what is sufficient.

Thus in designing a curriculum one should encourage as much flexibility as possible. Course topics are less important that the kind of pedagogy the courses should encourage. Intensity of engagement is more important than breadth of coverage. Information matters less than fostered passion. Since the world is more complex than academic organization, interdisciplinary work is a good thing. Individuation, not socialization, is the point.

For me, curriculum design is less about student education, which is anyway mysterious and unpredictable, than about creating the economic and social conditions for keeping around a diverse group of passionate teachers and scholars who will offer students the chance to recognize and to nurture their own gifts and obsessions. (If you’re curious about what I think that would mean for Furman’s curriculum, there’s another document on the way.)

A Proposal for Curricular Revision at Furman, with Special Attention to GERs (#3)

I. Theory

The heart of curricular reform at Furman must be reform of general education. Let us begin there; later we will consider other parts of the curriculum that need modification.

Any array of (so-called) “general education” courses, including Furman’s, is the expression both of institutional politics and of an underlying educational conception. As we consider significant change in our general education requirements (GER), the educational conception should come to the fore: neither the politics of the past nor the departmental interests of the present should determine the future of general education at Furman. The GER is a community interest (indeed, a community good) and should be shaped by an educational philosophy reflecting the mission of the college as a whole.1

What is the educational conception underlying Furman’s present GER? It can be summarized in a single, traditional (and actually quite honorable) question: “What is the knowledge most worth having?” Our current GER tries to provide every Furman student with the knowledge we consider necessary to the educated citizen of the new century. Such knowledge may be composed primarily of facts and theories (the kind of knowledge provided by courses in the social sciences, in history, and in religious studies, for example), or it may consist primarily in the acquisition of complex skills (as in courses in languages and mathematics). Either way, the transmission of particular knowledge (information and skill) is the basic intention of our current GER.2

The result might be characterized, sharply but not unfairly, as “high school on steroids,” or (more charitably) “high school done right.” Furman’s present GER mirrors, by and large, the same body of skill and information one would expect in a good high school curriculum: courses in history, languages, mathematics, laboratory science, social science, composition and rhetoric, English and American literature, the arts, physical education, etc. Because—one supposes—we cannot trust our first-year students actually to have been furnished with the knowledge they most need, we will therefore provide it. Public school “general education” is broken; our GER must be, therefore, essentially remedial.

For at least two reasons, this conception is faulty. First, while it may have been true in 1967 (the date our present GER was adopted [the changes since have been marginal]) that Furman students were unprepared for genuinely college-level work, that is certainly not the case today. Our admissions picture is much different from what it was in 1967 (or 1977, or 1987), and in the past three or four years, the quality of our admitted students (measured by the usual standards) has risen even more significantly, a trend we expect (and hope) to continue. We are not, on the whole, now admitting students who need significant remediation. Many of them have taken two or three or four advanced-placement courses (and bring that AP credit to their Furman transcripts); some of them have spent a large part of their senior year taking courses at a local college. Increasingly, our students come to us ready and eager for the kinds of challenges, intellectual and otherwise, that first-rate college work provides.

Second, even for those students whose high-school experiences have been less than ideal, giving them one more chance at a history course, or a chemistry course, or a math course, or an English course, is unlikely to make much real difference. Not only is the Furman GER largely unneeded as remediation; it is also largely ineffective in that aim. Of course we wish our first-year students to know more than they do on arrival, but can we honestly claim that our GER reliably removes that deficit? If they don’t know much about, say, the outcome and the importance of the European wars of religion in the 17th century, can we be sure that HST 11 will eliminate their ignorance? If they don’t know how to use the semicolon, or how to construct a persuasive argument, or how to describe the Darwinian revolution, can we be confident that ENG 11 or PHL 20 or BGY 16 will remedy their lacks? My point is not to pick on those particular courses; I respect them, and I respect those who teach them. My point is that we tend to fantasize about the result of taking such courses: if our students hear one more time about the Thirty-Years War, or the semicolon, or the importance of evidence, or speciation through natural selection, then the scales will fall from their eyes and they’ll never forget what they’ve learned. Or so we pretend to believe.

I think we need to move away from the model of general education at Furman as “high school done right.” We need an underlying educational conception of our GER that makes it a distinctively collegiate experience, an experience that both exhilarates and challenges our best first-year students. If the question that motivates the present GER is “What is the knowledge most worth having?”, the question for the new GER ought to be “What are the habits of mind and heart most worth cultivating?” We need to move from conceiving the GER as providing a base of information and skill to conceiving it as fostering intellectual and ethical sensibility. Sensibility, as I understand it here, is the capacity for individual responsiveness; it is a person’s ability to size up, accurately and justly, the reality that confronts her and to respond to that reality with informed intelligence, with imagination, and with ethical discrimination grounded in self-knowledge and self-trust.

Another way to put my point is to say that upon arrival at college one’s educational aim ought to shift from socialization to individuation. Pre-college education has mostly been about making the student an intelligent member of her community: equipping her with the knowledge and skills necessary to function as a part of that community; giving her a sense the community’s history, its institutions, its defining ambitions, and its place in the world; educating her in those ethical, social, aesthetic, and intellectual disciplines that the community finds most worth cultivating. Such socialization doesn’t stop with graduation from high school, of course, but college education—especially in that component we call “general education”—should have another, and in some ways quite different, ambition as well. College is about taking a reasonably socialized community member and helping her to find a life of her own. Part of that is done by the student’s commitment to a major, since one of the fundamental expressions of individuality in our culture is meaningful, for-pay work; and college education, especially (though not exclusively) through the major, is a way in which such work is identified and prepared for. But an important part of individuation is the cultivation of a distinctive approach to one’s life, whatever one’s eventual job: the cultivation of a genuinely individual way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting. What we most admire and cherish in our fellow humans is just that individuality. We want, for ourselves and for others, a mode of life that is not routine, boring, and common; we aspire to freshness of perception and depth of response. We admire those who can see things in novel ways, who recognize possibilities for good (and for evil) most of us are blind to; we cherish those whose life bears a stamp of originality, who speak with their own voices and do not parrot the words of convention and cliché.3

To ask, in the context of collegiate general education, “What are the habits of mind and heart most worth cultivating?” is to ask, “What are the habits of mind and heart that tend toward individuation?” It is to ask, “How do we educate so as to foster a person of profound and individual sensibility, a person with the kind of intelligence and imagination that will shape a future different from, and (we hope) better than, the predictable extension of the past?” Such a sensibility ought to be, I believe, the aim of Furman’s GER.4 The first year or two of college should not be “high school done right.”

II. Practice

What would such a reformed GER look like, and how would it cohere with other required courses? Below is my proposal for a new set of Furman academic requirements, including a general education (GE) requirement. Note that I distinguish GE courses from distribution requirement (DR) courses. I do believe that part of one’s college experience should be given to exploring different academic disciplines in order to understand their particular ways of seeing things; thus there should be a number of “Introduction to X” courses that students should be required to take. But GE courses should not be “Introduction to X” courses. Why? Because “Introduction to X” courses focus, appropriately enough, on discipline-specific information and skills. They are intended to give the student a glimpse of what the world looks like as conceived within a particular disciplinary matrix. GE courses, on the other hand, are not intended to furnish a professional (or proto-professional) point of view; they aim at getting the student to cultivate particular habits of mind and heart. They intend to aid the student’s individuation as an intellectual and ethical being. Important as it is that a student be given various “Introductions to X,” to do so is not the best way to deepen sensibility. So GE courses and DR courses should not be the same.

A. General Education Requirement: 4 courses.

Each of these GE courses would in some significant way emphasize the three features Martha Nussbaum elaborates in Cultivating Humanity: (1) Socratic rationality, (2) world citizenship, and (3) the narrative imagination.5 (There’s no expectation that each such course would emphasize each element equally.) Each GE course would require intensive reading and writing (this would be the Furman version of “writing across the curriculum”), and each would be a small-group discussion format with no more than 15 students enrolled. Interdisciplinary approaches would be encouraged. GE courses would not carry a departmental prefix, and they could not count toward a major (either as major courses or as prerequisites or as allied courses). There would need to be a GER director, or committee of directors, to make sure the GER goals were being appropriately met in a given course. A student would have to satisfy the GER by the end of her second year at Furman.

Any faculty member at FU could propose a GE course. (We might even have the requirement that every faculty member propose at least one GE course every year.) The expectation would be that one would propose courses that engage one’s professional expertise (and obsessions) but that also would be interesting and available to those students who won’t end up majoring in one’s specialty. For example, a psychologist might propose a GE course on the cultural impact of contemporary psychopharmacology: “Better than Well: The Impact of SSRI’s on Contemporary American Life.” An economist or a mathematician might show how economic/statistical methods are changing our conceptions of how to measure performance, reading Michael Lewis’s recent book Moneyball as one of the examples: “Baseball as a Way of Knowing: Statistical Representations of Performance in Business and in Life.” A religion professor might propose a course on contemporary uses of the book of Job, showing how it illuminates the kind of national and personal soul-searching that followed 9/11: “Terrorism, Tribulation, and Suffering: Job at Ground Zero.” A geologist might propose a course on the depletion of natural resources, perhaps focusing on replacements for fossil fuels: “$25 a Gallon? The End of Oil and the Search for New Energy.” A philosopher or a computer scientist (or both!) might propose a course on how computer modeling of the brain is changing our conception of what it means to be human: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Can Machines Outthink Humans?” And so on, and so on. With an alert, energetic faculty, I would think every year we’d have more GE courses proposed than we could actually offer.

As I’ve said, while these courses would certainly use the professional expertise of the faculty teaching them, their point is not to create a new generation of professionals. Their point is to encourage clear, precise, informed, imaginative, and ethically sensitive thinking in the students who take them. Their point is to begin to help the students to think for themselves, to think—with intellectual rigor and with ethical intensity—about topics that repay such thinking. Sensibility rather than knowledge; individuation rather than socialization: this is the proper model for GE at Furman.6

B. Distribution Requirement: 5 Courses (with at least one from each division).7

These could well be “Introduction to X” courses; they would carry a regular departmental prefix (plus they would be designated as DR courses); and they could count as major courses (and as prerequisites and as allied courses for majors). The DR would have to be completed by the end of the student’s third year. It would broaden her exposure to various fields of knowledge, thus preventing too much specialization and keeping alive that aspect of the liberal ideal. In addition, since no particular course would be required, we’d avoid the turf battles that would otherwise wreck (or at least poison) any substantial attempt at curricular reform. We would thus be agreeing that exposure to diverse kinds of knowledge/ways of knowing is a good, without specifying any as “the knowledge most worth having.”

C. Foreign Language Requirement: (no more than) 3 courses (and many students would take fewer than 3).

I’d leave this as it presently is, except that no student with more than 3 years of a single foreign language in high school would be required to take a foreign language course at Furman. Any student with 3 years of a single foreign language in high school would automatically be placed in 21 or above. Any student with 2 years of a single foreign language in high school would automatically be placed in 15 or above. Placement testing will be used only to place students higher than the required placements stated above.8

D. Senior Departmental Experience: 1 Course in the major

As a part of each major I’d require of seniors an academic experience that would encourage reflection on the major in its relation to other academic disciplines. In many, perhaps most, departments, such reflection will take the form of a seminar; I leave it open that some departments might find other ways to accomplish this goal. In my proposal this senior departmental requirement is, I admit, less well defined than the others; the crucial idea is that every student, having completed a major, be encouraged to step back from its particular way of seeing the world and to reflect on its connections to (and discontinuities with) other such ways of seeing. The focus of the senior experience should be both integrative (“This is the state of the art today.”) and self-critical (“Here are the ways our discipline must be complemented by other interpretive systems.”) I wish I could be clearer about this; I lack a good model of such an experience to exhibit.

That’s it.9 After these four sets of requirements (and perhaps a rule or two to deal with disadvantages #1 and #2 below), I’d let students follow their noses (with, I hope, some good advice from faculty advisors).

E. Departmental Honors Programs

Although I would not make it a requirement (as described in sections A-D above), my ideal curriculum would offer students in every academic major the option of trying for an honors degree. Only seniors with a certain GPR within the major could try for honors, and each department would specify for itself the kind of project that such a degree would require. I assume that for most departments an honors degree would require a substantial research project plus an oral exam conducted by faculty from within and without the department of the major. (It might be that students trying for honors would enroll in a credit course called ‘Honors’ while working on the project. The course would be graded Pass/Fail, with some of the Pass students being granted an honors degree.) I further assume that the college would specify some overall requirements so that high standards for honors degrees be upheld. (Perhaps, comparable to the requirements of PBK, only a certain percentage of majors in a given year could be granted an honors degree by a department.) The honors degree should be recognized on the transcript and on the diploma, and note should be taken in the commencement program.

The details can, of course, be modified. The important thing is to offer this sort of enrichment (another facet of “engaged learning”) to those students who want it.

F. Advantages and Disadvantages of This Curriculum

Advantages:
1. The GER would be motivated by a clear, coherent, and distinctively collegiate educational vision. The GER would be, in the clearest and best sense of the phrase, “engaged learning.” We would be expressing our commitment to such engagement in the very center of our curriculum.
2. The GER would shrink. In fact, the number of required courses overall would shrink. Right now the number of courses we require is right at 50% of our graduation requirement; under my proposal, it would drop to about 33%. If you think that’s too low, add a course to the GER and/or the DR. My own ideal for a liberal arts education would be: 33% required; 33% major; and 33% elective.
3. We would no longer be trying to do two quite different things in courses such as PSY 21: to offer an introduction to the discipline and to offer a general education experience. Both the introduction-to-discipline experience and the GE experience would benefit from the separation of GE courses from DR courses.
4. No departments would have a guaranteed slice of the GER; no departments would not have a guaranteed slice of the GER. All departments would be encouraged to offer GE courses. In the same way, all departments would be encouraged to offer DR courses.
5. No GE courses would count as major courses. This would be a clear indication that we think of GE as a good thing in itself, not just an adjunct to what’s “really important.” In this way we would go some distance toward undercutting our students’ present impatience with the GER; they would see it as having a distinctive educational rationale.
6. No turf battles: any course that meets the GER vision (as administered by the GER director[s]) can be offered as a GE course. Ditto for DR courses.
7. Specially designed GE courses (e.g., those Nussbaum discusses from Scripps, St. Lawrence, etc.) tend to get tired over time; it’s hard to keep a single conception fresh and energetic as the generations pass. Since my system envisages lots of different GE courses, proposed by lots of different faculty members, and changing naturally over time, the courses will stay fresh. As one’s intellectual obsessions change, one’s GE course topics will change. (The GE courses I would propose now would certainly not be the courses I would have proposed 34 years ago.)
8. GE courses would not be “high school done right.” They would give the beginning student, hungry for college, a taste of what a distinctively collegiate educational experience would be.

Disadvantages:
1. With fewer required courses, students will be tempted (and in some cases pressured) to take more and more courses in the major. Steady application of institutional will could solve this problem. But do we have that will?
2. With fewer required courses, students will be tempted to do second (and third?) majors. Steady application of institutional will could solve this problem. But do we have that will?
3. “This will mean that a Furman student might graduate without having a math course!” Or a history course! Or a religion course! Or a HES course! Or a philosophy course! Etc., etc. Right, but this objection harks back to the “knowledge most worth having” model for the GER, a model I suggest needs replacing. Moreover, once one starts down the road of saying, “My courses are more important than your courses and must therefore be required for graduation,” the outcome is both predictable and disheartening. Turf battles leave everyone bloodied, even the bystanders, and they are not the proper way to resolve significant educational disagreements. Nor should our GER be the result of compromise in such turf battles.
4. “But are you not saying that foreign language courses are ‘more important’ than others, since you preserve the foreign language requirement largely as it stands?” I take the point, and maybe I should just bite the bullet by quoting my hero Emerson, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But in fact I don’t think of the foreign language requirement as a part of general education; I think of it as a legitimate educational requirement (for a liberal arts college like Furman) on a par with the general education requirement and the distribution requirements set out above. I think it was always a mistake for Furman to think of the foreign language requirement as a part of general education. (That it was thought of that way was the result of thinking of GE in terms of “the knowledge most worth having.”) I conceive the foreign language requirement as an institutional necessity, predicated on our institutional identity: I cannot imagine a decent liberal arts college that doesn’t offer significant instruction in the major modern and classical languages and literatures; yet I cannot see how such instruction can be preserved (at Furman) without a requirement to underwrite the faculty positions required. I don’t think that’s true for any other central component of liberal education at Furman. Chemistry departments and philosophy departments and math departments and English departments don’t (at present, at Furman) need any such institutional props. But would there be a Latin faculty, or a Chinese faculty, or a German faculty, at Furman without some sort of language requirement? I wish I thought the answer was yes, but I don’t.10 And could we be a decent liberal arts college without such faculties? Certainly not. So the language requirement, in some form, has got (for the moment, anyway) to remain.

Of course there are problems I’m sure I haven’t thought of, but this seems to me a solid basis of what the curriculum at Furman should be. What’s wrong with it?

Footnotes
1. I do not mean that this mission is already determinate and clear, say in some document adopted by the trustees or in some tradition honored by the community. No, the meaning of the college’s mission is continually being expressed, refined, and redefined in our conversations about that mission, to which conversations our present curricular study (and even this small document) are contributions.
2. I do not say that our present GER courses intend to do nothing but transmit information. That is false. But I do believe that such transmission is the dominant common element in most of the GER courses we presently offer, and I further assert that the structure of those courses—what they are called and how they are arranged and taught (and, perhaps most importantly, how we test and grade our students in them)—creates in students the impression that at Furman “general education” means “more of the stuff you need to know but don’t.” In some important ways, the student perception of our GER is as important as the reality actually found in some of its courses: if they perceive it as “more of the same,” then it (largely) will be, no matter our efforts.
3. The distinction between socialization and individuation (a distinction not always expressed in those particular words) has, of course, a long history in American culture and educational theory. I think of its fount as Emerson’s great essay of 1841, “Self-reliance.” The distinction is also invoked in a recent essay by Richard Rorty, “Education as Socialization and as Individuation,” in R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 114-126. Because of Furman’s history, its location, and its long connection to South Carolina Baptists, our college has been slow in coming to see the importance of the distinction and has been reluctant to acknowledge a fundamental commitment to individuation. Socialization, especially of a sophisticated sort (“preparing our students for the real world”), has always been easier to affirm, since it seems less threatening and more “useful” to our various constituent communities. (No doubt this emphasis is connected to our original task of preparing an educated clergy for South Carolina Baptists; mostly we have simply extended the range of that sort of vocationalism.) Given our renewed commitment to excellence as a liberal arts college, a commitment spurred by our (recent, in historical terms) separation from the South Carolina Baptist Convention, it is propitious for us shift our focus in the direction of individuation. As I hear it, our sometimes-maligned and sometimes-mocked slogan “engaged learning” is explicitly Emersonian in intent, thus saving it from the banality it skirts. We wish, as a college, to engage our students, through their academic work, in their own self-formation. We seek for them more than just integration into the world as it is; we want them to transform that world by transforming—“engaging”—themselves. For Emerson, as for Plato, self and world are inextricably linked: their transformation is, always, one and the same activity.
4. Please note that I’m not saying that fostering individuation is only the aim of the GER. Many other elements—curricular and co-curricular—of a collegiate experience should have the same ambition. But the GER is a particularly important place for individuation to be cultivated, and I focus on it here.
5. This part of my proposal needs the most work, I think. Although I’m strongly attracted to the three aims Nussbaum elucidates in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Higher Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), I’m not yet fully convinced that all of them are sufficiently tightly geared to those habits of mind and heart that foster individuation. I’m most uncertain about what she calls “global citizenship.” Is there a close connection between such citizenship and Emersonian self-reliance? It’s hard for me to see how individuation could proceed without a commitment to Socratic rationality and without the kind of appreciation for personal and cultural difference cultivated by the narrative imagination; I’m not so sure that global citizenship is as closely tied to individuation as they are. (Part of my problem is that I’m not sure exactly what Nussbaum means by the phrase.) In another vein, I’m also worried that Nussbaum’s three aims might have a hidden “humanistic bias,” and I certainly don’t want the humanities division to become the primary home of GER. I welcome collegial help here. Is there a better way to specify those concrete educational aims that foster individuation and thus should be the foci of GER courses? If one were to keep Socratic rationality and the narrative imagination, is there some third that would form a better trinity than hers? Note, of course, that even if one doesn’t like the Nussbaum trinity, or doesn’t share my commitment to Emersonian individuation, the overall structure of the revision I propose—e.g., the separation of GE courses from DR courses—is not necessarily destroyed. Perhaps there is some other way to specify a distinct philosophy of general education that’s better than either Nussbaum or Emerson. (Although I cannot imagine a better guide than Emerson here!) As I say, I welcome help from my colleagues.
6. I hope I don’t have to say that of course the GE courses I anticipate would require students to master a great deal of knowledge. One doesn’t develop the kind of sensibility I valorize in a vacuum of information and skill. (One can’t, for example, talk sensibly about the cultural impact of SSRI’s unless one knows something about their chemistry and something about the neurostructures they affect. And so on.) The issue is emphasis: the GE courses I envision don’t fundamentally aim at knowledge and disciplinary competence; they use both to foster rigorous and sensitive responsiveness.
7. I’m assuming here the standard Furman pattern of four academic “divisions”: Natural Sciences/Mathematics; Social Sciences; Fine Arts; and Humanities. I do not rule out that a student might take more DR courses in a given division as electives or as major prerequisites or whatever. In fulfilling the DR, no more than 2 DR courses may be taken in any single division.
8. I would put in our admissions materials a strong recommendation that a student take the maximum available years of high school instruction in the foreign language of her choice.
9. It will not have escaped notice that I don’t mention the present HES requirement. The omission reflects my own ambivalence. I’m convinced that HES 10 is a fine course, and I would advise any student to take it. But should it be required? If it were, given my scheme, it would be the only specific course required for a Furman degree; and that strikes me as both conceptually odd and politically insupportable. Furthermore, in all honesty I can’t argue that HES 10 should be thought of as a requirement on a par with the GER or the DR or the foreign language requirement. I just don’t see it as educationally central to a liberal arts education in the way those large-scale requirements are. Is that an objectionable prejudice in favor of mind over body? I believe and hope not. As I say, I’d hate to see HES 10 not be one of the most popular courses at Furman. So what to do? Right now I lean toward designating HES 10 as a DR course counting as a social science. I suspect not every FU student would opt for it, but enough would so that the institutional and individual benefits of a strong HES department would remain. In this respect, HES 10 would be treated, on my scheme, just as would our present HST 11 or REL 11; and that’s appropriate, I think. In my scheme, some sacrifices have to be made in order to accomplish the greater good, but none of those sacrifices would cripple any department.
10. And this grieves me, since I think it’s a function of American cultural isolationism and complacency that most foreign languages have fallen on hard times. It’s certainly not the fault of those language teachers, nor does it reflect a sober and informed judgment made on educational grounds.
11. Given current high school language instruction, and given our country’s demographics, I doubt the Spanish program needs institutional support. We could have a good Spanish faculty and a vigorous Spanish major even if there were no foreign language requirement. Maybe that’s also true for French, though I doubt it. It’s the other languages I worry about, and, as I say, I can’t imagine a college like Furman without a classics major, or a German major, or significant instruction in Asian languages.

Thoughts on Liberal Education (#2)

Liberal education—that is, the kind of education that befits a free human being—emerged at a particular time and place. Although its roots reach back to ancient Greece, the form liberal education took in the modern world can be traced back to the great universities of the medieval period in Padua, Bologna and Paris. It is here that we find the first fully developed curriculum (course of studies or training) consisting of the trivium and quadrivium, a discipline that culminated in engagement with fundamental human questions as addressed by philosophy and theology. This hierarchy of studies gave a unity to the endeavor, and places of learning were aptly called uni-versities.

In the late modern or post-modern period, the notion of a university survives more in name than practice; the essential dynamism of higher education has transformed places of higher education by an explosion of knowledge such that they are better likened to multi-versities. Nevertheless, there exists a deep continuity in the notion of liberal education, one that both reaches back to the roots of the Western tradition from whence it has sprung, and outward to include any developed or developing culture. At the center of liberal education, I place the effort to understand the nature and purpose of a human life—a distinctively human activity not bound to any particular culture. I understand the essential modus operandi of liberal education to be dialectical; that is, engagement with the considered thoughts of those possessing a claim to wisdom living in any place and at any time. Although this conversation is by no means bound by traditions of various kinds, its own tradition provides ballast against the all too human tendency to submerge oneself in the present, to imagine that ours is the best of all possible worlds, or to assume a stance of superiority to thinkers, writers, and artists who have come before. So while good readers examine critically the best ideas of past authors, partisans of liberal education simultaneously allow those authors to challenge the favored and often uncritically accepted opinions of their contemporary readers.
My premise here is partly a post-modern one: Each culture or historical epoch both conceals and reveals truths about the human condition, and I believe that our own is no exception (the persistence of beliefs in American exceptionalism notwithstanding). But I also understand this to be deeply consistent with a Platonic view that elevates the dialogue or conversation as the privileged point of access to the whole of which we constitute a part. While it is certainly the case that we have made tremendous advances in our understandings of science and unleashed its practical potential in unprecedented ways, comparable progress is not obviously the case with respect to the fundamental human questions—questions about the meaning of human life, of death, of justice; reflections about the sources of human happiness, the nature of love and friendship, and the possibility of transcendence; or the development of capacities to make (inescapable) judgments about right and wrong or good and evil; as well as larger questions concerning the place of a human life within the delicate web of vital networks that constitute the larger cosmos within which we find ourselves. It is in my opinion at least an open question whether denizens of the contemporary world are happier, more ethically attuned, or more thoughtful about these questions than those who lived in the past. I find myself more inclined to think we do better in some respects but worse in others.
I do not want to give the impression that I think liberal education to be backward looking. Rather, I understand a liberal education to reach out in any direction that promises deeper self-understanding—backward, forward or sideways. I emphasize this dimension, simply because it is most foreign to a pervasive way of thinking predicated on often unexamined notions of progress.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates maintains that education is not what most claim it to be: It is not putting knowledge into a student (hence not about accumulating “information”), but rather (as the word “education” suggests) a drawing out of capacities already present but as yet unexercised or even discovered. The central activity of liberal or “liberating” education is critical self-examination. This, however, involves more than the individual, since an individual’s self-understanding is necessarily shaped by a range of more or less conscious contexts. Certainly, family, upbringing, neighborhood, class (however defined), country, religion, and historical epoch profoundly shape an individual’s self-understanding. Hence critical self-examination necessarily involves thoughtful and critical engagement with family, friends, neighbors, country and the larger world in which we find ourselves. The liberally educated or “liberated” self is not the starting point, but the goal of a liberal education. By discovering and developing abilities previously unknown or imperfectly sensed, one is liberated to be more fully oneself. As Socrates put it several centuries ago, “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” because, I am tempted to add, it not a recognizably human life, one that befits a free human being.
But liberated individuals do not live in a vacuum; we are, as has been famously maintained, “political animals.” I understand this to mean in part that we develop as human beings only in and through our interactions with others. Not only do we come to know ourselves by living in a variety of overlapping and sometimes competing contexts, but context is an unsurpassable condition for being human. Self-knowledge and a sense of self is inextricably bound up with our relationships with others; we are essentially contextual beings (though of course that context takes different forms for the parent, writer, hermit, artist, philosopher, political activist, etc.) As Aristotle put it, one who is self-sufficient is not a human being, but rather a beast or a god.
The dialectic between the individual and the larger social and political context within which human beings find themselves is fraught with tension, danger, promise, and creativity. It is also rich in implications for understanding liberal education since I maintain that both poles of this dialectic need to sustained and developed throughout the undergraduate years. If we aim at inviting students to develop themselves as individuals, this needs to be balanced with a growing appreciation for the formative power of contexts—not simply as something to be transcended or escaped, but as essential conditions for a flourishing human life. If all forms of life require a habitat of some kind to survive and flourish, the same is true of human beings who, in addition to the physical conditions that make life possible, require a variety of human and political (in the broadest meaning that word) habitats to flourish. As a consequence, I think a liberal education should aim to both situate and liberate students, inviting them to understand at greater depth the formative roots of the culture in which they find themselves, as well as prodding them to look beyond it; inviting them to understand the deepest sources of their own particularity, while simultaneously cultivating a more cosmopolitan sensibility that renders nothing human foreign.

Fundamentally Furman (#1)

I feel a little confounded by this assignment, whether my aim should be to stick to core principles (or “goals”) associated with a “liberal education” in concept, or perhaps provide a more practical discussion of my views regarding its manifestation in the Furman experience. I have decided to initially address the former followed by a few remarks about the latter that I will use to preface my curricular proposal to be submitted at a later date. I introduce my comments on liberal education with the ready admission that all of the committee members who have already contributed to this discussion are far more eloquent than I, and a summary of their statements would incorporate many the points I have provided below. I also remain a work-in-progress in my thinking about this issue – many of you would not debate that point in particular!

Irrespective of its original intent and tradition in the early Academy, (apologies [. . .] for my ignorance here), the liberal arts education as we know it today as emulated by the programs that assert to provide it to the students who choose to participate in it typically embodies the following elements:

(1) a focus on the development of the whole intellect, rather than the assimilation of selected highly specialized parts. Practically, this involves exposure and evaluation in both a variety of disciplines and perhaps more importantly, a variety of perspectives. It also prescribes critical introspection, consistent with developing the capacity to place one’s beliefs, viewpoints and values within a greater global context.

(2) preparation of the scholar to enter a world in which attributes such as reasoning, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, adaptability and the capacity to understand others with different backgrounds and experiences trump simple vocational “training” as defined by a learning only a specific set of technical skills.

Note this does not imply that there is anything inherently improper with learning applications, skills and techniques that may serve a pre-professional or career-oriented purpose, so long as this does not supplant (1) and (2). As [a colleague] has aptly pointed out, j-o-b need not be considered a four-letter word.

(3) disciplinary study that embraces depth of understanding, that dictates rich exposure to a broadly defined academic area of interest such that scholarship can be recognized, appreciated and critically evaluated on its own merits, that provides opportunities for individuals to participate as primary contributors to the greater body of knowledge, not be constrained to succumb to the role of spectators.

I hold these as basic tenets of the modern practice of a liberal arts education on the whole, common themes collectively manifested by the majority of self-proclaimed “liberal arts colleges” nationally. Enumerating and promoting such principles is central to our mission, yet there may be numerous insightful curricular models and approaches that could successfully fulfill such a vision. The promulgation of these interesting pedagogical approaches does not in itself make the Furman experience particularly distinctive from any other quality liberal arts institution that achieves the same end through a diversity of means. To be sure, basic curricular design is core to the mission of the institution, but implementation... what the faculty do with the courses they are responsible for teaching, the life experiences and knowledge they carry into to the classroom, the depth and breadth of exposure to knowledge they provide, the success to which the traits of self-reflection, perspective and critical analysis are conveyed to the student body.... would seem to be the key to the process.

It is in this sense that I believe Furman currently enjoys an outstanding academic program. In my view it is not because of the identities of the courses we offer, the disciplines they represent, the number of GER requirements they fulfill or even the specific content that is addressed, but rather because the Furman faculty by their very nature share a common vision of education that transcends discipline, and have vested themselves as a whole to using whatever courses they teach as vehicles for accomplishing that vision, whether in so-called ‘survey’ courses, HES 10, Medieval English Literature, Business Finance, Differential Equations, or Neurobiology. To be sure, I am fully supportive of any level of curricular innovation and change that improves the product and efficiency of the educational process (especially if implementing such change stimulates enthusiasm and motivation among the greater faculty body), and I have already seen several very interesting proposals and suggestions that may in indeed serve that purpose. Yet, in the end I suspect our graduate “products” are much more strongly influenced by their curricular and cultural experiences outside the classroom and our passion and presentation within the classroom than the manner in which material is subdivided and organized into bytes of information or illustration.

In my view it is critically important that in this process, Furman both recognize and strive to maintain her unique character. I hold this to be a fundamental quality of any outstanding college or university; Williams does not want to be Amherst, and Amherst has no need to emulate Colgate, or Harvard, or Furman. Through the outstanding contributions of generations of Furman faculty, students and administrators, we have established an identity, steeped in a tradition and heritage that we must at the least recognize and acknowledge so that we maintain an appropriate context of our own. The students we attract are highly intelligent and well trained, yet clearly demographically distinct from peer institutions located in other educational centers such as the Northeast; this may not change remarkably in years to come, and in my view need not be the primary goal. We are nationally recognized for excellence across the liberal arts and sciences, and refreshingly unique in student body size, shape, location and function among the vast majority of our liberal arts “peers”. We offer experiences often expressed as “life-changing” in numerous and diverse study abroad programs subscribed to by students from all disciplines; we offer unique opportunities for engagement with the world beyond Furman while maintaining our liberal arts values through venues such as the Washington Experience, the former Biosphere 2 program or the Medical Ethics program; we have developed an engaged learning effort that blends scholarly study, undergraduate research and internships into a program arguably unrivaled by any peer liberal arts college; we have musical performance opportunities and traditions unparalleled by most other four-year colleges; we have regular opportunities to engage nationally-competitive Division I scholarship athletes in our classrooms and watch them develop and flourish intellectually as well as physically; we have a 12-8-12 calendar that despite its advantages and disadvantages is at its core uniquely ours (no laughing out loud, please).

Have I yielded to the view of the Patriot rather than the Cosmopolitan? Perhaps. But it seems paramount that in the best sense of the liberal arts tradition, a sense of who we are and what we do in relation to the academic world in which we live be acknowledged at the outset of embarking on a course for where we’re going. Whatever the outcome of our deliberations and the final format of curricular revision, it is my hope that we consider carefully how we moved from the ranks of a small, Southern Baptist, somewhat selective, predominantly local college with two academic buildings and virtually no endowment to one recently ranked among the top 40 nationally (even with a meager endowment versus many on that list), noting that all of this change has occurred since the last curricular/calendar revision. As we redesign and re-engineer those components of our academic program that we agree can be made to work better and more efficiently, we should conscientiously anticipate and endeavor to preserve that which makes us in the end.... fundamentally Furman.