by Perry Glasser English Department Conversations about the nature and value of the liberal arts grow shrill because the poles of the conversation encompass no middle ground. When no compromise is possible, collaboration is difficult. The best an academic community can hope for is uneasy mutual tolerance. Alas, when money is scarce, tolerance vanishes. The Traditionalist [...]

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By Michael A. Deere Philosophy Department I often joke with my students that the discipline of philosophy is perhaps the only one in which a living is made off of not knowing the answers to the questions that we pose.  Philosophers excel at not knowing.  One need only mark Socrates on this score: The wisdom [...]

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By Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello Department of Interdisciplinary Studies “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” —Albert Einstein “To be liberally educated is to be transformed.” –From statement on “Why Study the [...]

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G. Else Wiersma Professor of Sociology It is well-known that there are noticeable differences in average faculty salaries by  academic departments, and that on average salaries of faculty in the School of Arts and  Sciences lag salaries of their counterparts in professional schools. Business and engineering  faculty salaries rank highest while faculty in Liberal Arts [...]

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By Andrew Darien History Department “I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.” –Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave,” The Republic, [...]

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By Robert E. Brown Communications Department No. Not that L word – the stigmatizing term that has scared many principled people into avoiding being called “liberal,” and rebranding themselves as “progressive.” The liberal that concerns me is the time-honored and endangered institution: a liberal education. In the era of No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, [...]

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By Jude V. Nixon Dean, School of Arts and Sciences The essays appearing in this issue of ASpect, different and distinct as they are, coalesce nicely around the value of the humanities and a liberal arts education. There has been no shortage of essays and books in the last year coming to the defense of [...]

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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?

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As with many of my peers, I am deeply concerned and involved with the curriculum. As all of us have, I taught my load, advised hundreds of students, served on departmental curriculum committees and on the All-College Curriculum Committee. As department chair I had to handle student requests as well as problems, not to mention transfer course evaluations. Over the years, I have come to think of the curriculum as a ball and chain that shackles both faculty and students to an unwieldy structure. The curriculum as a structure has become outmoded to the point that many consider it a deterrent to education.

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In my six years at Salem State College, I have heard much anxiety about assessment not only from colleagues in the Department of Biology but also from colleagues further afield in our college. I do not mean to be flippant by using my aversion to dentists as an analogy, but I really do believe that a clear understanding of the assessment of learning objectives will significantly benefit the long-term health of what our students are learning and of our own long-term health as teachers.

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