The university is following a national trend of abandoning traditional general education programs in favor of newer and more contemporary studies.
Harvard University, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill and the University of California system have all either implemented or are considering new general education programs that higher education administrators say will involve students more by tying courses to real world issues and skills.
General education programs, which establish what courses every student at a university is required to take, have been a trademark of American universities since World War I. But the overhaul of the CORE program shows that faculty, administrators and students are reevaluating why general education is needed.
“The overriding consideration is, what will help students learn the most?” said George Rainbolt, a philosophy professor at Georgia State University. He helped lead a faculty protest during the past month that successfully convinced the University System of Georgia to slow down a proposal to overhaul its general education program.
“[General education] is a perennial issue,” said Jeremiah Alberg, a philosophy professor at the University of West Georgia who worked with Rainbolt to protest the general education overhaul. Alberg said both students and faculty are unsure why they still take and teach general education programs. Students wonder why they need to take courses unrelated to their majors, while faculty struggle to engage students in disciplines they may otherwise ignore.
Here and at other universities, the debate over the future of general education has broken down roughly along two sides.
The first side, usually represented by faculty in the arts and humanities, says a general education program should help students answer broad philosophical questions they may not otherwise consider. They support a traditional general education program rooted in disciplines, similar to the current CORE.
The second, typically represented by university administrators, wants to create new interdisciplinary general education programs that tie courses to real-world issues. They generally claim the program will prepare students for the 21st century.
At this university, the overwhelming approval of the strategic plan by the University Senate last week seems to show widespread support for the university administration’s vision.
The strategic plan includes a three-category framework that all new general education courses will need to fit into. “Pathways to Knowledge and Creativity” will divide courses into three disciplinary groups loosely based around the humanities, the social sciences and the chemical and life sciences. “Ways of Thinking” categorizes courses based on the intellectual approaches to be emphasized – creative, critical or analytical. Most of the debate focused on the “2020 Perspectives” category, which calls for each course to examine a prevalent contemporary issue.
Some faculty, including Alberg, see this category as a departure from traditional liberal arts general education programs. He said general education programs should help answer broad philosophical questions such as “What does it mean to be a human being?”
Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard University, co-chaired a committee that decided to adopt a less traditional general education program. He said the new program represented “an effort to tie courses students take in the liberal arts and sciences to the issues they’ll confront.”
“It’s tricky,” Menand said. “You don’t want a course on the headlines.”
The program at Harvard is “not based by department or by discipline or methodology, but by broad subject matter,” he said. Some of the categories in Harvard’s program are called “The United States in the World,” “Culture and Belief” and “Science of Living Systems.”
Ira Chinoy, an associate journalism professor at this university, defended the new general education program before the vote on the strategic plan by citing Iran as an example. A course on the history of Iran could help students better understand the current tensions between the United States and the Middle Eastern country, he said.
But experts say administrators don’t need to choose between a traditional and a complete education.
“The idea is that by having a strong general education program, you develop the ability to deal with change,” said Ross Miller, an expert on general education who works for the American Association of Universities and Colleges. He said that in order to prepare for change in the 21st century world of globalization, students should be able to answer big questions – whether they are internal and philosophical or external and practical.
“You can learn about yourself by looking at the world, and you can learn about the world by looking yourself,” he said.
Rainbolt agreed and said philosophical questions can also become practical – debates over the role of women and minorities in society were once merely philosophical, he said.
Experts generally agreed that whenever a university tries to overhaul its general education program, certain people are bound to be upset.
Rainbolt referred to the disagreements as “CORE wars” – battles between various faculty to ensure their courses fit within the requirements.
Menand and Miller both said designing and getting faculty to agree on a new general education takes about three or four years, depending on the level of disagreement. Miller said long debates are understandable.
“You’re talking about decisions made for students that will have repercussions for years down the road,” he added.
At this university, adjustments to the strategic plan were made to give faculty more of a role in crafting the new general education program, which were victories for opponents of the new plan. An original 2013 deadline for the proposal to be fully implemented was dropped, and the senate will now have an increased role in crafting and approving the new program.
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