Curricular Reform in Historical Perspective

Although sons and daughters have of­ ten written biographies of their parents, it is a rare thing when a parent writes a biography of a child. One such book did appear, however, in 1902. Its subject was a promising landscape architect who had died at the age of thirty-seven. Its author had been president of Har­vard University since 1869. Both men were named Charles Eliot.

The father took occasion in the book to illustrate his favorite curricular phi­losophy. He had made the case for students’ free election of their college courses in speeches, articles, and re­ports. Now he showed the benefits of such freedom in the life of his son.

The younger Charles had been a dif­fident fellow, lacking intellectual bril­liance and unsure where he was headed. At Harvard he found the required freshman studies uncongenial. Under the nearly total free election of the last three years, however, he warmed to his courses, choosing a group that looked at first glance like a hodge-podge: rapid reading in French and German, geogra­phy, chemistry, political economy, and so forth, with much art history from Professor Norton. But this seemingly uncoordinated selection, the elder Eliot argued, had turned out to be splendid preparation for the scarcely known pro­fession of landscape architecture. “With only the guidance of his likings and natural interests,” young Charles had prepared himself superbly for his still unidentified career.

Here was an example of freedom well used, but as the saying goes, “for exam­ple” doesn’t prove anything. In other contexts, President Eliot argued with clearer reasoning and broader evidence that the “system of liberty” was the cru­cial curricular reform for post-Civil War America. Most academics know about this central development in educational curriculum, and the Yale Report of 1828 had brilliantly set its rationale. An undergraduate education should consist of time-tested liberal courses, especially the classical languages and mathematics. These would discipline and furnish the mind. Probably they were not what most interested a student, but the very effort to force oneself  to learn difficult, unat­tractive matter would build mind and character. They prepared a social elite that would gain specific professional or business training elsewhere after gradu­ation.

The history of American higher edu­cation during the mid-nineteenth centu­ry consists largely of the undermining of the position of the Yale Report. Utili­tarian pressures led to a parallel course that downplayed the ancient languages. A partial course allowed students to direct their studies toward career inter­ests rather than the degree. Some facul­ty yearned to teach more advanced courses that drew, perhaps, on their doctoral training in Germany. They wanted space in the curriculum, release from required elementary work,  and the stimulus of students who were studying with them voluntarily. Al­though the antebellum pattern allowed for gradual additions of new subjects such as chemistry and history, these were crowded into an already full cur­riculum. The resulting shallowness undercut long-held claims of mental disci­pline.

An important, if unspoken, argument on behalf of  the set curriculum had been that it did not cost much, and colleges were poor. With post-Civil War fortunes available and philanthropy  on the rise, it was easier to admit new specialties into the curriculum, deleting requirements to make room. Finally, as academic departments emerged, these new communal centers of power within the institution pressed to depose the curricular monarchs of the old regime.

This saga of the rise of electivism and its fruit in the creation of the American university is generally familiar. Its historical presentation has usually been ei­ther heroic or (as in the preceding para­graph) progressive. In contrast, the current intensified interest in curricular reform has linked  the rise of electives to a number of evils in today’s colleges and universities. The gentler term that is used in various reports and news stories is “disarray.” Sometimes the rhetoric intensifies, and we hear about “chaos.”

Horror stories about the excesses of electivism go back a long way. As early as the 1880s there were accounts of students who used the system not with the inner wisdom of a Charles Eliot, but to guarantee that they had no classes before 10 a.m. and none up more than one flight of stairs. Terms like “cinch,” “snap,” and “gut” were invented to identify undemanding courses taught by easy graders. Undergraduate ener­gies seemed increasingly devoted to sports, fraternities, and convivial but unedifying “activities” that were a far cry from earlier literary and debating societies. Long before the scandalous 1920s the dominance of this new extra­ curriculum seemed to set the tone of college life. For many students the class­ room was a sideshow.

A very respectable history of twenti­eth-century American higher education could center on efforts to counteract the elective system. It would include the new rules requiring concentration and distribution, the emergence of general education courses, sometimes called a “core,” and the effort to enhance stu­dent community through having them share required courses. Prerequisites, sequences, honors programs, and com­prehensive examinations complicated college catalogs and students’ lives. Har­vard, Columbia, Swarthmore, and Chi­cago were conspicuous in such efforts, but many less renowned institutions were also establishing new structures. These efforts climaxed in the wake of World War II, drawing on wartime re­ assessment of national purpose and Cold War challenges.

While reports are appearing, headlines being printed, and panels at conventions holding forth, it seems worth remembering that “reform” is a very slippery concept.

But this retreat of electivism was not to go unchallenged. For various rea­ sons, student choice set the tone of curricular change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The colleges, having strug­gled to widen the class and ethnic range of their student bodies, found that some of the new students bluntly objected to requirements that lacked relevance to their career intentions or social con­cerns. On the other hand, students pre­pared in the most advanced secondary schools criticized general education re­quirements as tediously repetitious of work already done, and they too had social concerns that they expected to find reflected in the classroom. The worst prepared and the best prepared both asked to be freed from curricular trammels. The spirit of the times was with them. With new generational self-consciousness, anything that smacked of in loco parentis was suspect. The same force that ended parietal hours in dor­mitories eroded course requirements. It was a time to “Do what the spirit says do,” to “Question authority,” and to “Off the establishment.”

Making common cause with the stu­dents, some teachers complained about being dragooned into general education courses. They taught better, many said, m courses within their own specialties. The old academic political deals of ”I’ll vote to require your course, if you vote to require mine” began to operate in reverse. If the science requirement went, could foreign languages be far behind? Sometimes curricular struc­ture, like the fabled feudalism at the hands of the French Estates-General, was abolished all in one night.

When students turned conservative (when was that, after Kent State? after Watergate? after the energy crisis?), their focus on career preparation tend­ed to keep them in the anti-general education camp. Between 1970-71 and 1981-82, while, according to The Condi­tion of Education Statistical Report, Valena White Plisko, ed., all bachelor’s degrees increased by only 14 percent, those in business and management increased 87 percent, in engineering 49 percent, and in health sciences 153 percent. The time left over from the major was wanted for lively courses that could be consumed without assignments that took too many evenings. And yet a countertrend was setting in. Martin Trow (“Aspects of American Education, 1969-1975,” The Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in High­er Education: A Summary of Reports and Recommendations) found in responses to the statement, “Undergraduate edu­cation would  be improved if all courses were elective,” that whereas in 1969, 51 percent of undergraduates and 21 per­cent of faculty agreed, by 1975 the fig­ures were down to 35 percent and 13 percent respectively. This evidence of a mood shift by the mid-1970s gives us part of the background of the current drive for curricular restructuring.

The recent litany of academic flaws has grown familiar. Students are taking easy courses. They are over-concentrat­ing on academic work they hope is job-related. The major has crowded out other interests. The new possessors of bachelor’s degrees are often the most sophomoric of specialists. Faculty are w1thdrawing from broad institutional concerns into the work of their disci­plines, a move allowed by the open curriculum and encouraged by the tight job market. Administrators are preoccu­pied with economic resources and inter­ institutional coordination. Nobody cares about the curriculum as a whole.

Although the country’s three thou­sand institutions of higher education do not fit a single pattern, there has been enough general truth to the foregoing worst case to help get a reform move­ment started, a movement now appar­ently near its climax. Much of the story occurs within institutions. In 1973 at Harvard, Dean Henry Rosovsky issued a twenty-two-page letter to the faculty urging serious reconsideration of the undergraduate program. His annual re­port for 1975-76 intensified the call. The long process of restructuring at Harvard can be traced in Phyllis Keller’s delightfully frank Getting at the Core: Curricular Reform at Harvard (Cam­bridge, 1982). At Amherst in 1975 the faculty refused to accept a report justi­fying a free-electivist status quo and voted to appoint a select committee to develop a plan for more curricular structure. The outcome, though still highly electivist, instituted required In­troduction to Liberal Studies courses first offered in 1978. At Gustavus Adolphus in 1981 faculty members were required to submit all their courses to a quo warranto proceeding. They must either offer a new rationale for their established courses, or—the preferred alternative—redesign them and explain why. A required core has now been established there.

The most consequential educational history probably lies in multiple local efforts like these, many unsung beyond an institution’s immediate constituency. But it is press coverage of reports by national bodies that stirs public excite­ment. Beginning in the mid-1970s, in­dependent foundations showed new in­terest in the college curriculum. Partly through its Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, the Carnegie Foun­dation issued between 1977 and 1981 a series of curricular studies, notable for their breadth of view and freedom from axe-grinding.

In these reports it was granted that the curriculum is not the most impor­tant element in the education an institu­tion gives, since it is less significant than faculty quality. Generally moderate in tone, they did label general education “an idea in distress” or even “a disaster area.” That concern has been central to some of the more urgently expressed relevant reports by other bodies.

Besides foundations, organs of the federal government have taken an in­ creasing role in viewing higher educa­tion with alarm and calling for change. The National Institute of Education’s contribution, Involvement in Learning, disavowed any intention “to define the ‘knowledge most worth having,'” being chiefly concerned with whether or not students learn what courses purport to teach.

There was less restraint in the report from the National Endowment for the Humanities, William J. Bennett’s To Re­claim a Legacy. Citing “a steady erosion in the place of the humanities in the undergraduate curriculum and in the coherence of the curriculum generally,” the report assailed the electivism that lets students earn bachelor’s degrees without European or American history and without foreign language study. Perhaps To Reclaim a Legacy gained its greatest impact by praising the pattern of course requirement in three nonelite institutions, colleges not widely thought of as pace-setters. At Brooklyn College, there are ten required core courses for the bachelor’s, and at St. Joseph’s in Indiana the same number. Kirkwood Community College in Iowa has a re­quirement of 24 hours of humanities courses for the AA degree. These ex­amples are said to prove “that it is possible even in this age of skepticism to educate students on the principle that certain areas of knowledge are essential for every college graduate.” The report calls for strenuous curricular reform and, with a surprising stress on origins, bluntly states that it “must begin with the president.”

The institutional associations, most of them headquartered in Washington, have never been known for shying away from committees and reports. In this phase of curricular reconsideration, the leading example is the Association of American Colleges with its Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Aca­demic Community (Washington, DC, 1985). It opens with a historical account that passes harsh judgment on the elec­tive system. It maintains that with the “collapse of structure and control in the course of study,” programs of ephemer­al knowledge have been introduced and the curriculum has become “a super­ market where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning. Fads and fashions, the demands of popularity and success, enter where wis­dom and experience should prevail.” It recognizes that it is part of a chorus of reports and helpfully summarizes the others in an appendix. It calls for a minimum required curriculum, but contrary to the impression given in some newspaper stories, this is not the same as calling for required courses.

Many of the skills and experiences identified as essential—such as literacy, critical analysis, historical consciousness, comprehension of other cultures—are said properly to permeate many parts of the curriculum. The report calls for “the development of a self-conscious profession of college teaching, replete with all the appurtenances appropriate to a proud and honored profes­sion. . . .” Academics had better get ready for a new organization, new na­tional codes, and a new journal.

While reports are appearing, head­lines being printed, and panels at con­ventions holding forth, it seems worth remembering that “reform” is a very slippery concept. Who is really likely to benefit from the changes proposed? Are there special interests being served? Without claiming to prove the case or exhaust the possible candidates, let me name three groups that have self-inter­est reasons for embracing the suggested turn against electivism. Conservative and neoconservative politicians can see this as a new way to appeal to their supporters’ fundamentalist, back-to-ba­sics attitudes. College trustees and fi­nancial officers may see it as a way of saving money, since requirements tend to limit course proliferation, and the humanities are temptingly inexpensive to teach. Also, faculty members within the humanities are drawn to these pro­ grams to counteract recent steep enroll­ment declines in English, foreign lan­guages, philosophy, and history. Self­ interest we have always with us, and an idea, say anti-electivism, is not necessari­ly bad because it serves other interests besides the declared one of better edu­cation. But faculties considering curric­ular change should beware of shallow or self-serving educational nostrums.

The worst outcome I can imagine for the present movement is a turn to cur­ricular requirement because some ill­-defined “they” seem to want it. Surely the dean of academic affairs at Wilson College was speaking too hastily when she said, “We need to be able to say exactly what a Wilson College graduate knows and can do.”

If requirements are imposed from outside the institutions, if they come prepackaged, or if they represent a new interdepartmental political deal, then higher education will be worse off. The best outcome would be serious reexami­nation of present curricular structures, led by faculty, with student opinion con­sulted and administration and trustees supportive but unintrusive. One of my colleagues at Amherst College, Richard D. Fink, while trying to explain a recent round of curricular change to an audi­ence of students’ parents, observed that reforming the curriculum is like stand­ing up and stretching after you have been working at your desk reading, writing, thinking. The change refresh­es, but the essential intellectual adventure is not really at stake. It persists through rearrangements of bodily or curricular muscles.

Electivism has been made a whipping boy in this particular round of curricu­lar reconsideration. No doubt we are in for a period of increased requirement­ of either specific general education courses or distribution among the disci­plines. That will be healthy the way a good stretch is healthy. But I predict that by 1990 or 1995 there will be a new movement under way, one dominated by rediscovery of the virtues of electi­vism.

In the midst of a new round of re­ports and media accounts, we will hear about how much better students learn when they are motivated by their inter­ests and allowed to pursue them, about the maturity gained by making one’s own decisions even if they are mistakes, about the shallowness of a degree that signifies the collection of the right array of course boxtops and coupons, about how much better faculty teach in courses within their specialities, courses chosen by students who are not a captive audience. There will be a new set of horror stories about shoddy or trivial or boring general education required courses. Perhaps there will even be a figure parallel to the younger Charles Eliot, someone who went through col­lege under the anarchic curriculum of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who managed to find not only good courses, but the precisely right mix of courses—in film, anthropology, black studies, and history—that prepared her for her richly productive and deeply satisfying life.