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August 24, 2009
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Core inconvenience
From Ted Bromund, at Commentary:
It's sometimes claimed by institutions that lack a core curriculum that they compensate by a careful system of academic advising. What a laugh. I advised for six years at Yale. Here's how it works: An hour before you meet your freshmen for the first time, you get their folders and some quick advice from the dean. You have a few minutes to memorize a fact or two about each student--hopefully, that includes their name--and then you go off and have a stilted conversation with four students who don’t know you from a hole in the wall, who have no interest in your subject, and can't imagine why they should care what you say--which is sensible, because you don't know much about them and can't offer any useful advice on their wildly disparate interests. A few weeks later, they materialize in your office with a form to sign. You check that it meets Yale's immensely unconstraining distribution requirements, sign, and they disappear. They materialize again in January with another form to sign, and that is usually the last you ever see of them. Frankly, advising doesn't work, and anyone who says it does is ignorant.The trickier question is why it's done this way--and "by this way" I mean not just advising but the whole curricular system. One answer is that after the 1960s and their aftermath got done demolishing the idea of knowledge and objective inquiry, it was all that was left. That's undoubtedly part of it--maybe even the main part of it. But day to day, I tend to think it's mostly about making life easy for the faculty; they are the ones who hire their own colleagues (the Ph.D. is, in the end, really a union card that's useful for excluding outsiders), set their own schedules (which, if you're tenured, increasingly doesn't involve teaching on Monday or Friday), and pick their own classes (which for a lot of faculty involves dodging the intro courses).
The basic problem with a core curriculum is that someone would have to teach it--and because it would be core, there would be a lot of teaching to be done. That's not what faculty at elite universities are really there for, which is why the top schools do so poorly in ACTA's rating and why only seven schools in the entire study got an A. To an extent, this problem can be met by hiring adjuncts, which is what most faculties, in another great stab in the back to the rising generation, have already done. But if you took the model of English 101 at most universities and applied it across all the general-education subjects, you would need a lot of adjuncts indeed. Better, maybe, not to make the effort at all, or so the faculty appears to have concluded. I'm all in favor of ACTA's efforts, but they do nothing to calm my reluctant sense that, as long as the faculty are running things--not that most of the other candidates would be any better--there is not the slightest chance that the core curriculum will make a comeback.
Bromund may seem harsh, but he's actually fairly gentle here, leaving out the part about how the faculty have also rationalized themselves into a relativistic hole from which they are unlikely ever to emerge: rather than admit the truth of the matter, that staffing a core curriculum is hard, repetitive work they'd rather avoid, professors who oppose installing core curricula trot out endless justifications for their unwillingness to even take a stab at making sure students graduate knowing core things and possessing core skills. The idea of the common core is reactionary and conservative, many say; it presumes a demographically homogenous student body, or, worse, presumes that a diverse student body can and should find the history, thought, and art of "dead white men" to be relevant and even formative to their lives. Some sidestep that one, and simply go with a weak, pseudo-inclusive pragmatism, saying that students today come from so many backgrounds, have so many different and distinct educational needs, and are going so many different places, that a common core is a quaint and purposeless distraction--for the students and for the faculty. Some prefer to get on a high horse with no legs, arguing that core curricula are essentially remedial courses, covering what students should already know from K-12 education--and that college is for higher things; never minds that even students at elite colleges don't show up knowing what K-12 is supposed to have taught them. Still others just throw up their hands at the complexity and expense of it all, arguing that there is just no way to arrange the logistics of core courses for large student bodies, let alone pay for it.
All of these arguments, of course, are utterly routed by the few schools that do have strong core curricula in place. Surely if they can do it, others can, too -- if they have the will.
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Comments:
His Fishiness speaks:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/
I support core curricula. But the only way to prove their effectiveness -- and not their superiority in principle -- is to test to see if the graduates at today's core curricular schools are doing better than the students at coreless curricular schools.
So I don't think we can say anything about "utterly routed" arguments until there is some hard evidence for the real-world effects of a core curriculum. At this point, the argument over cores is strictly abour principles.
the faculty...set their own schedules (which, if you're tenured, increasingly doesn't involve teaching on Monday or Friday)...
Maybe at Yale. Not where I and thousands of other tenured faculty teach. Increasingly we're pressured to teach night and weekend courses, both on-site and at satellite campuses. Of course, this work speedup can be obscured by shining the spotlight on the elite, as if "the faculty" generally had it so cushy. It's about as honest as focusing on CEOs with Learjets and golden parachutes in a discussion of "the businessman" as a general character type.
I am not persuaded, especially by the link, in large part because of the presence of composition courses. It seems to me that composition courses are a way for faculty to duck their responsibilities. Farm out the teaching of writing to a bunch of grad students in the English department, and save themselves the trouble. That way the faculty can use multiple choice questions and tell themselves that writing is already taught. A good class should involve learning to write by learning how to write about the subject, either through requiring multiple drafts or lots of short papers, preferably with tutorial sessions where students criticize each others' writing. I never took a composition class as an undergraduate (nor was one on offer) but the bulk of my classes required intensive, heavily criticized writing.
It doesn't require a Ph.D. to teach a composition course. Nor does it really make sense to put someone whose specialization is 18th-century British lit into composition courses. Those people should be teaching survey courses and upper-division and graduate courses in their specialization.
Those courses should involve writing, of course. And most do, at least at the institutions at which I've taught.
Plus, graduate students need to gain teaching experience somewhere, and that place is not upper-division courses. They need to start in general education, because they are not yet qualified to teach upper-division courses.
I've occasionally heard of a faculty member where I teach not teaching on Fridays, but the vast, vast majority of us are here 5 days a week for classes. Plus our 10 hours of scheduled office hours.
We prefer to advise our majors, so mistakes don't get made that we have to mop up later on (I had to do an emergency after-deadline add for an incoming student whose "general" advisor enrolled her in the intro bio lecture but failed to enroll her into a lab.)
We have sort of a core - at least, there are certain General Studies classes students MUST take. It's perhaps not as prescriptive as the plans-of-study of years back.
I am in favor of a core; I think there are too many students who would slip through the cracks and miss a lot of basic learning. (People who are so seriously unwilling to teach core should probably go somewhere where they can get a 100% research appointment; where I am, we all (tenured faculty) teach core courses.)
