By Jude V. Nixon
Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Jude Nixon

The core has historically been the center, the core, of a college’s academic curriculum of studies. Its courses are the spokes that drive the academic machinery, striving to define what it means to be an educated student. How should a student’s course of studies be shaped for him/her to be deemed truly educated, and what exactly does that mean? What fundamentally must that student know about the complexities of the world s/he is a part of? And how deep or broad should that knowledge be? As important, how much and exactly what should be incorporated into the curriculum, and what can we afford to leave out without severely impairing that education? In other words, what is core and what is not core, not essential? While we can arrive at some consensus on what a student needs to know, the academic discipline where s/he gets that information and where it is best delivered might find less consensus. An even more problematic question is whether the core, which is traditionally conceived as a set of key courses (the equivalent in literature of the sacred canon), is like a list of educational ingredients that, when taken like a pill (2 of this, and 3 of that, here a little, there a lot), nutrient, or even purgative, produce the intended result. Rather than set courses, should that prescription, instead, be a recognized set of content information or skills that can be gotten through and across many disciplines?

Thus, if it is agreed that students must or should know something about the enlightenment, would only a literature or history course be the only way for students to acquire that information? Can s/he not receive the same quality of information in a course in philosophy, foreign languages, or for that matter the sciences? It might require new and expansive ways of thinking about one’s field. Could not many disciplines address that knowledge base by looking at the ways each, given the confluence of all disciplines, reflect on the same cognitive need and hence achieve, if not the same, at least similar results? In a two-part essay, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” the literary critic René Wellek shows how the theories, philosophies, and styles of this broadly historical transatlantic movement in literature, history, music, science, philosophy, and the arts migrated from one country to another on the European continent, finally making its way to the UK, and then by implication the US. Should not students then be allowed a degree of freedom to take courses across broad disciplines all gesturing to cognate questions? Perhaps the only restriction might be set limits on how many core courses students are allowed to take from their major field in order to expose them to how other disciplines think, talk about, and broach similar issues differently.

Not surprisingly, the core has been the subject of vigorous debate at Salem State for quite some time. Just two years ago, we produced a lovely glossy, The Core Curriculum, which treats such areas as Core Concepts, Core Philosophy, Core Overview, Levels I and II Competencies, Level III Requirements, Free Electives, and, finally, Academic Writing Standards. The document makes the following claims, lofty as they are admirable:

The core curriculum imparts the skills needed to engage in advanced study in a chosen major, including competence in problem-solving, critical thinking, and abstract reasoning. The student will write and speak effectively and demonstrate competence in reading, computation, and mathematical and scientific reasoning. The student will acquire the computer literacy skills needed to adapt to the changing and expanding information stream.

The core will expose the student to diverse conceptual frameworks and academic perspectives and illuminate how inquiry is conducted in the various disciplines. It will highlight interdisciplinary connections and give the student sufficient aesthetic, cultural and cross-cultural experiences to promote a broadened sense of humanity in its historical, moral, social and technological development.

The core will underscore the richness and diversity of individuals, groups, and cultures around the globe and foster respect and responsibility for our planet and the quality of life upon it.

The core will encourage creativity and natural curiosity, equipping the student with the capacity for continual learning and the adaptive qualities essential for thriving in an every-changing world.

Yet here we are, less than two years later, still disenchanted by this endeavor, not only because of the perceived absence of core goals but also because we merely reconfigured a set of courses deemed essential to knowledge rather than looked closely at the knowledge itself and how it might be disseminated across broadly diverse fields. We simply assumed, for example, that only in history is history taught, or only in English do writing and critical thinking take place. The jury is still out on whether the existing core serves our student as well as it might, and whether the exclusion, perhaps even banishment, of certain disciplines and departments from participating in the core not only privileges and assigns value to certain departments but also places an unnecessary burden on departments conscripted to serve the core. Should not the other schools, Business and Human Services, for example, be brought into the core, critical as some of their information and thought processes can be to key areas of knowledge? Oddly, some of the departments that now serve the core do not see themselves as privileged but as exploited, because they cannot serve their own majors or develop, teach courses, and conduct research in their particular fields. In service to the whole, these departments disenfranchise their own majors, whom they can neither meaningfully mentor nor prepare for jobs or graduate schools.

And so rather than departments vie for their centrality to the core, their perceived specialness, perhaps what we need do is begin a conversation not on disciplines but on core intellectual questions and the skill-sets an educated student must ask or have, the thing we call learning outcomes. This will perhaps get us away from simply concluding that because of increasing globalization students need to take a foreign language, that that language must be a particular one, and that one semester is not enough but it must be five. Might there not be more effective ways to approach language acquisition, ones that could involve some beginning language instruction and then slogging through the language through exposure to conversation and some literature (and by ‘literature’ I mean readings in philosophy, history, literature, and science)? If the language is German, why not some reading of short German science literature, some Kant or Hegel in philosophy, Goethe in poetry, and perhaps some Feuerbach in religion, teaching language along the way? If we agree that another way of fulfilling the language requirement is through conversation, then why not immersion into the language where students are placed in a controlled but uncomfortable environment where the language is the only thing spoken and where their very survival is based on their ability to communicate in the language? I recall not too fondly a “game,” so my wife thought, played on our family some years ago. In a moment of temporary insanity, Jennifer decided that she would spend the entire Saturday around the house speaking only French. Any question put to her in English received an answer or instruction in French. So we all spent the day scrambling around, talking to each other, consulting Lascelles , all in an attempt to recognize and recall bits and pieces of French so as not to starve. It was not fun or funny to anyone but her, judging from the perpetual broad grin on her face, but we learnt a lot about language acquisition. Might something like this not be one way for us to creatively design some language courses, taught in such a way that they are more integral to the core and more integrative? It might be that in some courses the best environment for learning, the best laboratory, might in fact not be the classroom. What we really need for our discussion as we embark on revisiting the core is not to follow the white swans, which is what most everyone does, but to engage in what Nassim Taleb calls “Black Swan,” non-linear, asymmetrical thinking.

In April 2009, the University of Warsaw began an experiment by introducing a college of liberal arts, Collegium Artes Liberales, into its mostly scientific, technological, and discipline specific curriculum. The university invited some of us from America to present papers on the general education curriculum of our respective institutions. The University of Warsaw, in keeping with Poland’s move towards inclusion in the European Union and to the need it felt to sever itself from its communist past (education is seen as a major factor), wanted to create a curriculum more in line with American universities than with the curriculum in Eastern and Western Europe and even in the UK. These educational leaders wanted, so they say, a Chicago-style model. But the University of Warsaw did not want to adopt wholesale an American model of higher education, only to adapt its best features, including its general education model, i.e., the core, which was entirely absent in theirs. They felt that this was foundational to America’s democracy and its cultural, technological, and economic strength and that clearly this type of education was what made America the envy of all nations and contributed to its openness, practicality, creation of a middle class, and model of racial, gender, and ethnic inclusion. I do not think that this is too great a burden to place on our general education core.

This article is part of ASpect’s March 2010 issue on the core curriculum.