Making Sense of the College Curriculum

Robert Zemsky,Gregory R Wegner,Ann J. Duffield

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813595047
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Readers of Making Sense of the College Curriculum expecting a traditional academic publication full of numeric and related data will likely be disappointed with this volume, which is based on stories rather than numbers. The contributors include over 185 faculty members from eleven colleges and universities, representing all sectors of higher education, who share personal, humorous, powerful, and poignant stories about their experiences in a life that is more a calling than a profession. Collectively, these accounts help to answer the question of why developing a coherent undergraduate curriculum is so vexing to colleges and universities. Their stories also belie the public’s and policymakers’ belief that faculty members care more about their scholarship and research than their students and work far less than most people.  

Part One

Defining the Task

Introduction

It’s a Riddle after All

First came A Nation at Risk—an unexpectedly harsh indictment of what many had accepted as a national strength. The words didn’t just sting; they inflamed, helping ignite an educational reform movement that thirty years on has yet to run its course: “We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983, 1). Most of higher education, however, just shrugged off the critique, assuming that the real target had been K–12 education in general and the nation’s failing high schools in particular. That was in 1983.

Two years later, the Association of American Colleges (AAC) released Integrity in the College Curriculum, the product of a select committee largely drawn from the ranks of higher education and those institutions committed to the liberal arts. Among the notables who worked on the project were Arthur Levine, David Breneman, Robert McCabe, Gresham Riley, and Martha Church. Williams College’s Fred Rudolph was generally credited with the drafting of the report. The text began modestly enough, noting that in 1982 when they began their work, Integrity’s authors understood they “had joined a chorus.” There was, however, nothing quiet or choral-like about what followed—indeed, in tone and style, Integrity simply outdid A Nation at Risk in calling out the nation’s colleges and universities for being satisfied with what had become a shopworn product. The chapter addressing the issue of the status of the baccalaureate degree was pointedly titled, “The Decline and Devaluation of the Undergraduate Degree.” Nothing escaped the select committee’s barbs: “The business community complains of difficulty in recruiting literate college graduates. Remedial programs, designed to compensate for lack of skill in using the English language, abound in the colleges and corporate world. Writing as an undergraduate experience, as an exploration of both communication and style, is widely neglected. College grades have gone up, even as Scholastic Aptitude Tests and American College Testing scores have gone down and the pressures on teachers to ease their students’ paths to graduate schools have increased” (AAC 1985, 1).

The committee saved its harshest criticism for the college curriculum itself:

As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes. We have reached the point at which we are more confident about the length of a college education than its contents and purpose. The undergraduate major . . . in most colleges is little more than a gathering of courses taken in one department, lacking structure and depth, as is often the case in the humanities and social sciences, or emphasizing content to the neglect of the essential style of inquiry on which the content is based, as is too frequently true in the natural and physical sciences. The absence of a rationale for the major becomes transparent in college catalogs where the essential message embedded in the fancy prose is: pick eight of the following. And “the following” might literally be over a hundred courses, all served up as equals.

What caused this state of affairs? “The curriculum has given way to a marketplace philosophy: it is a supermarket where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning. Fads and fashions, the demands of popularity and success, enter where wisdom and experience should prevail. Does it make sense for a college to offer a thousand courses to a student who will only take 36?” (AAC 1985, 2).

While there was plenty of blame to go around for the nation’s curricular foibles, the authors of Integrity were particularly unhappy with their faculty colleagues: “The development that overwhelmed the old curriculum and changed the entire nature of higher education was the transformation of the professors from teachers concerned with the characters and minds of their students to professionals, scholars with Ph.D. degrees with an allegiance to academic disciplines stronger than their commitment to teaching or to the life of the institutions where they are employed” (AAC 1985, 6).

Eventually AAC itself began to worry whether its select committee, having laid out their displeasures for all to see, had somehow missed the mark. It was at this point that AAC’s Joseph Johnston came to visit Penn’s Institute for Research on Higher Education (IRHE) to ask whether the institute might be able to calibrate and then verify Integrity’s conclusion, “As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes.” We could, we said, provided AAC supplied the funding and helped the institute get access to the undergraduate transcripts needed to test whether undergraduate curricula, because they had fewer requirements and less course sequencing than before, were yielding educational programs that lacked curricular coherence. What we found, more than thirty years ago, was as dismaying as it was baffling. It was true. Undergraduate curricula in almost every kind of college and university were being “destructured,” just as the authors of Integrity had charged. Anything and everything was possible. There was neither coherence nor much rigor reflected in the transcripts analyzed. Along the way we spoke with a faculty member who told us he assumed that in each class he taught, regardless of its numbering or presumed place in the curriculum, almost every student enrolled in the course had little or no prior understanding of his field’s basic precepts. Outside of the sciences, there were few truly introductory classes—freshman and sophomores were as likely to be sitting next to juniors and seniors as to students like themselves, who in the past would clearly be recognized as beginners. Nor could the IRHE staff find a curriculum that was anything but a list of courses that satisfied some set of often-murky requirements.

The larger disappointment, however, was the fact that neither Integrity’s critique nor the IRHE’s analysis led to any noticeable change in what was happening to college curricula. The report was celebrated and quoted. The institute’s analytic team was congratulated on the cleverness of its statistical routines. Across the higher education landscape, individual faculty were intrigued, but not enough to forge a new consensus requiring a more structured or a more coherent undergraduate curriculum. The faculty had learned, only too well, the pleasure of allowing each instructor to do his or her own thing. Reinstituting requirements would have made faculty responsible for what their students took with them into the next set of courses in an ordered and sequenced curriculum.

It would be wrong, however, to assume nothing changed because of the critiques offered by A Nation at Risk and Integrity in the College Curriculum. Quite the contrary—what ensued was a truly remarkable reform movement that focused not on the curriculum but on pedagogy. Fixing the problems identified by the critics, it was argued, required a fundamentally different approach to teaching and learning, one that produced an engaged student learner. Again, it was the Association of American Colleges, newly rebranded as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), that took the lead. Year by year, conference by conference, publication by publication, AAC&U laid out an agenda of high-impact practices that framed the pathway to a more engaged student learner. In 2005, AAC&U expanded its call for a broad-based educational reform by launching Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a national public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to focus renewed attention on liberal learning in general and liberal arts colleges and universities in particular.

At roughly the same time, the Pew Charitable Trusts provided the funding necessary to create the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Largely based on the work of Peter Ewell and Russell Edgerton, the NSSE assumed that while it was still not possible to measure the student outcomes of individual institutions directly, it was possible to estimate an institution’s likely success by noting whether its practices promoted student engagement. For nearly twenty years now, NSSE has tracked changing institutional practices, noting when and where individual institutions seemed to be making unique contributions to higher education’s learning enterprise. But like AAC&U’s efforts, questions of curricular structure and coherence received little if any attention. What mattered most was how individual subjects were taught, not how they were linked together in particular curricular patterns. The one exception was the AAC&U’s focus on general education, where, in fact, it argued that what was required was more than a smorgasbord of introductory courses. The larger impact, however, was a torrent of interesting experimentation—new courses, new subjects, new ways to integrate in-class and out-of-class experiences. Students often responded by pursuing double majors, added internships, and new ways to make the old seem new by combining it with something different. The result was curricula that made little if any pretense of offering either structure or coherence to the undergraduate learning experience.

Such was the state of affairs when Harvard’s Derek Bok gently called to task the enterprise he had spent a lifetime shepherding through good times and bad. The former president’s Our Underachieving Colleges tells much the same tale Integrity had told twenty years earlier, though certainly Bok’s friendly critique and even the title of his book were much easier to swallow. But Bok’s critique is important, not just because of who he is and was, but because he wrote about how higher education had a largely unfinished agenda: “The good news is that most of the serious deficiencies can be overcome, at least to a significant degree, given the will to do so. The bad news is that most of the problems are not being seriously addressed on campuses today, nor will they be until they are correctly identified and clearly understood by those responsible for the quality of teaching and learning in our colleges” (Bok 2008, 10). The problems Bok identified were the same as identified by Integrity: too much unconstrained student choice, too little understanding of what students ought to be learning and the skills they ought to be acquiring, and too much acquiescence in a faculty culture that fits faculty interests but not student needs:

The second persistent problem in the work of the faculties arises from the traditional independence of professors and their departments. In most colleges, debates over the curriculum are not a means of imposing order but a process for reaching a consensus among autonomous scholars. By common consent, no tenured professor should be forced to do anything. Very rarely is a department compelled to assume teaching responsibilities against its will. When the majority votes for specific requirements, it is often assumed that the necessary courses will all be staffed voluntarily, even if it means that someone must be found to teach them. (Bok 2008, 39)

And it turns out, as more and more institutions are learning to their chagrin, unfettered faculty independence combined with unfettered student choice is simply not economically sustainable. Not surprisingly, then, just two critiques dominate public discussions of higher education today. First, American colleges are too expensive, in large part because they lack the will and the know-how to do things differently. And second, far too many students start but do not finish their baccalaureate educations.

Initially it was thought that these two concerns—escalating costs and disappointing attainment rates—were separate problems, a division of responsibility as well as blame that mirrored higher education’s view of itself as having a hard side where monies are concerned and a softer “more nurturing side” when helping students achieve their academic ambitions. There is, however, a perfectly straightforward linking of these two observations—one that challenges collegiate faculties to reshape their undergraduate curricula, making them more efficient both in terms of learning and costs. Curricula that are overly complex or overly filled with requirements whose principal logic is the preservation of faculty positions cost both students and faculty time and money—or as a host of students at one public comprehensive proclaimed when asked to evaluate the institution’s general education curriculum, “It’s a waste of my time and my money.” Some of the students’ comments were wonderfully prescient in their estimate of the faculty’s commitment to a well-formed introduction to the liberal arts. As one student put it, too much of general education does nothing “more than keep particularly irrelevant courses funded and tired faculty continually employed.” The third most common complaint was that the faculty did not understand the requirements, which helped explain why advising too often left students taking the wrong road to graduation (Zemsky 2013, 149–150). Instead of fixing the problem, however, most faculties have left in place smorgasbord curricula whose principal purposes are the protection of disciplinary agenda, the faculty’s interest in teaching what they feel most comfortable teaching, and their students’ pursuit of curricula that allow them to choose among a wide variety of courses every time they register for a new semester. It is as if the way to run an upscale restaurant is to allow every customer to define his or her own menu and the chefs in the kitchen to cook only what they want to cook.

It was but a short step to extend this argument, as was done in Checklist for Change, offering a pair of axioms for guiding the kind of reform that is now necessary. The first held that “higher education is the faculty’s business.” It is what faculty do and take responsibility for that will matter most. The faculty’s teaching and explorations will depend on the academy’s continuing commitment to the scholarship of learning and discovery. Achieving that future as opposed to one of diminished faculty roles will require forceful but, more important, collective action on the faculty’s part. As individuals, faculty members will have to abandon that sense of themselves as independent actors and agents. The financial crisis of the new century has taught everyone that talking about “my money” or “my students” or even “my research” brings few benefits and no friends. Faculty need to be frank about the need to share the money—and will have to understand that they neither own nor possess their students, though, as faculty, they have an important responsibility to ensure their successful learning.

Checklist for Change’s second axiom held that the change that is needed most is curricular change. A substantial portion of the increase in operating expenses at most colleges and universities derives from the “faculty collectively teaching (and often requiring) more subjects but individually teaching fewer courses than before.” It is the propensity problem—“the irresistible urge to add new subjects reflecting the ever-expanding nature of the knowledge base while almost never deciding not to teach something else.” Majors expand, double majors proliferate, internships become ever more important, yielding graduating transcripts more likely to record 140 credits or more rather than the standard 120 units students would earn if they took five three-unit courses per semester for four years. In many institutions, the propensity problem “increases the probability of more under-enrolled classes. Often the pool of students pursuing a specific major or specialization has, through the continuing addition of new and advanced courses the faculty want to teach, been divided and then divided again until at any given moment only a handful of students are available to take a given course at a given time” (Zemsky 2013, 182).

Why has there not been more curricular change of the kind called for by the authors of Integrity in the College Curriculum? That is the question—the nub of the riddle that is the subject of the volume you are about to read. If you want to see if we actually solved our riddle, we invite you to skip to “Conclusions,” where we present, in summary form, our answer. We hope, however, that you will not do that, choosing instead to work through the parts en route to a better understanding of the whole. We hope you will proceed as we in fact did, starting with an understanding of the passions that motivate faculty, the singularity they vest in their own autonomy, and the frustrations they encounter when seeking to bend their institutions to their will. Any understanding of what it means to be a faculty member—scholar, teacher, guide, interpreter—and hence a potential agent of change necessarily requires first an appreciation of the passion most faculty bring to their calling and second an awareness of how faculty connect with their students. Despite the parodies that cast us as muddle headed and confused, we are usually almost embarrassingly explicit about what motivates us—it is what often makes us intellectual absolutists. Nor, as it turns out, are we impervious to change. One of the themes common to almost all our faculty stories is an awareness that both teachers and students have changed and, in fact, are continuing to change.

We have also come to understand how the principles that animate the faculty find their way into the curriculum. Just as important are those topics faculty have trouble talking about—race and politics and the dwindling support they receive from the public at large. No less important is the need to understand how instructional faculty are coming to terms with the need to teach differently, teach more collaboratively, and teach better using social media and other new technologies.

With those experiences and predilections as a foundation, we knew we needed to explore how faculty identify, to themselves and to their colleagues, the specific obstacles to curricular reform. The first, not surprisingly, was the sheer difficulty of eliminating anything—courses, majors, minors. The curriculum and its options may be constantly expanding, but time, as the faculty know only too well, is a finite resource. Money is the second finite resource—and what is most unnerving of all is just how often faculty see themselves engaged in processes that never seem to end. Too often it is a matter of being told, “Sorry, but you can’t get there from here.”

Our hope is that you will come away with the feeling that yo...