Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke has revealed his much-anticipated proposal for a new, improved liberal arts college. It's a detailed and daring proposal, one worth perusing carefully and discussing at length. From the prelude:

Iíve been messing around for a while with a blueprint for an alternative institution and have finally finished the basic sketch. This is no more than a sketch, and very clearly impractical or inadvisable in a number of the gestures it contains. It attempts to resolve through fundamental redesign three interconnected problems:

1) The haphazard, disconnected curricular design of both liberal arts colleges and research universities, both the range of subjects covered and the connections between areas of study. Rather than glossing over the relationship between integrative and specialized knowledge and trusting everything to turn out for the best, as most conventional liberal arts colleges do, or actively favoring specialized knowledge, as most research universities do, this curriculum proposes a much more consciously and rigorously organized relationship between integrative and specialized knowledge and between academic study and practical know-how. This is my own response to the kinds of curricular incoherence identified so expertly by Gerald Graff in his book Clueless in Academe, which I strongly recommend to both students and other academics.

2) The insular, timid and self-confirming character of a great deal of contemporary academic practice. This outline responds to this both by widening the labor pool of potential instructors and by systematically directing faculty towards communicating with wider publics while also demanding that faculty broaden their knowledge and intellectual practice rather than narrowing themselves towards more and more inward-looking forms of specialization. Rather than the laissez-faire spirit of most contemporary academic institutions, in which generalism is only one of many options for professional development and a responsibility to wider public discourse and needs is not a requirement, the 21st Century College would make these central conditions of continued employment. As part of this reorganization, this blueprint also advises the abolition of conventional academic departments and units.

3) The rise of the expensive "full-service" model of higher education coupled with the pervasive resurgence of in loco parentis, of the college or university as "nanny" determined to manage most aspects of community life and ethos. This blueprint counsels abandoning the vast majority of services provided by most colleges and universities while also maintaining a scrupulous disinterest in the private lives of students, faculty and administrators.

A couple of basic things about this outline.

First, Iím serious about it: if you happen to know where thereís 500 million dollars lying around, Iíd very gladly try to be part of building this institution for real.

Second, I think some aspects of this design would productively inform efforts to reform current institutions, but this is also an integral project, with all parts tightly connected. I think many of them would not work nearly so well if they were adopted on a piecemeal basis. I would be equally concerned about ìwatering downî key aspects of the design in order to make them more respectable by the standards of the current academy. The key idea here, more than any other, is to create an institution whose legitimacy is largely not measured within the normative terms offered by contemporary academia.

My own feeling about the proposal is that it's an excellent starting point. I have some reservations about how the curriculum is shaped, though I am also intrigued by it--I'm provisionally open to the idea of doing away with traditional departments (this may surprise some readers), but only if it can be shown that doing so does not fragment students' educations even more than they already are in the current system, and instead actually improves their abilities to master bodies of knowledge in a systematic and meaningful way. I do like how careful Burke is to envision a four-year course of study that builds logically from one year to the next and that has as its ultimate goal the intellectual independence of highly skilled, well trained, immensely competent graduates. I like, too, Burke's decision to jettison both the tenure system (in favor of a series of eight year teaching contracts) and the costly and intrusive bureaucracy that serves the ends of in loco parentis at so many colleges and universities. This is a streamlined, no nonsense, no frills approach to education that appeals greatly to me in its intellectual seriousness, its focussed sense of mission, and its daringness (no less than daring is needed in our present moment). It sounds like the sort of place where I would be proud to teach.

UPDATE: There is more discussion at Cliopatria and Crooked Timber.

The "debates" courses should be a senior-year capstone. Freshmen do not have the knowledge base to make anything useful of such a course. As a freshman requirement these courses would be an open invitation to the faculty to engage in ideological indoctrination and would accentuate one of the worst vices of our education system (at all levels)- the sanctification of uninformed opinion.

It would be churlish to leave the above comment without registering my overall enthusiasm. Some kind of intellectually serious "no frills" college- sort of a St. John's without the Great Books mysticism (which is dysfunctional for fields like science and math)- is desperately needed (not least by us parents who have to pay the bills!) and this proposal is a good start.

I agree with points one and two. I'm leery of point three, though that's probably because I work in an area that could be affected (student housing). I think a lot of the bureaucracy in schools is redundant or unnecessary. Many of them are in place for reasons, though.

The idea of a disinterest in the personal lives of students isn't a new one, assuming I'm reading this right. The German universities adopted a similar model and it spread to the States in the early/mid 1800s. As the university's emphasis was on instruction and research, social and moral development were largely ignored. One of the side-effects of this model was the rise of student services as a separate field.

My concern with point 3 is that it would be difficult to run an effective residential campus without a dedicated staff for residence life, food service and student activities. There would remain a need for a dedicated admissions or recruiting office. As long as money is accepted (especially state and federal money), there will be a need for a business office. With a commuter campus, one could dispense with the functions of housing and food service and student activities (to a degree), but the other administrative functions would still be there.

These functions need to be addressed to some degree, and I'm not sure how far you can scale them back before they're no longer effective.

Then again, I make my living in student housing, so I may have a slightly different take on this.

I'm intrigued. I do have a question, and perhaps you can answer it or perhaps I will have to direct it to Burke. What sorts of things do you think constitute a "resurgence" in in loco parentis behavior? When I worked for residential life 7 or 8 years ago, we talked a lot about the fact that we were NOT there as an in loco parentis organization. Is that philosophy no longer accurate, and if so, how is it changing?

Steve's point about the debates course is one I've thought about a lot, actually. It almost seems to me that you could have a 1st year debates course and a 4th year one, to show how engagement with a core area of knowledge alters your understanding of or ability to engage in such a debate. Certainly the 1st year students would be much more of an audience and much less participants in their version of the debates course.

My thinking that you could do such a thing for first year students is partly a reaction to a colleague of mine in the humanities who has insisted on a couple of occasions that what he does, no undergraduate could ever hope to do; indeed, that no undergraduate could ever even hope to understand. That I find this a peculiar pedagogical perspective in an undergraduate institution is unsurprising. I simply don't agree with it: I think that if you can't translate what is lively and important and interesting about your field into a presentation for bright 18-year olds who know nothing about it, then you're not acting as an intellectual should. If you think about the suggested topics of Debates courses in the proposal, if you can't explain what's at stake in those topics (genetic engineering, or poverty) then you are more or less saying that the broader public could not be involved in making decisions about those issues, either--a big problem in a democratic society. That being said, there is a *different* presentation that you can make about what is lively and important and interesting about your field that you can make to 21-year olds who know something about the inner workings of your intellectual craft.

On the residential issues, I'm putting in stark terms in this proposal because I think it clarifies one way to resolve the kinds of issues that Erin has devoted a lot of effort to discussing. I do think that most colleges and universities have grown increasingly involved in managing the lives of their students, whether it is in trying to buttonhole what kinds of speech they ought to engage in or in telling them how to conduct their interpersonal relations within dormitory settings. Within the framework of the conventional residential college, I think much (though not all) of this inevitable and even desirable, and as I note in the proposal, in many ways, I rather like it or am at least comfortable with it.

But if a college essentially saw itself in residential terms as no more than a landlord, I don't know why you'd need the rest of the residential advising infrastructure. Would an apartment house full of 20-year olds require some kind of managerial oversight above and beyond what any other apartment building has? Maybe, if for no other reason to protect the value of the property. But it's worth thinking about in this starker form if only to discover what it is that we value about the normal residential college form, and whether there are alternatives to it.

Blaise,

To Tim's longer answer, I'll add a citation: Alan Kors' and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University. The book is dedicated to charting how the return of in loco parentis at colleges and universities across the country has brought with it enormously worrisome policies and practices that in many cases amount to violations of students' civil liberties.

I appreciate your response, Prof. Burke. But for conveying the essence of an abstruse field to novices (and yes, I agree that a good teacher should be able to to this), it seems to me that good old "physics for poets" is a much better model than the use of inherently politicized current-events "debates", in which typically much of the real-life public debate is conducted by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. (In scientific areas of which I happen to have professional knowledge, much of what gets said publicly even by people who ought to know better is so lacking in veracity and/or sincerity that it sets my teeth on edge.) So I'm a stodgy old fogy, I can't help it. ;)

In regards to Tim's response, specifically the last paragraph. The residence life infrastructure is there for a few reasons, some functional and some are to keep us from being sued. Most housing offices I've been associated with (at five schools) have a chief housing officer (primary contact and head of the department), a facilities position (coordinates maintenance staff, repairs and refurbishment), and an educational/development position. Most schools have some variant of the RA position and a full-time live-in position as well.

The courts have recognized a greater duty of care than an off campus apartment complex, and we have to take reasonable steps to ensure that the students are safe. This is why there is a need for more staffing (and more rules) than a typical off-campus apartment complex. Most of the policies at my current department are in place for student safety or to protect the facility.

I think that's right, Tait, but I think the reasons that the courts have recognized a greater "duty of care" is that in various ways colleges have voluntarily shouldered that duty in a number of other non-residential domains, and hence cannot situationally shuck it off when it is inconvenient. Erin and I have disagreed in the past about Swarthmore's speech policies, for example, and one of the issues at stake when you get down to it is the current state of harassment in the law, and the degree to which assertions of responsibility for staff or student conduct in one area form a basis for legal burdens in another. That's why I wonder a bit if the way to attack one problem--the expansion of university assertions of responsiblity for the private conduct of students and employees--isn't a really radical assertion of non-responsibility across the board.

If a university owns a house in a mixed-residential neighborhood and rents it to students, I believe they have less legal exposure than if they've got students resident within the core boundaries of a university campus. You don't have to have residental advisors, etc., if you're renting to graduate students off campus as well. So if my hypothetical college were going to try and shuck off the entire apparatus of residential supervision and advice, it's clearly imperative that if they build residential facilities, they'd have to build them off-campus and they'd have to build them with the normal architecture of rental housing rather than the way dormitories are organized.

Before this last spring term, I would have been inclined to agree with Steve LaBonne's skepticism about the Debates courses. However, this spring I taught a researched argumentative writing course that focused solely on the hate speech/university speech codes debate, structuring the reading so that first we explored the advocates' arguments and then the opponents', with a retrospective section at the end. It turned out even better than I had hoped: students engaged deeply in the issue, read texts that ranged from popular editorials to lengthy academic essays, continually re-examined their own positions, and in the end, each one of them came to their own conclusions on the issue (and these conclusions really ran the gamut). One student suggested gathering all their essays together and publishing them informally, which I would have loved to have done if it weren't for the fact that I'm trying to wrap up my dissertation/pack to move across country/prepare for a new teaching position. Though as challenging for me as it was for the students, it was one of the best teaching experiences I've ever had.

Oh, and by the way, I'd work at the 21st century College in a heartbeat.

Just as a side note, I've been unable to find a replacement blog for the Invisitlbe Adjunct.

Got to thinking on that when I saw the no tenure and began to wonder what about how that interfaced with adjuncts. Conclusions aren't that important, but the missing IA ...

There's a lot to be said about the kind of interdiciplinary teaching that goes on at The College of the University of Chicago. I just graduated from the place, and could not have imagined a better liberal arts education than a combination of a Fundamentals major with a liberal sprinkling of Big Problems courses. If you're not familiar with either, give http://www.uchicago.edu a visit.

As for emulating St. John's, there is also some caution to be learned. There are those who say that the ciriculum never rises above a frosh. survey course for the entire four years, and in the last decade or so, there has been an influx of kids who couldn't care less about a liberal arts education, but care deeply about not recieving grades.

Anyway, I like the plan a great deal, especially the emphasis on planning above the departmental level. I worry, though, about about how the core areas may or may not splinter and fragment themselves into competing fiefdoms that offer their own kind of specialization.

And how about Chicago for the location? There's a gaping hole in the near-west suburbs or the far-west-side for a major college/university, and would put it within easy public transportation reach of the U of Chicago and Northwestern. If it located there, I wouldn't accept the world in exchange for a chance to teach there.

One small and tangential dissent with Steve LaBonne: "...without the Great Books mysticism (which is dysfunctional for fields like science and math)..."

Without exposure to the Great Books, you simply aren't educated. Math and science are training disciplines, not educational ones.

And Debate is a discipline sorely lacking in U.S. society. Any attempt to reintroduce it should be supported.

But why build from scratch? Why not just copy Hillsdale?

Kim, I agree with you about the importance of the Great Books. But why the shot at math & science? These are fundamental ways of understanding reality, not just "training disciplines."

I also agree with you about the importance of debate--all students, not just members of the debate team, should be exposed to this activity in some form.

Interestingly, Dr Burke doesn't mention the important issue of admissions policy. I think that the noncurious have no place in a quality liberal arts program, and that the people whose reading consists of "fantasy" and the sports pages should be told to go elsewhere.

He says "liberal arts college", which I take to mean "not science", but there's the Integration section about the car - an engineering subject if ever there was one.

He says "... introduce students to a generalist and integrative framework for critical thinking while interweaving that framework with specialized, practical and real-world implementations of knowledge."

That seems like a tall order. It sounds a lot like a "pick one" idea. Maybe you could get both with 4 years of intensive study - but none of this wimpy "summer break" stuff.

I agree with Steve about putting the Debates into later years. How many high school graduates - even good ones - are capable of getting anything out of - or putting anything into - debates about "Genetic Engineering; Environmentalism; Globalization; The Nature of Consciousness; ....."

Dennett is still debating that last one, and he practically owns the field.

It might make more sense to have a Debate Thread (we might even grit our teeth and call it Rhetoric and Argumentation) that starts in the first year with the basics (logic, fallacies, &c), and extends through the senior year, by which time students could be expected to frame and defend their own arguments).

Quite a few of the commentors bring up the social aspects, which Burke seems to overlook (but then, his proposal is pretty dramatic to begin with). It makes sense for such a student body to work together like a brotherhood, or a family. Sort of like the students at Plato's Academy.

One of Plato's marks of a good education was training in music, dance and athletics - the old "mens sana in corpore sano" bit. Much as I would protest myself against such activities, I have to agree that that's a significant part of one's education.

I think Burke might consider rewriting it into a 5- or 6-year curriculum.

A liberal arts program with no mandatory exposure to a foreign language/ culture?

This model may be fine for the learing of soft subjects like the humanities, but it would be a hellish waste of time for a student of the hard sciences.