Core Courses

A way to general ed

As chancellor of the sprawling State University of New York during the early 1970s, Ernest Boyer often met with angry students who demanded the abolition of required courses. Boyer disagreed. But he also took seriously complaints that "general education" courses (courses supposed to be broad enough to benefit all students) were often little more than rehashes by junior faculty members of their recent Ph.D. dissertations. He still does. "Students have not abandoned general education," Boyer concludes, "general education has abandoned them."

Now the new president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer has launched a crusade for general education. On most campuses, he says, it has become a cluttered "spare room" thoughtlessly located in student schedules somewhere between electives and degree-program courses. Boyer kicked off his crusade last week at a conference for 200 scholars and foundation executives at the University of Chicago. Participants received a 68-page Carnegie essay touting general education as an antidote to "self-preoccupation and social isolation." Its message: "All students should come to understand that they share with others the use of symbols, membership in groups and institutions, the activities of production and consumption, a relationship with nature, a sense of time, and commonly held values and beliefs."

Many educators give lip service to such familiar and useful aims. Boyer's main point, though, is that most colleges ignore them in the day-to-day business of planning curriculums. Instead of thinking about how best to provide a general education, most colleges, says Boyer, merely turn students loose to choose from a grab bag of courses that make the approved list as a result of academic politics. In planning student programs, explains Carnegie Senior Fellow Arthur Levine, "at most schools, three credits in economics is the same as three in political science. Biology is equivalent to physics. You can satisfy humanities requirements with Shakespeare or science fiction, Faulkner or an introduction to film. It doesn't matter. But it should." One answer, according to Boyer, is requiring all students to take a few well-planned, interdisciplinary "core" courses. Another: special campus-wide conferences about how academic disciplines relate to each other. Sums up Chicago's Dean Jonathan Smith, "To dump on students the task of finding coherence in their education is indefensible. Colleges shouldn't be allowed to collect tuition on that basis."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.